2024 Bronze Creative Solution

Agency: VML UK & Germany

Client: Beko

Entry Title: The Beko Inheritance

Executive Summary

By hijacking one of the most long-standing institutions of all time of all time, this campaign showed beko appliances are here to stay: maybe even longer than their owners.

Strategy

Products are designed with a fixed lifespan. It’s called planned obsolescence and it’s prevalent in the home appliance segment, and beyond. beko, however, has long broken the trend by prioritising durability and investing in extensive testing of its home appliances.

To reach a large audience and create buzz around this, the brand couldn’t just launch a traditional campaign. Dropping or abusing an appliance to prove its durability had been done to death, by both brands and content creators - consumers would switch off. It needed to break category codes.

Because of bad experiences, people assumed that planned obsolescence was now built into all products, especially cheaper ones. Given that the home appliance category is typically associated with low interest, the brand decided to do something completely different and borrow from a category of high interest: the luxury segment.

Creativity

The unique initiative allowed beko customers to pass on their appliances to loved ones by turning them into official inheritance. By consulting legal experts, the campaign meticulously drafted the beko Inheritance Addendum and launched it in three markets across Europe and The Middle East.

A film inspired by the likes of Succession, Knives Out & The Gentlemen, and an extensive influencer campaign led consumers to the website where they could personalise and download their own Addendum. They could also find the Addendum next to the traditional user manuals in select retail locations across the three markets.

Results

By basing the campaign around the universal insight of low expectations when it comes to the lifespan of appliances and tapping into pop culture, the campaign managed to transcend the advertising space and achieved impressive results in just two weeks after being launched. It featured in The Financial Times.

The campaign has set the bar for beko’s future appetite for both taking the brand into culture, and for crafting truly standout comms that cut through category norms.

The Team

VML - Ryan McManus, Chief Creative Officer - Simona Suman, Chief Creative Officer - Tom Drew, Executive Creative Director - Bruno Damião, Creative Director - Phil Siegle, Creative Director - Tiffany Chung, Creative Director - Winston Says, Senior Copywriter - Breno Chiavelli, Senior Art Director - Matthias Dahm, Senior Motion Designer - Sakuya Miesczalok, Art Director - Laura Hallensleben, Copywriter - James Irvine, Client Partner - Alex Moore, Business Director - Rachel Anthony, Account Manager - Oliver Woolf, Strategy Partner - Nadine Hadidi, Group Account Director - Danny Baylis, Delivery Director - Julian Poole, Programme Director - Abbie Keen, Project Manager - Ceren Oezen, Senior Project Manager - Gabrielle Bennett, Junior UX Designer - Jonothan Hunt, Senior Creative Technologist - Bella Danon, Executive Producer - Chris Pencakowski, Senior Producer - Isabel Chapman, Assistant Producer - Esther Reid, Case Study Junior Producer - Stephen McIntyre, Senior Broadcast Affairs Manager - Claire Proudfoot, Senior TV Producer - Aysin Ozkur, Senior Producer