The Winter Hit

Background

Fuel company CEPSA wanted to anticipate their competitors and get the first orders for the lucrative winter season. They were also keen to increase the volume of fuel each client purchased and re-activate clients who had been inactive over the previous two years.

Idea

Shackleton’s solution was to create, compose, produce and launch a song called ‘The Winter Song’, celebrating the coldest time of the year. Spanish pop-rock group Iguana Tango were hired to perform the song, which was published in CD (75,000 copies) and in vinyl (3,000 copies, for collectors). The music was distributed though various mailpacks, individually created for different sectors. Schools and hotels, for example, were sent business angled mailings, presenting the arguments from the point of view of students, teachers, guests. Real estate managers were mailed gift incentives for the number of units purchased.

Neighbourhood associations were mailed arguments from a residential point of view, with a year’s worth of gasoline as a prize incentive. Individual households were sent a lower value mailpack and pamphlet containing similar information. A website and banners were also created, continuing the ‘knitted’ look of the mailing and allowing visitors to download or send the song. The site also contained a competition to win a trip to Memphis, allowing for further data acquisition. In addition, CEPSA petrol stations featured Bluetooth downloads of the track for people’s mobile phones.

Results

The campaign achieved a general ROI of 234%, taking into account sales in the first year only. In addition, the song was covered in music media on radio and print and surpassed 35,000 downloads, of which more than half were forwarded on to a friend.

Target Audience

Real Estate Managers - Professionals in building management and decision makers over major volumes of purchase in condos they administer, divided between ACTIVE and INACTIVE (no purchase in the last 2 years);

Condominium Neighbors Associations - In self-managed condos one of the neighbors is elected to administer the community;

Business - Segmented by “hotels”, “schools” and “others”, we address the Purchase Directors of big corporations who are not specialists in heating systems but in their own businesses. The communication to this segment needs to be didactic as well;

Singular Family Housing - A major part of singular houses are heated with diesel oil systems.

Our Thoughts

This is a very bold strategy: not just to position CEPSA but also to reposition winter and get people to rethink the darkest months of the year as the cosiest, snuggest and most fun. The ‘knitted’ look certainly communicates that feeling. And the idea of producing a song celebrating winter is a good idea that is very PRable. After a while, however, with free trips to Liverpool (Beatles) and Memphis (Elvis) it looks like CEPSA have lost interest in winter and have started to try to 'own' pop music, instead. SH