A Targeted LATAM Campaign
Merrell, one of the world’s premier outdoor footwear brands commissioned our creative studio + production house to create a series of campaigns targeting the Latin American diaspora in the United States.
The Client: Merrell
WhereNext had recently produced an art-driven, outdoor advertising and print campaign for the brand in Austin, Texas, so we were familiar with their identity and company culture.
The Deliverables
Our deliverables for this campaign were forty high-resolution images and a series of 18 videos to be used for Merrell’s social media channels. We optimized the final cuts for peak social media performance: portrait format for Instagram, with minimal yet impactful text. Our digital marketing team’s extensive social media A/B testing has given us strong insights into the most effective formats on different social media platforms.
The Campaign
Our target audience for this campaign was the Latin American diaspora living in the United States. We quickly learned through our market research that this particular community is strongly underrepresented by traditional outdoor and adventure marketing campaigns. Because Merrell’s philosophy is to make the great outdoors more accessible to people from all walks of life, creating a campaign that correctly represented the interests and aspirations of the Latinx community in the US was paramount for the success of this project.
What the Market Research Told Us
The first part of our role as a storytelling agency was to understand how our target market experiences the outdoors - what are they looking for when they lace up their hiking boots and head out into the countryside? Our initial market research revealed that the classic marketing image of the lone adventurer gazing off the edge of a cliff after conquering the mountain peak isn’t fully representative of the Latinx outdoor adventure market in the US.
The people we surveyed viewed the outdoors as a more sociable space, a place where friends and family could get together and enjoy each other’s company in their free time. Having spent the best part of 12 months in various forms of lockdown, this desire for a pleasant, outdoor experience was even more heightened. For our target audience, the outdoors was less a space to test your limits and more a vehicle for interacting with friends and loved ones and forging personal connections in beautiful places.
Research also showed that the outdoors was more typically viewed as a space to take a break from busy lives and schedules. Our preliminary investigations showed that our audience was one of the hardest-working demographics in the US, so our goal was to present the outdoors as a place to disconnect, unwind, and decompress. We wanted to frame outdoor excursions as a gift that you give to yourself.
Reframing the Outdoors for a Young, Latin American Market
Our creative approach to this campaign was heavily informed by market research. We created a visual campaign based on young adult Latin Americans and their families enjoying the outdoors together. We also deliberately chose to shoot the campaign in accessible outdoor locations rather than the far-flung, exotic locations. This message also connected with a growing movement towards urban wildlife experiences and inclusive outdoor groups. This is best exemplified by birdwatching collectives like Flock Together and popular social media accounts like Unlikely Hikers - the goal was to present nature and the outdoors as a space for everyone to enjoy regardless of their previous experience or perceived “ruggedness.”
The idea was to show the outdoors as aspirational yet accessible; highlighting the fact that you can visit the outdoors practically in your backyard, without the need to plan an epic adventure and, crucially for Merrell’s brand identity, without the need for thousands of dollars worth of super technical gear. Merrell strives to be a brand that brings the spirit of the outdoors to everyone, and not everyone has the time or money to take off along the Appalachian Trail for weeks at a time. What almost everyone can do, though, is lace up their boots and head out to their nearest State park, forest trail, or lake. These were the kinds of locations we chose for shooting this campaign.
Creating a Multilingual Campaign
Additionally, to give Merrell as many options as possible, we created the campaign videos and texts in two-and-a-half different languages: English, Spanish, and ‘Spanglish.’ So, our client received three different iterations of the creative brief under all three language parameters.
This language variation allowed the client to thoroughly test different creative and paid campaigns to see which were most well-received by their target audience. Which ones connected the best with this audience and were the most aspirational for them?
Our team carried out this project in our Bogota, Colombia office. The visual elements were designed by Yenssy Gonzalez, our Colombian Art Director, and the in-field shoots were conducted by our Colombian audiovisual team in various rural locations outside of the city. In many ways, our team represents Merrell’s target audience for these products - young Latin Americans looking to explore the outdoors in a sociable fashion.