More Horses Campaign

The brief

For over 20 years, Kioti Australia has worked to deliver a product portfolio dedicated to the ever-changing and challenging Australian conditions farmers face. As a brand though, farmers saw Kioti as a low horsepower option and when the most common approach farmers use when buying tractors is to opt for the highest ‘horsepower per dollar’ that they can afford, the brand was finding itself in a tricky spot (NSW Govt Department of Primary Industries).

As a result, 2022 was a challenging year for Kioti. In a market that grew by 3%, Kioti sales decreased by 10%, causing the brand to drop a significant amount of market share. (2023 State of the Industry Tractors and Machinery Report) (Kioti internal sales data).

Kioti launched a new range, including the high-horsepower HX tractors designed for modern Australian farmers, aiming to claw back their market share. However, farmers dismissed Kioti before engaging with the industry's most effective media strategies: classifieds, portals, and finance offers.

We needed a unique solution to show farmers who dismissed us that Kioti had ‘More Horses’ to offer. We aimed to connect with our audience in a non-traditional way for the agricultural industry to shift brand perceptions.

The audience

The picture of an Australian Farmer is a complex one, and the relationship with their tractor is one of the biggest decisions they can make. So why do the Australian Tractor Manufacturers all market the same? Manufacturers all focus on classifieds, price and finance offers.

We aimed to challenge the stereotype that farmers are solely price-oriented and serious about their identity. By doing so, we seek to connect with them in genuine, meaningful, and authentic moments. We needed to align Kioti with a farmer’s passions and not their challenges. To build trust and challenge perceptions around what type of farm machinery brand Kioti really is.

We also found that farmers all over Australia are unique, that Victorians are vastly different to Queenslanders and West Australians, that their passions are regional, local, tribal and unique to them (Roy Morgan 2023). Underneath this difference though, themes shine through.

Farmers are deeply connected to their communities and value local events and people. They enjoy challenges, competition, and sports, and believe humor is a way of connection (Roy Morgan 2023). Above all, they desire more for their farms, communities, and machinery output.

The strategy

We decided to focus on what farmers care about most, their communities (Australia's family farms and farming communities: Interdependent, reconstituted, threatened spaces) and their sports.  Farmers over index significantly in consuming key Sports AFL (ix128), NRL (ix140), Cricket (ix133) and American Football (ix130) (Source: Roy Morgan)

With farmers always looking for more, we needed to bring more to them more variety, more engagement and mostly importantly…

Reaching farmers to tell them that a story is always a challenge, with farmers media consumption fragmented and at times unique due to their working lifestyle (ACM: Understanding media consumption of farmers).

We needed a way to engage with them on their time. To do this we focused on media placements with both selectivity and longevity.

How it worked

Leveraging the Kayo platform and their unique features to allow for anyone to watch at their leisure, we aligned with Australian Sporting moments across AFL, NRL and Cricket with a focus on leveraging Kioti’s sponsorship of the Carlton Football Club. All activity was targeted to farmers in regional Australia.

We then targeted key sports highlights on YouTube injecting More Horses into those powerful sporting moments.

And we even appeared in the Superbowl for Farmers to see how More Horses delivers more for them.

This was combined this with regional press, radio and digital to deliver complete cut through.

Appearing in their local communities, within nine regional press mastheads from ACM and News Corp and eight regional radio stations with SCA and ARN.

We streamlined our digital display efforts by partnering with ACM and The Weekly Times. Additionally, we catalogued 110 regional digital news mastheads and created a bespoke programmatic Kioti Marketplace, reaching farmers across Australia.

The results

2023 was a tough market for the agricultural industry with record level fuel prices, currency fluctuations and adverse weather patterns seeing Tractor unit sales decline 25% year on year (source: 2023 State of the industry Tractors and Machinery Report).

Kioti engaged with farmers like never before, reaching over 1 million people in premium sports environments on Kayo, Nine, and Seven. Our "More Horses" content garnered 1.7 million views on YouTube, and we had 31 press insertions reaching 2.9 million people and 1,371 radio spots. We also delivered 8.9 million display impressions across regional Australia's premium digital titles, from the Ararat Advertiser to the Yass Tribune. With complete coverage, we truly had more horses.

The results? They speak for themselves.

• Engaged web traffic increased 21% YoY
• Market share increased a massive 31% YoY
• We saw a 6% increase in unit sales in a market that dropped by 25%. With the brand new HX range accounting for over 30% of total Kioti Sales.

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Showing More Horses with Kioti gives more power to Aussie farmers.

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