YEAR
2005
PROJECT
HydroJect Lead
Gen Campaign
CLIENT
The Toro Company
The Backstory
Core aeration is a longstanding practice for golf course superintendents to keep their tees, fairways and greens healthy and pristine. But it comes at a cost. Each treatment leaves a debris field of earth-and-turf cores. It looks like a hail storm of Kit Kat sticks passed through. Even after the cores are collected, the remaining holes are hazardous to long birdie putts.
Toro to the Rescue? Count on it.
The Toro engineering team came up with an entirely new approach to aeration. Instead of pulling cores up and out, why not send blasts of water jets deep into the turf to reduce compaction while leaving the surface undisturbed? Amazing, right? And there was much rejoicing.
The Big Idea
As DKY measured our approach shot at reaching superintendents with the HydroJect, it was clear the marketing needed to be like the HydroJect: surprising, unconventional, and maybe even silly – like your favorite golf pants.
We created a series of direct mail postcards with each one sent from unique personas on the superintendent’s own course: the 5th, 11th, and 18th greens. They looked handwritten, and each one expressed a desire to receive this new HydroJect treatment. Infused with humor and personality (the 18th green is a primadonna, ya know), the postcards told an engaging story and sang the praises of the innovative new product.
Interested prospects were sent to a one-to-one personalized landing page that showcased the features, benefits and data behind the HydroJect technology. Site visits to the custom web pages sent an alert to a Toro salesperson for follow-up.
Finally, for good measure, we sent one last postcard from Manny the Mole (the nasty pest of golf courses) telling superintendents to ignore all the previous postcards and never buy a HydroJect.
Fun Fact
Variable data printing was evolving as a powerful tool in a marketer’s hands, with the advanced ability to tailor images and layouts to individual recipients. This data + printing tech opened up some very fun possibilities. (Huge fist-bump to our print and direct marketing partners over the years who were always pushing the…ahem, envelope.)
Scorecard Full Disclosure
DKY helped the team at Toro bring the HydroJect and many other brand innovations to market over the years. But sometimes when you are trying new approaches, it doesn’t deliver the championship. The HydroJect campaign was super fun, and may have generated some interest and business, but it didn’t achieve the impact we expected.
Even so, we persevere. As Jack Nicklaus once said, you miss 100% of the shots you never take. Or wait, was that a hockey quote?
