Introduction

Montana is well-known for its high-quality and sustainable Danish design and production. They’re also known for colors, playfulness, and the chance to personalize their products. In fact, the DNA of Montana is personalization — consumers can build and customize all kinds of storage so that it reflects their personal style. 

That’s why when Montana was getting ready to celebrate its 40th year, it made complete sense to work with artist Camille Walala.

The campaign

Montana has recently celebrated their 40th anniversary so they collaborated with artist Camille Walala to create a playful and colorful mural on one of the large walls at their factory on the Danish island Funen. They created a game to show the before and after of the mural, and as a way to strategically spread the word about their new mural. 

The Walala campaign complements the playfulness of the Montana brand, and gamification, and the Playable platform was able to support that along with Montana’s newsletters, online ads, and social media. Playable marketing provided that interactive element where Montana’s customers could engage further and explore the brand. Its purpose was to have an impact on all steps of the customer journey, including awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy. Their goal was to increase Montana’s brand value.

The results

While the main objective of using Playable was, and still is, upper funnel like campaign awareness, lead generation, and engagement. This includes creating interest in new markets and with new potential customers.

They also use playable marketing to make sure they know our customers well and to reach them across channels. Playable marketing also helps the Montana brand stay relevant and competitive.

Why Playable

“At Montana, our aim is to build brand equity and brand love, and we find that Playable is a great tool for this purpose. We use the Playable gamification platform to build experiences that nurture and enhance our brand image and value. It’s a unique way to target consumers with fun and entertaining communication that we know they like and will engage with.”

Rikke Nørr, Brand Activation Manager, Montana

The pain point and reason they started using gamification was to build out the brand awareness in the other focus markets: France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and other English-speaking markets. In addition, Montana Furniture wanted to preserve the awareness and loyalty they have in the Danish market, while using gamification to position their brand as ‘playful’, ‘pragmatic’, and ‘sustainable’.

Montana Furniture is a Danish furniture design company founded in 1982. Montana is known for its high-end shelving system that consists of 36 basic modules and 42 colors that can be combined and matched for specific needs.

Why Playable works for Montana

Montana was looking for a way to raise awareness of new products to new customers. While they are currently focused on using gamification with their B2C customers, they do see potential in creating gamified campaigns for their B2B clients.

Montana Furniture created a Quiz to drive traffic to their new Home catalogue and to gather new email permissions. The quiz consisted of three questions, and the answers could be found by looking in the catalogue.

It was translated for their focus markets: Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. The quiz was shared both in Montana Furniture’s newsletter as well as on Instagram.

It ran for two weeks in the summer of 2019, and it was a success! The gamification campaign helped spread the word about the new catalogue, which is important for Montana, and it helped showcase the latest color palettes.

The prize was relevant too: it was the chance to win one of Montana’s popular nightstands, DREAM.

“The reason why Montana is very happy about working together with you guys – Playable – is because many of our brand values match quite well with what your gamification platform offers – playfulness, endless possibilities, and a focus on making products of great design. The great match is also one of the main reasons why I think it has been so effective to use gamification as a tool to create brand awareness campaigns for Montana. We have only done campaigns for about a half year now and in fact we have already more than doubled our permissions since we started. The permissions we have achieved have overall been of high quality, since only about 10% of our new subscribers have unsubscribed afterwards.”

– Line Rytter Sørensen, Digital Content Designer, Montana Furniture

The results

The permissions Montana Furniture got from the DREAM campaign were high quality, with just 10% of new subscribers unsubscribing after (a good number for Montana).

Other results include:

• Over half (57%) of the unique permissions were new subscribers
  
• 62.3% conversion rate in Denmark (one of Montana Furniture’s focus markets and where the brand is best known)
  
• 55.3% opened the catalogue (one of the main KPIs of the campaign)
  
• 0:50 seconds average engagement across all focus markets

Takeaways

1. Personalize your message.

Montana chose to divide the campaign into seven separate campaigns due to the five focus markets with one market speaking several languages. Even though it was more work, it was really helpful for Montana to see how engaged each of their focus markets were.

2. Be strategic about when you ask for information.

Montana has tested putting the registration form before and after the game, and they’ve found that for them it makes more sense to have it before the game. While making the registration page only visible to winners might create stronger permissions, they found that getting the email permission regardless of the game outcome gives Montana Furniture the chance to keep them engaged as an email subscriber.

3. Don’t forget to be playful.

Montana is focused on making sure that there’s a playful feel to their gamification campaigns. Playfulness is an important aspect of the Montana Furniture brand, and it’s great that they can infuse their gamification campaigns with their branding.