How did we bring an unknown brand to the international market?
One of the toughest, but most rewarding and creative tasks for an advertiser is to build a brand from scratch. You must put in great amount of hope, enthusiasm and time, but at the end the satisfaction you will get is unbeatable.
We had such an experience with one of the leading B2B shoe producers from Bulgaria, subcontractor for well-known European brands. For the first time in his long-standing company history, our customer decided to go the extra mile and to create own B2C brand to produce his top shoe models. Brand name, logo, brand concept, digital and marketing strategy – the job to be done by our agency. When you have loads of work to do, tasks and resources management is crucial, thus always do effective research and planning.
Let’s start with the research. Our advantage was that the products we had to present were high quality ladies’ shoes, produced in a Bulgarian factory with more than 20 years history. The initial idea was to sell the shoes mainly in Germany and the EU market. Our task was to find out which was our target audience and how to present the shoes to the ladies from the German fashion market. We dived into a scale study with direct interviewing of the potential target and competition analysis and other conceptual questions clarification.
We found the audience we were looking for and started with the creation of the brand main visual. This is how we got to the brilliant insight: the shoes were really good, trendy, comfortable and affordable for the local standard. They aren’t flashy and attention-grabbing, but they are the perfect shoes to help you deal with everyday challenges. Shoes you can wear every day, wherever you go and whatever obstacles you meet.
Based on this insight, we created the brand name, the logo and the slogan. The slogan came our very quickly, almost by itself – Work. Walk. Wander. If you think about it, these are the main roles of the modern woman – the wife and the mother, the working city girl and the brave adventurer on her way to the next experience.
We had this usual problem with the choice of a brand name. We thought of over 100 name variations, suggested at least half of them to the client, but after serial refusals form our client, we realized that the name has to be associated with the city girl, but with a pinch of Italian class and style. Mika Cara was then born – the stylish, city girl.
Our typography smart move was to emphasize on the first letter and play with it’s shape, so that the customer can understand immediately what do we offer and what he will get.
The brand was unknown so we decided to launch a teaser campaign prior to the official brand massive online penetration. We created an entertaining landing page to provoke the young women to take a short engaging test in order to find out their lady type and which products are suitable based on their preferences. The results from the test were extremely valuable to us because they provided us information about the shoe models that they like, how to get in contact with them and how to follow-up them.
We did two photoshoots – image-making and product photo session, which we used in social media and the online store.
We wanted to stand out from the standard online shoe retailers, thus we decided to create an extraordinary one by choosing catchy copies. In each model’s section the customer could see a short fantastic description of the product and the leather:
We continued working on the social media brand presence – Facebook and Instagram profiles, where we could meet our target – the modern city girls. We kept the friendly, funny and fairy tone of communication from the e-store and implemented it into the social media.
Here we go, our brand is fully ready to conquer the world with it’s A-Z concept, clean design, catchy and engaging communication. One more time we proved to ourselves that little miracles like the extraordinary Mika Cara happen when the whole teams puts in effort, creativity and passion in its work. Simply Work.Walk.Wander. 🙂
