Mattel Hot Wheels ‘Make it epic tour': Reconnecting with children by making an epic experience.
Kreate has worked with Mattel on the Hot Wheels brand since 2012 - partnering with retailers, shopping centres and festivals to give consumers a series of fun, interactive Hot Wheels brand experiences. In 2015 a new campaign strategy was developed to help grow the brand, by creating excitement within the automobile toys aisle in key retail stores. The ‘Epic’ campaign is a long-term strategy that builds and creates an ever more epic experience, year-on-year. The 2016 campaign needed to be bigger, better and even more popular than the previous year. It had to be a loud, buzzing, hands-on Hot Wheels brand experience, to draw boys in and keep them there. It also needed to be retailer focused to drive awareness of a hero product - the ‘Hot Wheels Ultimate Garage’.
Epic speed, jumps, photo opps and goodie-bags.
Boys can be competitive and love nothing more than pushing the limit. Because there’s always a new record to break, epic stunt to conquer or cool track to build, Mattel would become the standard for pushing the limit to extreme levels through speed, performance and style through a Hot Wheels multi-track racing experience. Teams had to beat the clock to design their own epic track, before heading over to select their Hot Wheels car. The race started from the ‘Hot Wheels Ultimate Garage’ and the cars had to perform an epic jump to land in the ’car-catcher’ scoring zone. High scores were displayed on the digital leaderboard and the winners got to stand on the winner’s podium for a photo opp. Each child also received a goodie-bag filled with Hot Wheels goodies. After exploring various options for our Hot Wheels experience, we settled on a shipping container - a durable, industrial structure that fits perfectly with the Hot Wheels brand, while doubling up as mobile billboard between locations. We identified key locations to help us maximise trials and sales to meet our KPI’s. The ‘Make It Epic Tour’ visited 10 key retailer car parks during October half term.
Driving further awareness through an epic PR campaign that helped increase sales.
To drive awareness and build anticipation for the Make It Epic Tour, a PR campaign targeted local and regional press and radio with press releases, campaign visuals, radio ads and competitions. There was also in-store promotions via poster, leaflet and a shelf-strip print campaign, along with digital activity on retailer websites and social channels and announcements on the Hot Wheels Epic Tour Event Page. We hit our target with 6,004 consumer trials. Retailers reported between 40% - 118% increase in immediate sales with 92.5% of consumers saying they were likely to make a purchase. 98% of consumers also said that they would recommend Hot Wheels to their friends.