LG mobile was a distant third in market share.To make matters worse, buyers were fiercely loyal to the category leaders, Apple and Samsung, even though smartphone innovation had slowed and both brands were replacing innovation with marketing hype.

Knowing LG couldn’t out-spend or out-shout the competition, we had to find a different way to break through. Our job was to get people to consider LG by disrupting the hype around Samsung and Apple.

#WhatsItGonnaTake

To win over people who had grown skeptical of smartphone marketing hype, we created a campaign to address skepticism head-on and prod phone buyers into questioning their own buying behaviors.

Our mission was to prove that LG would go where no brand had gone before and do whatever it takes to get people to switch.

We knew the category leaders were competing for the same people—tech forward, creative Millennials—so we set out to find those with a challenger mindset.

We developed a custom survey to define and size an audience of persuadables. They had to be in the market and open to switching to an Android. We further segmented them based on attitudes suggesting they were non-conformists, from being pro-marijuana legalization to describing themselves as ‘anti-establishment.’ Combining these two layers we created an audience we called the Savvy Skeptics. This group represented a massive growth opportunity as it included the segments that over-index in smartphone purchase yet they were being ignored by the Goliaths.

We knew they over-indexed on Twitter and used the platform to express their skepticism of tech brands, so we designed our activation to meet them right there, where we could respond to their skepticism directly.

Through a combination of paid and organic Twitter posts, we simply asked Savvy Skeptics #WhatsItGonnaTake to get you to switch -- and then literally did it. Over the course of 12 weeks, we sent out 39 bespoke fulfillments ranging from custom GIFS to “LG G7 ThinQ” engraved chopsticks. We also posted 3 promoted videos—featuring a celebrity trainer, an NFL kicker, and a giant mural of a contestant with his dogs—to show Savvy Skeptics that we were walking the walk.

Reach

149,510,659 Earned Potential Impressions (+5,063% vs. category benchmark of 2,895,872)

Engagement

- 76,308 Hashtag Mentions (+1,763% vs. category benchmark of 4,096)

- 94% Positive Sentiment (+1,346% vs. category benchmark of 6.5%)

Sales / Business Targets

This activation was part of a larger marketing campaign that outperformed the launch for LG’s previous flagship smartphone, the V30.

RESULT: +230% Average Daily Sales

G7 average daily sales were +230% higher than V30 when comparing the first 4 months of each launch. This is attributable to the campaign as G7 pre-sales undersold V30 by 35%. In other words, V30 generated more hype and sales on its own , but with our campaign the G7 outsold it.