Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

The Challenge
Puma needed to reignite its fans’ love for its street culture creation. Converse and Adidas lead; Puma needs to have a cut through campaign with limited budget, targeting a niche audience base. It brought back its famous Suede collection, an authentic youth street culture icon shoes from the 1968.

The Solution – Insight & Idea
Puma identified its target audience as “Street Culture Urbanites” (SCU), the 16 to 22 years old, high energy urbanites who like street culture, yet being stylish. There are only a handful of them, less than 1million, and they do not consume mainstream media. Street Culture Urbanites are somewhat rebellious, proud of their individualism, and collect good authentic shoes. They are the sportswear and street-fashion style maker. They read street culture fashion blogs, watch Hip Hop music and fashion videos, like Street activities e.g. Skating and Street Art. They are highly outdoor checking out hippies cafes, and constantly on their smartphones. We combined some of the insights, and devised a modern-day OOH campaign that sell them the “experience” of owning a cool pair of Puma Suede, instead of “telling” them what to buy, a tactic that they do not favour of.

The Execution
Puma Suede has heavy heritage story, hence the OOH execution needs to tell the Suede story from the past, present, future. The stories must drive engagement, advocacy, and create desire to buy. Deploying Paid, Owned, Earned strategy:

1. Owned: Engaged Puma’s own KOLs from the street culture scene to paint 4 giant “canvas” Suede shoes. Each KOL from different field to gain wider audience traction: Newba (renowned Graffiti artist), DJ Twilight Action Girl, Julian Oh (tattoo artist), Sueann Chong (Hanger’s Editor), Miranda Yeoh (Fashion Editor, Juice), Kevin Yeoh (hip-hop enthusiast), Carolynn Chon (photographer). Each expresses their own Suede stories from the past, current and future.
2. Paid:
   • Turned Publika Mall into a giant shoes land for 4 weeks, where the 4 x 7-feet width Suede shoes were displayed. Publika Mall is a street culture mall, and has a range of hippies outlets.
   • Encouraged mall patrons to snap photos, share, tweet, and check-in on social networking space using #forthestreet.
3. Earned: contributed to the 50 Suede stories.

The Results

• 64% sales increase within 4 weeks!
• Brand Health index increased 5%.
• Brand association with Street Culture increased 5%, closing the gap with Converse, Adidas.
• 50 PR articles worth RM1.5million
• 89 FB sharing, 1,162 Instagram Photos • 480,000 visitors to the ambient Shoes at Publika
• Media ROI = 12.7x, under little budget used of RM200k including online, offline, and on-ground.