Inspired by Miele
How can an established household appliances brand leverage the power of thousands of genuinely enthusiastic customers? Our answer to that question was launching an online community platform filled with inspiring content and input by passionate Miele fans, attracting a whole new generation of followers.
Instead of paying celebrities to act as brand ambassadors during the most important trade show of the year, we simply invited Miele’s most fervent fans. They loved to chat with and help out the people who visited the Miele booth. Free of charge!
The challenge
Over the years, Miele has built an excellent reputation based on the premium quality of its products, inspiring several generations of both amateur and professional chefs – each of them genuinely enthusiastic about the way Miele household appliances help them care for family and friends.
However, googling Miele tells a different story. Search results consist primarily of people complaining, which, Miele informed us, had even started to affect sales.
We love it when a plan comes together.
The idea: an online community platform
The idea was simple. Let’s drown out the bad reviews with testimonials from the numerous fans who swear by the Miele brand. Let’s start recruiting brand lovers and invite them to become our partners in communication. Let’s be inspirational instead of technical. Let’s give Miele customers an online community platform where they can talk from the heart and help each other out.
The impact
Seeing how easy it was for Miele fans to get consumers to walk up to the Miele booth and convince them of the brand’s top quality, we figured: why not take this concept even further? Why not replace the booth with an online community platform and reach a much broader audience?
That is how inspiredbymiele.be came about. We built it from the ground up and launched it right after Batibouw, Belgium’s biggest trade fair – and the location of our first Miele fan-turned-brand-ambassador experiment.
We used all the content we gathered on inspiredbymiele.be to inspire young families interested in building a new home, as well as existing customers. Invitations to come and join Miele’s new online community were spread via e-mail, social media and various other online campaigns.
