Cheil Germany Frankfurt/ Main

ABOUT

The challenge
The sneaker brand KangaROOS was founded in 1979 on a simple belief:
that running should be pure and fun – and not even disturbed by the keys bouncing in your pocket. To free the runner of that burden, KangaROOS created a little pocket for storing the keys, and so the “Original Shoe with a pocket was born.

35 years later the joy and simplicity of running was ruined once again.

The spirit of simply running has been taken over by NIKE’s big brand technology, counting every step and constantly measuring your performance. So the mission for KangaROOS’ 35th anniversary was: Put the fun back into run!

The idea
We wanted to prove the absurdity of running after some self-created statistics. Our message was clear: KangaROOS cannot be tamed by a trend or a system. To proof this once and for all, we took on the biggest competitor and his primary fitness gadget: NIKE and the FuelBand.

We challenged the community how to put the fun back into run. A fanboy came up with the idea to play KangaROOS against NIKE. We loved his idea, so we sent him to Australia to attach a FuelBand to a real kangaroo. And then run with it to capture the data. While sharing his quest in daily webisodes on our Facebook page, visitors could win one of 35 pairs of anniversary sneakers just by guessing how many fuelpoints the tagged kangaroo would score. But because we added NIKE’s own hashtags #Fuelband and #NikeFuel, they posted their guesses all across NIKE’s social media channels. This way, we didn’t only mimic the routine of FuelBand wearers, but also hijacked NIKE’s twitter feed and made millions of NIKE followers part of our story.

To spread the word, we even went further. KangaROOS launched the World’s First Analogue Fitness Tracker: a sweatband with a pocket. We placed it between other “disruptive innovations” on the crowdfunding internet-platform Indiegogo where it really stood out as a parody of the ordinary digital tracking devices. Additionally, we reached our crowdfunding goal and sold in the heart of our core business KangaROOS sneakers by using crowdfunding as an e-commerce channel for the first time.

Did it Move?
Within a few weeks, our engagement rate on Facebook grew by 400% and over 18,000 people mentioned KangaROOS on Twitter. In total, we reached 8.1 million people. Also, our crowdfunding project was a big success: As well as gaining 130,000 impressions within the Indiegogo network, we reached our funding goal of 10,000 Euro and sold all of the available 300 KangaROOS sneakers. Altogether we gained 3.0 million contacts of free PR coverage. But most importantly: KangaROOS has touched a truth we all feel: Sometimes technology doesn’t make life more fun. So ... just ROO it.

AWARDS

EPICA Awards
Eurobest Award Shortlist
Webby Award

MADEIT CREDITS

Project featured: on 3rd July 2015

JUST ROO IT - THE ROO BAND

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