Stihl: THE SHAPE OF JOY TO COME

Credits & Description:

Category: Calendars

Advertiser: STIHL

Product/Service: POWER TOOLS CALENDAR

Agency: SCHOLZ & FRIENDS BERLIN

Date of First Appearance: Nov 10 2010

Entrant Company: SCHOLZ & FRIENDS BERLIN, GERMANY

Chief Creative Officer: Martin Pross (Scholz & Friends)

Executive Creative Director: Matthias Spaetgens (Scholz & Friends)

Creative Director: Mathias Rebmann (Scholz & Friends)

Creative Director: Florian Schwalme (Scholz & Friends)

Art Director: Patrick Vogel (Scholz & Friends)

Copywriter: Momme Clausen (Scholz & Friends)

Copywriter: Viktoria Gruenewald (Scholz & Friends)

Account Manager: Benjamin Baader (Scholz & Friends)

Account Manager: Sven Weiche (Scholz & Friends)

Account Manager: Albert Petzold (Scholz & Friends)

Account Manager: David von Hilchen (Scholz & Friends)

Graphic Designer: Franziska Boemer (Scholz & Friends)

Media placement: Calendar - Dealers Send The Calendar To Their top 20 Customers: Among Hobbyists As Well As Professionals - 10.11.2010



Describe the brief from the client

STIHL products are not available in do-it-yourself-stores but only at your specialist dealer. This calls for close dialogue with the customers. STIHL's briefing: developing a promotional giveaway for the Christmas season that attracts regular customers into these stores.



Describe the challenges and key objectives

The focus should be laid on the quality of advice specialist dealers are able to provide compared to their DIY-counterparts. Additionally, we were to communicate the product advantages of the all-round saw MS 261: reliability, power and longevity.



Describe how you arrived at the final design

Our concept was to create a special Advent calendar. Behind each window: bagged anticipation in the form of conifer seeds. The design idea evolved out of the content of the Advent calendar: if you plant the conifer seeds, one day you’ll have beautiful Christmas trees. So it was most convincing to make the Advent calendar look like a tree as well – of course in the well-known corporate design of STIHL. This way, just by looking at the Advent calendar, you’d get an idea of what to expect. And the brand was connected to anticipation that lies ahead of every Christmas. “Celebrate waiting” – that’s what it’s all about.



Give some indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

With the Advent calendar, STIHL and the STIHL specialist dealers positioned themselves as the experts for everything wood. The calendar was sent to the top 20 customers of the 100 best-selling STIHL retailers in Germany - among them hobby users as well as professional operators from the areas of forestry, agriculture, construction and gardening. Since the Advent calendar was designed as a pure customer retention measure and it was not asked for a response, there are no response rates. However, the feedback was magnificient: many customers called and thanked their specialist dealers for the surprise.