Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/511164
www.PowersportsBusiness.com INDUSTRY LEADERS Powersports Business • May 25, 2015 • 15 There's more consistency from the consumer standpoint and greater leveraging of assets and budgets from a client standpoint. How have you had to expand your company to accommodate the growth from this past year? We have five full-time staff members, and we've got about 12 project-based staff. Over the past year we've experienced some growth, and we are pretty close to capacity, meaning we're look- ing for both in the near future a larger physical location and also looking to probably add some digital marketing specialists to our efforts and possibly merchandising, too. That other side of our business is more on my partner, who is also my wife, who focuses on the retail merchandis- ing of powersports dealerships. That side is growing as well. LOOK Marketing operates out of Mel- bourne, Fla. How has your location benefit- ted business? Part of it is it's where I grew up. I used to work for BRP; this is where their R&D center is, and that's how I got started in the industry. I started out as test rider, while I was going to University of Central Florida to get my marketing degree. That's a reason why our business started here. Also, it's beneficial to BRP because we're close to the R&D center, and we're also in the epicen- ter of the personal watercraft market, which is Florida. So there are a lot of advantages for us to be here, and it makes a lot of sense. It allows us to deliver on watercraft marketing because we're doing it year round. So how has your history with BRP helped with coordinating its marketing and event management? It's a little different; we started out on the "other side of the fence." Obviously working within the marketing at BRP, we were working with agencies but as a client. So we don't have any agency experience so to speak. We started from scratch the way that we thought an agency should be run from a client's perspective. We may do things a little bit different than a tra- ditional agency, but we understand what the OEM side is dealing with internally, and we can help make projects run a little more smoothly, perhaps, than a traditional agency. I think a lot of times that gives us an advantage. Recently your #SPARKSOMEFUN campaign to launch the Sea-Doo Spark was quite suc- cessful. What were some of the reasons behind your marketing choices for the campaign? For the Spark tour specifically, the Spark was such a unique product where there really hasn't been anything like that in a long time as far as being small, light, nimble and affordable. Mixed with the new modern technology, there are no competitors for it. We really needed to ensure and show people that this product is everything that we were saying it was and more. The bottom line was we needed to let people experience it for themselves: It is pure fun, and it's easy, simple, and just because it's priced at half the cost of a normal watercraft, doesn't mean you're not getting 100 percent fun for it. Rather than us just telling people and using the ads, we integrated the campaign into a live experience. We wanted people to feel it by the seat of their pants, wanted people to have a continuation of what they might have seen on TV, what they might have seen on our social media, or what they might have seen talking to a dealer and bring that experience to the water where ultimately that's what the product is for. We tried to build an environment that replicated what the target Spark buyer would experience, and we wanted people to be able to try it for themselves and make them believers and feel good about their purchase. Because a lot of the people, for Spark, were people that had never owned a watercraft before, they … could be intimidated by owning a new vehicle, and we wanted to show them how easy and fun it was. It was really important to get people out there and get that word of mouth going that this thing is everything that the marketing materials are saying it is and more. And we did that. We were very successful at doing that by producing 33 specific events all over North America. From a marketing standpoint, were there multiple ideas for the #SPARKSOMEFUN campaign? T h e # S PA R K - SOMEFUN was part of the test ride tour which was part of an over- all launch effort; it was one of the c o m p o n e n t s . I t wasn't the main component; it was a big one, but it was part of an over- all launch plan. So #SPARKSOMEFUN was utilized heav- ily. We had some sweepstakes campaigns that we did with Deadmau5 where we did a large concert event that was connected to a large digital campaign; that's kind of where the # S PA R K S O M E F U N campaign began. And again we used #SPARK- SOMEFUN in our Ins- tagram accounts, our Twitter, our Facebook and then we wanted to carry that on over into the live experience. So the #SPARKSOMEFUN was not only the test ride tour, but that was one INDUSTRY LEADER — TIM McKERCHER Tim McKercher accepting one of eight ADDY awards from 2014. LOOK Marketing also received Best Event Marketing Effort in the marine industry in 2014. See McKercher, Page 21