A Pen for Every Side of You

The brief

BIC stationary has seen a steady decline year on year for the past 5-years, they are struggling to connect with the next generation of young people.  

The pervasive influence of social media and the digital world we find ourselves in is a double-edged sword. While it offers platforms for expression and connection, it also fosters unrealistic standards and consumerism, leading to negative self-perception among young people and causing people 18-24 to be less likely than ever to be creative via pen and paper, with a large majority saying they feel uninspired.

Mental health remains a critical concern, with 30% of social media users highlighting it as a key issue. Many young individuals calling out stress, anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem, which can to feelings of being uninspired and unenthused.

BIC Stationary saw an opportunity to flip the script and take social media from a platform that has a negative impact on younger audiences, to a community that encourages creativity in all its forms, and they had the perfect product to do it, the versatile 4-Colours pen (you know the one you used to fidget with at school? It had the satisfying ‘click’ when you changed between colours, and made any notebook look infinitely better), but the 4C Pen isn’t just for giving others pen envy – we wanted to inspire a generation that was moving away from pen and paper by showing them how the 4C can enhance any interest or hobby, with just a touch of creativity.

The strategy

It was important to show the audience that the 4C Pen offers limitless creative potential that can bring the interests of our audience to life in a all environments that they follow, overcoming the challenge of inauthenticity across social platforms by moving away from the mantra of “personalisation at scale” and looking to build cultural relevance by targeting “niche communities at scale”, with trusted advisors in each of these spaces.

The younger audience can be a difficult segment to influence, they are media savvy and know how to spot an inauthentic brand, we know young people are most engaged on TikTok as they have the highest daily time spent on platform compared to all other social networks, but showing up as a brand would be a very quick way to get overlooked, scrolled past, or blocked by the all-powerful TikTok algorithm. We needed help.

To inspire the uninspired BIC needed to cut through to them in their own community and with their own tone, surprising and delighting with content that shows them how to use simple tip and tricks to bring to life new ideas, challenge the creativity of the audience and dare we say it, stop the scroll just for a second.

To do this, we enlisted one of TikTok’s newest and most powerful features; The “TikTok Creator Marketplace” to partner with up-and-coming creators, micro-influencers and artists to make content that would inspire viewers to get creative with BIC.

The idea

We not only wanted to create a place for new ideas to flourish, we wanted to foster a community of creativity, and white space for BIC on a platform full of content, so we created BICTok.

The idea started simple; how can we integrate the 4 Colours Pen in the TikTok community?

The idea then become complicated; which TikTok community do we actually want to integrate with?

TikTok is unique in that is one big platform that is built on larger overarching communities, such as vox pops, viral dances, ASMR, comedy and food reviewers. But underneath these sit incredibly niche and vibrant communities, such as teachers' tips, photo-realistic pens drawings, organisation porn, the best items for the nursing profession, how parents can distract kids, and most importantly instructional videos on how to get better at pretty much anything.

These niche communities have a highly engaged audience, and when brands can get on their level, and align with their interests, they love to engage.

Our approach needed to prioritise the creative freedom of our chosen creators, so we workshopped a very open brief with BIC, before outlining priority communities.

Leaning on the individuality of the creators, we gave them all the same brief to see how they could bring their content specialty to the task.

With our key audience of students, we launched during the lead up to end-of-year exams for high school and university, partnering with creators preparing for these exams and letting them show us how they use a 4C to elevate their study time.

We then moved into the artist community, going out of our way to find creators with small followings but high talent to illustrate how your follower count doesn’t dictate your ability. The community of young people sharing their art on TikTok is immense, so we were able to find local talent who appealed to adjacent interests of our target audience through their art, like animal lovers and anime fans, to further increase engagement.

Branching out to young professionals, we spoke to lifestyle creators and teachers and asked them to show us how they use their 4C to elevate productivity or bring a little creative flair to their everyday projects.

BIC were thrilled by the results of the first 3 months of activity, so we doubled our budget to ensure we nailed the Back-to-School shopping period. This time, broadening our communities and testing the effect of partnering with both small and larger creators.

We continued our work with smaller creators, amplifying content showing relaxing and satisfying journal creation, and launched the school year with tips on how to make your class notebooks more exciting.

Many would remember a key feature of the 4C to be the iconic ‘click’ when changing ink colours, so we partnered with the biggest ASMR creator in Australia (JoJoASMR) to highlight the sound in a ‘sketching your portrait’ video, a highly popular recent trend in the ASMR community.

By tapping into trends on the platform and allowing for high creative freedom from our creators, many of these videos were also posted organically on the creator's profiles to gain millions of additional views outside of our paid activity

The results

To date, the campaign has delivered over 20 million paid and organic impressions, with a view rate of over 20%, where just 6% of brands globally earn view rates of more than 10%, showing that the tapped into the market seamlessly

The campaign also garnered features in B&T, AdNews, Mumbrella and mi-3, resulting in outstanding press for BIC Stationary Australia

BIC was happy too as it drove an 8% increase in sales year on year.

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