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Project Overview
During Back to School 2015 (BTS15) Officeworks sought to persuade parents that Officeworks is their one stop shop for all of their back to school needs, to be best prepared for the school year ahead. As part of the campaign approach to persuade parents and engage their children, Officeworks created the Growing Minds app to keep young minds active during school holidays.
The app generated thousands of downloads during the 5 week campaign, meaning Officeworks was directly engaging with thousands of school children. The games were played numerous times, on average for more than a few minutes, with a percentage of those who downloaded the app going in-store to unlock additional games. The app also featured in the iOS App Store ‘Best New Apps’ category.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Karl Winther - National Marketing Manager, Officeworks
Teresa Sperti - National CRM & Digital Marketing Manager, Officeworks
Hemant Chawda - Online Marketing Manager, Officeworks
DT: Creative Technology Agency Melbourne
Millipede Agency Melbourne
Project Brief
The brief for the BTS15 campaign was to ensure that parents of primary and secondary age children, choose Officeworks as their destination to shop for their child’s school needs, by proving that Officeworks helps their child be best prepared for the year ahead.
During the campaign ideation phase, insights were collected to help inform campaign strategy development. As part of this approach, Officeworks discovered that many students return from holidays unprepared for full-time learning and that parents and teachers need to cultivate a true interest in always-on learning. Equally research also showed that more than 50% of Australian mums struggle to find inspiration for activities to do with their children and the Christmas school holidays are one of the most challenging times to keep children entertained. Often parents primarily look to digital platforms for help.
Armed with this insight the strategy was to help parents prepare their child not only with the physical materials they need for the school year, but prepare their brain for learning in a classroom setting through a digital medium. By doing so Officeworks would provide genuine support to parents and children during the lead up to the new school year and also support Officeworks to achieve its objective of being the preferred destination to shop during the back to school period.
Further to this, Officeworks wanted to provide a compelling reason to drive parents and their children in-store in order to help them be best prepared for the year ahead.
Project Need
Through gamification Officeworks has been able to deliver a platform that demonstrates how the brand is truly supporting parents and children to be best prepared for the new school year. Whilst Officeworks provides the physical tools and resources to help them get best prepared, the app extends the campaign idea and supports students to be best prepared not only physically but mentally, by re-engaging and stimulating their minds in preparation for their return to the classroom.
Through a series of stimulating and fun, brain-training games, the Growing Minds app gently re-introduced the concept of concentration and focus to prepare them for the year ahead and to also entertain them over the school holidays.
As part of the approach Officeworks wanted to also provide compelling reasons to go in-store during the back to school period. To do so Officeworks offered additional gaming content that was downloadable by parents and students in any Officeworks store. The additional content available in-store was accessed by many of the students who downloaded the app.
To date the app has continued to actively engage students with the number of games played doubling since the BTS15 campaign finished, meaning on a daily basis hundreds of students are engaging with Officeworks via the Growing Minds app.
The popularity of the app during the campaign period also resulted in the Growing Minds app being featured in the iOS App Store. This was achieved in the fourth week of the campaign period with the app being featured in the App Store under the ‘Best New App’ category.
User Experience
Officeworks built the Growing Minds app, a gaming app that delivers a series of stimulating and fun, brain-training games, to gently re-introduce the concept of concentration and focus.
The app features six games designed to stimulate core cognitive functions such as memory, attention, speed, knowledge and flexibility. Packaged as short, targeted exercises (some which were timed), the app was designed to train different parts of the brain in a manner that encouraged repeat play and motivates and rewards progress.
Each game is set in a different school-related environment i.e. a science lab. The games include activities such as virtual dodgeball (in the school gym) and follow the leader (a hopscotch game in the playground) to keep learning interesting.
Intended for both primary and secondary year students the app difficulty settings are pegged to the student’s year level. Difficulty also intuitively increases based on the user’s performance, with the games becoming increasingly challenging as they progress further.
To incentivise children and encourage repeat play, the app also rewards progress with badges which displayed on an ‘Honour Wall’, inspiring students to exceed their previous score.
Growing Minds features three free games on download with an additional three games being unlocked in Officeworks stores. Customers could go in-store, and the app will geo-locate the device, unlocking the remaining games.
Project Marketing
A mix of channels were leveraged to promote the app. Dedicated app marketing was also leveraged to accelerate interest and downloads. In addition, as the app was a digital engagement component of the Officeworks BTS15 marketing campaign – the app marketing strategy leveraged the broader BTS15 campaign marketing efforts.
Dedicated app marketing activity
•Onsite: Banner advertising and a landing page were created to support awareness of the app and to help educate students and parents of its features.
•Display, Search and Remarketing: A series of mobile digital media channels were leveraged to support awareness and drive downloads these included;
-Targeted banners and text ads on Google and other relevant third party sites and search engines.
-Remarketing activity targeting those who visited the landing page but didn’t download as well as lookalike audiences.
•Social Media; The app was promoted to existing Officeworks Facebook fans. In addition Facebook’s custom targeting was leveraged to target parents of primary and secondary school age students to drive interest and downloads.
•PR was leveraged to target key education and tech journalists with a sneak preview of the app to encourage them to review it. To further amplify the message PR activities also included blogger outreach activity.
•In-store - 150+ Officeworks stores were equipped with marketing collateral to inform customers that they could download the Growing Minds app for free. The marketing devices used were, POS screens, window decal, catalogue stand header and in-store radio.
Back to school campaign integration:
The app was also integrated across the following BTS15 campaign executions;
•BTS catalogues (4 during the BTS15 campaign period)
•BTS newsletters – featured panels and call outs in eDM newsletters to cross promote the app.
Project Privacy
The Growing Minds app does not capture any known / personal data on the individual user. As such best practice privacy compliance was not required for this project.
Best Mobile Marketing Campaign
This category recognises campaigns that use elements such as competitions, promotions, games & messaging to engage customers via apps.
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