The Brief

To make K’s JAPAN, a small guitar company famous as a cool rock guitar brand. They had no name value and people were not enthusiastic about rock like they used to be in the golden era because other music like hip-hop became just as popular. K’s JAPAN needed to expand its consumers to those who are not core rock fans.

Creative Execution

We developed an extreme guitar for the following 4 reasons: 1. Because our promotion was in form of a real product, SMASH directly delivered K’s JAPAN’s rock spirit “Destroy to Create” as a direct experience of playing and smashing. 2. The rock spirit “Destroy to Create” embodied by SMASH, attracted not only rock fans but also people fed up with recession. 3. We made people and media come to us without using media fee. 4. Because SMASH was a performing tool, as people played SMASH in the media and liveshows, these performances automatically expanded K’s JAPAN’s advertisement.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Instead of creating a normal advertisement, we developed to sell an extreme product to excite people and engage them with K’s JAPAN. We made a guitar born-to-be-destroyed, SMASH!!! SMASH is meant to be destroyed in its structure, function, recycle system and price, needless to say it can be played as a normal guitar. It is an extraction of the rock spirit, “Destroy to Create!” With this spirit, we aimed to attract not only rock fans but also people wanting to breakthrough the stress of recession. Then, we advertised SMASH with viral movie, flyers, posters, launching event and experience event. Then various media picked up SMASH as exciting news, creating free publicity.

Results

Sales went up 400% in March 2010 compared to March 2009. $3 million worth of free publicity with 0 media fee. It became no.1 search-word in one of Japan’s biggest search engine, goo. No.1 sales ranking at Amazon’s new instrument category. No.1 topic in Japan’s biggest SNS more talked about than Olympics and ipad. No.1 in “Things I Want Ranking” in the most issued shopping magazine. Marty Friedman (ex MEGADETH) commented that SMASH is ideal rock guitar. Bounce rate of SMASH’s website hit 1.5%. MTV did a 1 week special event. Media used SMASH in various ways which expanded SMASH’s recognition (ex. used in a music video, topic on business news, an iphone application and as a weapon in a pro-wrestling match).