K's Japan: (movie) SMASH

Credits & Description:

Type of entry: Strategy
Category: Traffic & Brand Building
Advertiser: K'S JAPAN
Product/Service: GUITAR COMPANY
Agency: HAKUHODO Tokyo, JAPAN
Creative Director: Jin Saito (Hakuhodo)
Copywriter: Hidenori Sakai (Hakuhodo)
Art Director: Kentaro Harano (Hakuhodo)
Creative Producer: Shoko Akutagawa (Hakuhodo)
Web Production: Answr ()
Event Production: Tyo Production ()
Describe the brief from the client:
To make K’s JAPAN, a small guitar company famous as a cool rock guitar brand.
They had no name value and people were not enthusiastic about rock like they used to be in the golden era because other music like hip-hop became just as popular.
K’s JAPAN needed to expand its consumers to those who are not core rock fans.
Creative Execution:
Instead of creating a normal advertisement, we developed to sell an extreme product to excite people and engage them with K’s JAPAN.
We made a guitar born-to-be-destroyed, SMASH!!!
SMASH is meant to be destroyed in its structure, function, recycle system and price, needless to say it can be played as a normal guitar.
It is an extraction of the rock spirit, “Destroy to Create!”-Destroy rigid systems to create a new world. With this spirit, we aimed to attract not only rock fans but also people wanting to breakthrough the stress of recession.
Then, we advertised SMASH with viral movie, flyers, posters, launching event and experience event. TV, websites, magazines and radio picked up SMASH as exciting news, creating free publicity.
Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.
We developed an extreme guitar for the following 4 reasons:
Reason 1
Because our promotion was in form of a real product, SMASH directly delivered
K’s JAPAN’s rock spirit “Destroy to Create” as a direct experience of playing and smashing.
Reason 2
The rock spirit “Destroy to Create” embodied by SMASH, attracted not only rock fans but also people fed up with recession.
Reason 3
We made people and media come to us without using media fee.
Reason 4
Because SMASH was a performing tool, as people played SMASH in the media and liveshows, these performances automatically expanded K’s JAPAN’s advertisement.
Describe the results in as much detail as possible.
K’s JAPAN’s sales went up 400% in Mar. 2010 compared to Mar. 2009.
$3 million worth of free publicity with 0 media fee.
K’s JAPAN became no.1 search-word in one of Japan’s biggest search engine, goo.
No.1 sales ranking at Amazon’s new instrument category.
No.1 topic in Japan’s biggest SNS, mixi, more talked about than Olympics and ipad.
No.1 in “Things I Want Ranking” in MONO, the most issued shopping magazine.
Marty Friedman, ex MEGADETH commented on SMASH as an ideal rock guitar.
Bounce rate of SMASH’s website hit 1.5%.
MTV did a 1 week program on our event.
Media used SMASH in various ways which expanded SMASH’s recognition. For example, used in a music video, topic on business news, subject for an iphone application and as a weapon in a pro-wrestling match.