The Situation
The British Council is a UK-based organisation specialising in international educational and cultural opportunities. The Council - positioned as a world authority in learning English - needed to target the global ‘teens’ (13-16) mass market.
Their objective was to encourage this market to engage with the British Council to learn English thus build brand awareness for the Council and generating lifelong engagement in a host of relevant services.
Having completed an initial market research stage, the Council was looking to produce an integrated campaign to promote their ‘Learn English Teens’ resources in Turkey and China.
The Strategy
Our strategy was to engage with this audience in a cultural context that they would readily understand and could easily access – music. We developed a campaign called ‘Learn The Words’, demonstrating the importance of learning English as a way to engage more with a wider cultural lifestyle.
The campaign leveraged digital and social media channels to really get under the skin of consumers…
- We produced a short video of a couple in a karaoke booth attempting to sing along to an English language track, but highlighting the pitfalls of not knowing the words
- We created bespoke microsites in both the local language and English.
- We drove people to the sites through a strategic viral seeding campaign, together with the opportunity to win a trip to the UK
- We captured a wide variety of data from visistors entering the competition to help us understand our target audience better and therefore help in the refinement and development of future global marketing campaigns
The Results
The campaign has been universally well received by the British Council. They have said that it “demonstrates an instinctive understanding of complex audiences worldwide – and how to engage them as a community”. The campaign is current so no statistical results are in yet.