Brief Explanation

Our brief was to come up with a way to reward BCF's high-value club members and stimulate sales. Instead of finding off-the-shelf promo items and slapping the BCF logo on it, we invented our own. Like most big retailers, one of BCF's business issues is getting customers spending more at times when sales are traditionally down. We created You-Wish-Fish as a promotional item where customers had to spend over $50 to get the item free. It was created to stimulate sales, strengthen the relationship between BCF and their club members and to generate content and P.R. for the BCF brand.

The Brief

BCF (Boating Camping Fishing) is Australia's largest fishing and outdoor retailer. They're all about selling the gear that helps customers land the big ones. The nature of fishing however, is that even the best fishermen (and fisher-women and children), with the best gear, still catch little fish. With this product, now even those tiddlers can become trophies. BCF's positioning line is - this is living. It's a celebration of having fun outdoors. You-Wish-Fish is a direct extension of those brand values.

How the final design was conceived

The inspiration for the idea was the classic trophy fish photo. We noticed that people held their fish right out to camera in an attempt to make them look bigger. We took that behavior and pushed it further by creating tiny hands to make the fish look massive. Other than a simple optical illusion, the technological influence over the idea is the smart phone camera's extremely broad depth of field. That means the fish in the foreground is just as sharp as the person holding it in the background – this makes the trophy shot more believable. Before manufacturing in China, we created and refined models in 3DS-MAX and printed prototypes using a 3-D printer. This meant we could experiment with the size of hands and length of handle to hide the user's real hands behind a fish, while keeping them compact enough to fit into a typical fishing tackle box.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

You-Wish-Fish created user-generated content for the BCF brand. Customers shared their You-Wish-Fish photos on social media. It also provided a unique opportunity for BCF to share a joke with customers. The sales promotion targeted BCF Club Members in specific locations so we could measure the success of You-Wish-Fish as a sales promotion and its popularity as a product. By targeting BCF Club Members, we are able to link the membership numbers of customers who received the promotional EDM, to sales results in store when they use their membership cards at the till. The EDM open rate was 22.81%. The click through rate to watch the product demo video from that group was 14.95%. A ratio of one in 228.3 club members who were sent the EDM, reacted to the campaign (opened the email) and came into store. Those customers spent an average of $94.46 exceeding the average basket value of $88 by 7.34%.