Rawlings Plasma Fusion Bat
SNAPSHOT:
How does a company known for selling baseball gloves enter the baseball bat market? Specifically, how do they sell a $300 premium bat to hard-to-reach males 12-21, who don't consume any of the normal media and have virtually no attention span? The answer: Get "into the batter's boxâ" with them and find non-traditional ways to define "excessive power.â" The result was the single best product introduction in Rawlings history.
Rawlings is one of the most iconic brands in American sports. Any young boy growing up who played baseball knew "the finest in the fieldâ" and probably had an autographed-model glove bearing the signature of Ron Santo or Stan Musial (from a bygone era) or Derrick Lee or Albert Pujols (from today's era).
Like any great brand, Rawlings had a clear definition of what it stood for, and it mostly stood for baseball gloves. But to expand and grow, the company wanted to move into the lucrative baseball bat business. Here, the competition is stiff, with equally iconic names such as Louisville Slugger and Easton.
Key Challenge:
How does a glove company start selling baseball bats? With a minimal budget, no less. Rawlings tends to put most of its marketing dollars into paying endorsements, not leaving much for advertising.
So we're told to come up with strategies that would create excitement but that would not cost a lot of money.
Our specific assignment was to launch the Rawlings Plasma Fusion bat (a premium aluminum bat retailing in the $300s), a launch critical to the company's financial success for the entire year. Rawlings specifically wanted nontraditional, budget-conscious ideas.
This bat is targeted towards serious young players between the ages of 12 and 17. Lots of young boys play baseball, but they usually give up the sport in their teen years. The ones who keep playing are serious and competitive.
Today's teens and young adults are also a crafty lot. They have the attention spans of gnats on caffeine, they have been inundated with advertising since the day they were born, and are eerily tech savvy. So how do you pin them down?
The Agency Contribution:
The most important strategic insight the agency brought to the table was how we answered that question. You don't pin this target group down. You let them find you. That was the heart of our approach. Boys between 12 and 21 are not exactly the easiest group to track down in a classic media profile. So we looked at reaching them through non-traditional channels, such as viral videos and any place that engaged them at the key point of relevance, which we defined as "in the batter's box.â"
The central point in the creative strategy was this core idea: the Plasma Fusion bat is excessively powerful. All creative executions would flow from that idea.
We wanted our target group to find their way to the fusion bat website. An array of non-traditional elements, a viral video, a faux eBay auction site, windshield flyers from a dent removal company (for cars damaged by balls hit with the Plasma Fusion bat) all directed users to the site. An apocalyptic video game style welcomed users to learn about the most powerful metal bat in baseball history. We even obtained a unique product placement in the EA Sports NCAA Baseball video game, in which the Fusion Bat is shown rocketing a pitch far over the left field wall.
Market Results:
The campaign proved to be as powerful as the Plasma Fusion bat itself. As a privately held company, Rawlings keeps sales results proprietary. But the company president said that the launch of the Plasma Fusion was the most successful product launch in the 120 year company history. The viral video we produced has had more than a million downloads and is being used in a pilot TV program from USA Network as an example of the kind of off-the-wall video work that is getting attention on Internet sites such as YouTube.com.
"Rawlings Fusion Bat - Boy vs. Pinata"
| Viral Video
"Plasma Fusion Bat"
| Video Game Placement
"Plasma Fusion"
| Website