In EMEA an estimated 300 billion images were taken in 2016 (241 billion were taken on a smart phone). This new behaviour has had a significant impact on Canon’s hardware sales.

Canon and the camera category are facing a truly game changing challenge where consumers do not have the necessity to buy a separate camera, and tech companies (i.e. Google with Google clip etc) are bringing new AI driven
camera technology offering a different proposition to the consumers, cluttering the market with new competitors.

Hence, no longer were Canon the leaders of the imaging category, but they were challengers.

In addition to this, whilst their current core audience are typically older (35+ years old), Canon have identified a new audience, Adventurous achievers (16-34 yrs old, younger & adventurous) as a key audience to grow their business.
Whilst this new audience holds the key to success, they perceive Canon as niche, inaccessible, too hardcore and not a brand for “me”. Canon had lost touch with these audiences and required to build their brand amongst the noise and clutter of the imaging category.

This challenge required Canon to review their total marketing activity across their entire business and ensure that everything Canon did was consumer centric and focused toward the new audience but also capture opportunity with
the existing / in-market audience. This would range from their communications platform, to their website design, planning with consumer journey in mind, etc.

To spear head this evolution, a new brand proposition was created “Live for the story”. This is a mantra, it’s about living in the moment and embracing the now no matter how insignificant. It’s your story and it’s truly living for the
story.

Our challenge was to embed this proposition to our key audience and drive re-appraisal of the brand and relevance.

Live for the story is all about encouraging consumers to live life for their stories to tell and capture them. Canon has always marketed itself by championing the extraordinary moments captured beautifully by the professionals. But most people’s lives aren’t made up of extraordinary moments, and most of the images they have haven’t been beautifully captured. As a result, Canon doesn’t feel very relevant to them. Hence, to change this perception, we want to shift from Canon’s storytelling to consumer’s story telling – empower people to go out there, and share their experiences and stories behind their pictures.

Our media strategy reflected our new brand proposition hence all of our activity was under pinned by the three key strategic pillars:
Drive Stature & Scale – Reposition/generate reappraisal of our brand- reach is key to the right audience at the right time / moment
Emotion – Prioritise channels and executions which best support emotional communication
Storytelling – Storytelling at the heart of every channel choice and encourage engagement, aligned to our audience’s passion points.

In addition to embedding the new brand proposition to our audience, we required an “always on” strategy to ensure we captured those audiences that came to Canon’s site and drive further engagement to lead audiences to the
Canon ecommerce site for purchase. The new brand proposition would act as the catalyst to bring people to Canon but people searched and interacted with Canon across the year, not just when we have campaigns and we needed
to do this throughout the year, but Canon did not have the mechanism to cater for this consumer behaviour. Our always on strategy was to set up a prospecting and retargeting strategy to target our audience with personalised
messaging based on their onsite behaviour or purchase intent behaviour.

Canon was able to land the new brand proposition of “Live for the Story” across the key markets UK and Germany.

The social engagement platform was amplified by paid across UK and Germany, but ran across all of their 19 markets via organic activity on the Canon social sites. The transformation has only begun but has clearly landed the new proposition to the market with clear positive results across their campaign delivery and most importantly the increase in brand consideration across their key markets. The always on campaign has proven success with positive

ROI and high engagement rate capturing audiences coming into the category but also to those who were already interested in the brand and product.

This is only the beginning, but the first year has certainly made a mark on their journey to become relevant to our audience and grow their business.
The performance in UK and DE for the brand proposition:
DE- TV: 70.4% reach of 20-44s (+11% VS TARGET), Cinema: 1.4M admissions (+9% TARGET), VOD: 43.9M views (+41% VS TARGET), Digital display: 276M impressions (2x TARGET)
UK – TV: 72.1% reach of 16-34s (ON TARGET), OOH: 41 M impacts (2X TARGET), Cinema: 3.5M admissions (ON TARGET), VOD: 19M views (+12% VS TARGET), Digital display: 24M impressions (+55%VS TARGET)

Canon brand consideration across UK / DE / IT increased by 11%
For the 365 days of Summer – social engagement in DE / UK (share, likes, comment, clicks, completed video view) 8.3x vs. benchmark, Reach +57% vs. target, Over 16,000 competition entries (entries across 10+ markets)

Always on activity across the 6 european markets average ecommerce ROI (programmatic) = 2:1 ROI