And so now you’re in control right? Your task is clear. You have the skills, and you now realize not everything can, nor should, be built from scratch — sometimes you have to replace one wheel of your go-kart at a time as you careen around the course. And as you get busy replacing wheels (did I mention that your driver is slightly mad and knows no caution?), it dawns on you that you may not have all the skills you need after all, so you have somehow go back to stage I and II and develop new skills and still win the race, or, persuade people with better skills than your own, to hop aboard your crazy ride. Maybe control is just an illusion.
It’s all rather exhilarating, and if you can can manage to do it in the company of good people, they will probably call you lucky.
Have no fear of perfection – you'll never reach it.
–Salvador Dalí
SAP Concur consideration campaign
Started in 2017 as an experiment, SAP Concur’s first foray into a consideration campaign (just don’t call it a brand campaign ;)) exceeded expectations and has been in continuous production with yearly updates ever since.
The campaign is used across all SAP Concur’s key SMB markets and verticals, and has shown potential to cross into mid and enterprise.
The approach is simple (ha!) – We use 6- and 15-second vignettes to illustrate key solution benefits/concerns that we’ve learned resonate with our audience via yearly tracking research. The specific language and personas in each vignette resonate with known themes and universal truths specific to the spend management and travel worlds. The campaign primarily uses targeted pre-roll placements with additional special placements in select pubs. Broader-reach banner advertising is used to round out the messaging.
All this is supported by extensive education materials and communities activity on the site, and reinforced via waves of thought-leadership pieces and social campaigns timed to campaign pushes.
That’s now; it all started as some cool ads :)
The tone is market-leader confident, relying on humor to signal the ability to meet the promise.
Ariba brand evolution
Ariba was going through the SAP integration process and the proposed brand work from the agency had run into internal opposition.
As the SAP Concur team had successfully managed Concur’s integration into the SAP brand ecosystem, we were enlisted to engage Ariba’s leadership in a discovery process to help give them a larger voice in, and understanding of, the brand integration process.
It really was Brand 101, but quite rewarding ultimately as we turned never-SAPers into true believers by the end of the process, and helped Ariba over this sticking point in their integration journey.
The vocabulary sliders have been recycled a bunch of times for other projects.
SAP Brand evolution 2023-4
Current work – reach out for a tour.
