Making DIY easy as

Insight

Stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap!

That's the way in the New Zealand DIY (Do It Yourself) retail category with over 90% of category spend on price promotions.

Archrivals Mitre 10 and Bunnings were locked in such a fierce price battle that consumers were starting to see the brands as inter-changeable. In fact, 80% of Mitre 10's customers also shopped at Bunnings.

The brief from Mitre 10: Achieve 3% uplift in sales Year-on-Year in a flat category, with a flat budget.

Mitre 10 was ready to discount - hard.

But a new piece of research had them questioning the assumptions being made in this category. Despite the category spending 90% on price promotion, when asked only 16% of consumers said price was a key motivator in brand choice. Left with little actual brand differentiation, it appeared consumers were left trying to 'cover their bases' by shopping at both, especially when they were often located right next to each other.

Mitre 10 realised if they wanted to change consumers' behaviour they needed to change their own. They needed to give consumers a reason to come through the door beyond the functional elements of price and location and figure out what they really wanted from a DIY brand.

Strategy

The key insight shaping their strategy came from research showing that New Zealanders were losing confidence in their DIY ability.

Many still aspired to be practical DIYers, but they were reluctant to admit they didn't have the same level of DIY skills as their parents. This lack of confidence was a major barrier to them even starting a DIY project and therefore buying the necessary tools and equipment from Mitre 10.

The category's obsession with price promotions meant this bigger consumer need was being ignored.

The strategy was for Mitre 10 to meet this need. And to do so in a way that locked arch rival Bunnings out of the process.

They did this by creating inspiring, educative content and using this to partner customers at every step of their DIY project journey - from inspiration to preparation, to purchase, to successful completion.

This would bring more people into the category by inspiring them to undertake more DIY projects, while cutting Mitre 10's reliance on price promotion to stimulate sales.

So the communication strategy set out to wrap the DIY journey from "go to whoa":

1: Inspire them to start. Show the possibilities of what you can do yourself

2: Inform them how. Build confidence with instructional Easy As project content

3: Equip them with the right tools for the job at Mitre 10.

The knowledge gap was a sensitive subject: New Zealand men are reluctant to publicly signal that they don't know what they're doing. They had to support them in a personal, 1to1 way, using a friendly tone. The support also had to be flexible so content could be used in a variety of DIY contexts - indoors, outdoors and in-store.
Execution

Mitre 10 created a unique and category-defining content platform that inspired, supported and informed New Zealanders to DiY.

Through a media partnership with New Zealand's biggest broadcaster, they produced 80+ minutes of video content across 24 DIY projects; these covered a range of tasks from changing tap washers to building a fence.

They then wove this content across the DIY journey:

1. Inspiring: TV ran in "inspiration windows", when people were most receptive to project planning. Each week we featured a single project on TV and aligned subsequent activity around this.

2. Informing: Paid, owned and earned media drove people to relevant "Easy As" video content across a range of platforms:
• Search and promoted video drove viewers to an "Easy As" YouTube channel. Keywords and videos were up-weighted for the weekly featured project.
• Mitre 10's full suite of owned channels including catalogues, website and emails also drove to the YouTube channel.
• In-store stands allowed customers to watch videos and collect printed guides. In-aisle QR codes connected customers to the 'how-to' videos on their smartphone relating to products in the aisle they were standing in.
• An engagement program meant staff was equipped to help customers with 'Easy As' questions. This included tutorial videos, staffroom posters, Q&A and pocket reference guides, plus caps and badges to identify topic experts.

3. Equipping: prompting purchase around "DIY days". Press, digital and TV ads highlighted the products featured in that week's project video to prompt a purchase and start the project that weekend.

Results

By the end of June 2013, over 776,000 New Zealanders had watched 1,027,800 Easy As videos. With an average video length of 2 ½ minutes, that's the equivalent of 2.57 million minutes of Easy As content viewed - making it NZ's most popular branded content platform.

The content wasn't just useful, it drove record sales:

Objective: Increase sales by 3% YoY

Result:
• Total sales increased by 10.6% YoY
• Share increased by 7% YoY
• Equivalent to $21.2M in additional sales
• An incremental ROI of 10:1

How can they be sure these results were driven by Mitre 10's Easy As activity?

• Share of media spend was flat YoY
• Mitre 10 spent 9% less on price & promotion advertising across the period
• Sales data shows almost all the products featured in Easy As videos experienced sales uplifts of at least 10% in the month after their featured Easy As video was released.
• Some products such as Compost Bins (as featured in "How to Compost") achieved sales uplifts of over 50%.
• Stores that had higher proportions of their staff trained in the 'Easy As' guides consistently saw higher sales uplifts.