Keeping It Cool And Clear This Winter With Good Quality Story-Telling

Performance Communications | January 10, 2014

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With a polar vortex freezing the USA and winter storms battering and flooding the UK, it seems ‘the weather’ has been a bit of a hot topic so far in 2014, or should that be a cold current affair…

In amongst the dramatic headlines – thank you Daily Express – this story from cold Canada really caught my attention, because it takes our obsession with this troublesome time of year to sell a product by telling a good story simply and effectively.

So what’s it about?

Well, here we have automotive retail chain Canadian Tires, who wanted to let people know that their MotoMaster battery will work at 40 degrees below freezing. How did they do this? They took a real truck chassis and running gear, did a bit of suspension welding to handle the weight and recreated the bodywork with 11,000 pounds of ice! Then they cooled the battery to the desired -40 Celsius, plugged it into the ‘ice truck’ and off she went. Pretty impressive, eh?

The resulting video and images create attention-grabbing and memorable visuals. The video’s entertaining – a little pedestrian but I can’t imagine this vehicle corners too well – and most importantly, you understand completely why they’ve done what they’ve done. You’re enjoying the content, engaging with the brand and they are getting their message across. Big thumbs up for this one from me.

You can read more about this ‘cool’ project here;

And it’s the sort of clarity of communication that brands are increasingly using to explain often complicated technology in relatable human terms. One of the best recent examples was Mercedes-Benz’ use of a chicken to demonstrate ‘Magic Body Control.’

[youtube height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLwML2PagbY[/youtube]

Someone on YouTube had identified that chickens are able to keep their heads in one place even when their body is moved from one position to another. Add a little disco music and a man in lab coat and you’ve got all the ingredients of a viral video. However, this fun film also tells the product story in very simple and effective terms. You understand straight away that you’re the chicken’s head and the car – the Mercedes! – is the chicken’s body. The body may move around a lot, but you – the head, the driver or passenger – will stay in one position, in comfort. This very effective video has achieved almost 9million views so far and rightly so.

Then Jaguar came along and it all got a bit silly didn’t it.

[youtube height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PQS8SFWNQw[/youtube]

[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]Everything that can be said can be said clearly[/quote]
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosopher

Dom

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