Brief Explanation

Mizone Formulated Sports Water is a small, little known player in a highly competitive category in Australia, battling the might of Gatorade and Powerade. In 2012, the brand was starting to lose meaning and relevance in the minds of regular exercisers – our ‘everyday athletes’ – who perceived Mizone as a rational proposition (functional hydration). As a result, sales were in decline; Mizone’s promise (‘Mizone is proven to put you in the zone’) was not clearly understood. To address this, we created a fully integrated ‘brand experience’ to bring to life Mizone’s emotional benefit. As its name suggests, Mizone is specifically engineered to put you ‘in the zone’, a mind-state widely understood to be a place where you are fully immersed in your exercise – helping performance and duration of exercise. The challenge for many of our ‘everyday athletes’ was that they didn't know how to get into their zone – or only very briefly. We created an experience platform to empower our audience to get in the zone and stay there. We knew we needed to demonstrate the benefit (walk the talk, not just talk it) in a PR-worthy way to make our limited budget work harder. We leveraged the psychophysical and ergogenic properties of music to create ‘music proven to put you in the zone’. Our research had shown, that while music was commonly known to help you ‘get in the zone’, no brand had ever composed a track with that single objective in mind. This presented a huge innovation opportunity for Mizone. We composed 4 performance-enhancing tracks that became a downloadable gift with purchase. The composition journey was documented and content was shared across digital and social channels. This campaign resulted in Mizone’s largest-ever sales month – increasing sales by 23% (120% above target) with 57% less marketing spend vs. the same period in 2011. It is relevant to note that historically in February/March Mizone had invested in a national sales driving promotion with a supporting awareness-driving campaign. In order to isolate the effect of the ZoneLab campaign, it is therefore relevant to compare this directly to the 2011 campaign’s results – which had similar share/sales objectives but had 133% more budget to support it. Finally, the Zonelab campaign not only succeeded in increasing sales for Mizone, it negatively impacted the sales growth of two of its major competitors in the convenience channel during the campaign period.