As the construction market is slowing down globally, KONE has increasingly shifted their focus from new equipment business towards services. Digitalization is changing elevator and escalator maintenance and many of KONE’s competitors has launched new services within this area of business. KONE wanted to launch their IoT-service in a way that clearly stands out and create a competitive edge.

The 24/7 Connected Services combines KONE equipment with IBM’s Watson-platform, which analyses escalator activity in real-time, every second of every day. Continuous monitoring helps KONE make timely service and maintenance procedures, which prevents unnecessary breakage.

KONE had previously informed about the collaboration with IBM Watson at a press conference, that did not generate the sought-after media attention. In 2017 KONE launched their connected services for elevators, under the title Machine Conversations, to great success. In 2018 it was time for escalators to become connected.

We did not want to replicate or widen our previous Machine Conversations campaign, as the news value and potential to generate earned media would have been next to zero.

Escalators are boring by design, even to the target groups. They only get noticed when they break down. This means that we make them even more uneventful by monitoring them in order to keep them running without interruption.

How do you market something that is innovative, but essentially boring? Our solution was to bring something fresh, news worthy and innovative to the method of storytelling itself, while making it so boring it becomes captivating.

Because escalators that run without interruptions are essentially boring, we created the world’s most boring VR-experience.

Bought, traditional media would not have been a resource efficient method to reach our goals. Generating earned media space through an interesting idea, social media and PR - and strengthening KONE’s position as an innovation leader at the same time - proved to be a smarter option.

Bought media was only utilized in social media. Most of the gathered attention was generated by carefully planned PR-actions and activity within social media channels.

The campaign exceeded our goals and gathered 42.8M potential viewers, even though it was, well, the most boring VR-experience ever created.

With the campaign, our goal was to a) raise awareness around KONE’s Connected Services globally, b) communicate that escalators are now included in the service offering, and c) strengthen KONE’s position as a innovation leader.

The campaign’s results were measured from February 28th 2018 to March 20th 2018.

Results:

? 164 media hits (not social media)

? 42.8M potential audience reach

? 3.6M Social Media contacts

? 19,884 website visits (exceeded the set goal levels, low: 6000, average: 12.500, high: 17.200)

? Active dialog between CEO’s on Twitter, Henrik Ehrnrooth (KONE) and Marc Benioff (Salesforce).

The marketing has also helped KONE to reach the position of 59th most innovative company globally and 7th most innovative company in Europe, according to Forbes.