Why great media partnerships are about more than just the audience
Building meaningful emotional connections with a new generation of luxury buyers isn’t just about reaching the right people
In modern marketing we think of media platforms in terms of the audiences that we can target through them. Don’t get me wrong – this is important. If you can’t reach the people you are interested in, then there’s not much you can achieve. However, to my mind, the right audience is just the starting point for a really effective media partnership. For the recent campaign that my company, Baume & Mercier, ran on LinkedIn, we needed more.
As a luxury watch brand looking to build new communities of ambitious young people, the context in which we reached out to our target audiences was hugely important. So was the ability to do something genuinely innovative with that audience and in that context. We’d run social media campaigns in the past but our activity on Facebook, for example, was limited to people who already owned our watches and knew our brands.
For our Classima Collection, which is built on innovative, affordable excellence, we needed to reach ambitious young people who had no prior knowledge of us. We needed to demonstrate why our watches mattered to a generation that had grown up checking the time on their iPhones. For that we needed a context that could bring out the relevance of our brand and products to young lives in a wholly new way.
Creating moments that aligned with our brand
Our strategy was to link Classima to extraordinary, transformational moments; the type of moments that shape your life and which you want to mark in a way that stays with you for life. We brought this to life through an integrated campaign featuring an online video telling the story of a young man landing his first job, and a social media contest #mymomentofsuccess, which asked young people to submit their own life-changing moments for the chance to attend the Forbes 30 under 30 summit.
Partnering with LinkedIn was a hugely important part of the campaign. It meant not only that we could reach the precise type of ambitious young professionals that we were interested in, but also that we could reach them at the point in their careers that matched these moments of success. Just as importantly we could reach them in the context they associate most closely with transforming their lives and fulfilling their ambitions.
Why a professional space is an emotional space
That’s the thing about LinkedIn. As a professional social platform it’s actually a hugely emotive space. This is where people come to fulfill their potential and redefine what they can achieve. They occupy a mindset that’s at once aspirational – and also empowered to make things happen.
This fit the type of associations we were looking to build around Classima perfectly. We designed a campaign to fuse offline and online, building tangible experiences by inviting these ambitious young professionals to exclusive evening events: style workshops and personal shopping experiences where they rubbed shoulders with actors, designers and of course, our luxury watchmakers. We sought to create moments that were worthy of their ambitions and achievements – which is what Classima is all about.
This combination of relevant context and precision targeting provided us with the opportunity to bring this campaign idea to life – but we also needed an innovative media partner to realise the potential.
That’s the other thing about working with LinkedIn that stood out for my marketing team. In a digital media environment where a luxury brand like ours constantly needs to adapt its approach, the way the LinkedIn team thought outside the box was a key component in delivering success. They helped us target the right people through the right touch points (Sponsored InMail, in particular) and create a user journey that fit perfectly with our brand and what we were trying to achieve.
Our engagement rates were four times industry benchmarks and meant that 15% of the international audience who received our InMails went on to attend our events. Our aim was to bring our brand to life for a new generation – and by building a media partnership rather than just using a media platform, that’s exactly what we achieved.
Corinne Delli Gatti is Head of Communication and Media of Baume & Mercier. For more details of how the brand build engagement with a new generation on LinkedIn, see our full case study.
