Sofology and Gogglebox on Channel 4

Campaign Background & Objectives

Sofology's 4 year sponsorship of C4’s Gogglebox is a perfect example of how a partnership can flex and grow in line with changing client business challenges.

Sofology operate in an intensely competitive market defined by high media spends, heavy price discounting, and if truth be told, patchy customer service.

Back in 2013 Sofology wanted to set themselves aside from the competition with a strong trust message and a promise to offer good value all year round rather than relying on crash discounting at sale time. As a small privately owned concern Sofology's budgets were much smaller than their larger competitors.

Gogglebox offered the perfect opportunity to meet Sofology’s brave new business positioning:

Relevance: The show features ordinary families huddled together on their sofas and armchairs doing what most people do -watching and chatting about TV.

Timing: Gogglebox is regularly the most viewed commercial programme at 9pm on a Friday evening, the perfect time to speak to their target market as they at their most receptive, in a relaxed "nesting" frame of mind and just prior to the key sales period of Saturday and Sunday. Running across initially two, growing to 3 series a year GB offered a near “always on” presence.

Scale and stature: Numerous studies have shown that association with key programmes and events confers an enhanced viewer perception of scale, prestige and premium positioning on the sponsoring brand, particularly important to challenger brands such as Sofology.

Trust: Research has shown that association with TV brands increases viewer trust of sponsoring brands. Trust is often built on a big name presenter's equity but in this instance trust is driven by "ordinary" members of the public. The Gogglebox contributors are seen as "people like us" and their quasi endorsement via Gogglebox feels even closer to recommendation by a friend than celebrity endorsement.

Sofology is a dynamic and evolving brand. Working closely with Carat and the client we pre planned each burst of activity months in advance to ensure success.

Execution & Exploitation

Year 1

The key objective at the start was to increase brand recognition of Sofaworks (having changed name from CSL some three months earlier). To maximise the impact we worked closely with creative agency TBWA to ensure that the sponsorship creative complemented their other marketing activity. To this end the first credits featured a family at home watching TV joined by a new family member, Neal the Sofaworks sloth, front and centre on a Sofaworks sofa. To add a further layer of connection, Craig Cash, Gogglebox's narrator also provided the v/o for the credits and their advertising.

Year 1 ended with a high for both parties, Sofaworks saw a positive business impact on all KPIs. Viewers were 5 times as likely as non-viewers at the end of this period, to recommend Sofaworks to friends, and talk about the brand. They committed to a second year at a vastly increased investment.

Year 2

An unexpected issue arose in year 2. Due to a legal action Sofaworks had to change their name to Sofology. Normally this would mean a back to the beginning approach but we worked closely with the creative agency TBWA to smooth the transition to the new company name whilst still retaining the positive brand equity built in year 1.

In the transitional period we retained the Sofaworks core brand but introduced the new name by branding the credits "Sofology from Sofaworks". This built awareness of the new name and when the switch happened viewers of the programme were double non-viewers in terms of new brand awareness.

Year 3

Year 1 and 2 saw growths in all key metrics awareness, trust, and most importantly purchase intent. Now was the time to build upon that equity and give the viewers a deeper knowledge of the brand by highlighting individual products and ranges as the stars of the sponsorship.

Year 4

All change again. A new Marketing Director, new creative agency, and a new media agency heralding a shift to a much more premium and contemporary feel with the introduction of Owen Wilson as the brand spokesperson.
Again we worked closely with the agency and client to build the transition which essentially saw Owen in his ‘everyday guy’ persona kicking off his boots and sprawling out on his sofa in front of the TV. This served to articulate that even big Hollywood starts feel the relief of sitting on their sofa at home.

Activation

With the on-screen sponsorship producing amazing results the challenge was to turbo charge the campaign with an equally strong in-store, social and digital activation.

We created the Gogglebooth, an instore replication of the TV experience where customers could sit as a family and review key Gogglebox moments. The interaction was recorded and emailed on to the customers to share on social media with friends tapping in to the programmes massive social presence. The Gogglebooth toured Sofaworks stores around the UK with invitations being issued through Sofology’s CRM database to increase footfall.

In addition the Gogglebox families attended key store events such as opening, revamp and new collection launches generating huge local press buzz.

ISPON- Sofology led the way within their industry in shifting sales away from Bricks and Mortar stores to more eCommerce and they challenged us to replicate this leadership. We achieved this by introducing an entirely new promotional format called iSpon. This is an interactive sponsorship credit that allows the user to directly requests samples, downloads brochures ,create social links, access video and image galleries, find local stores, check prices, spec your own sofa and buy on line. This was hugely successful driving propensity to visit the website by 14% and delivering an engagement rate of 1.57%. This is thirty times the 2017 DoubleClick display benchmark, and over double the standard Ch4 VOD average CTR.

Outcome & Evaluation

Despite, and perhaps because of the twists and turns in the business objectives, positioning and personnel this sponsorship has been the predominant media channel and the one constant throughout the 4 years during which time:

- Purchase intent was driven up by 15%

- Spontaneous Brand Awareness by 14%

- Prompted awareness UP by 31%

Shifted brand perception metrics significantly in the following key areas; Quality products, good service, trustworthy, stylish, great value and easy to use website.

Research is all well and good but the proof of the pudding is in profits which have risen across the course of the sponsorship making Sofology so attractive that Jason the owner operator of Sofology was made a too good to refuse multi-million £ offer to sell to market leaders DFS. Chief Marketing Operator Andy Leadbetter said “We can see a definite pattern over the years of increase in web traffic during transmission from anywhere between a third to more than double. In particular the 10th series launch of our Sofology idents featuring Owen Wilson prompted our largest spike in traffic to date at that time slot. On the back of this we have seen the success of the featured sofa Linara immediately become one of our best selling sofa ranges.”

Jason said: “The sponsorship of Gogglebox was transformative for Sofaworks, and latterly greatly helped the impact of the launch of the Sofology brand. We established an “always on” approach with an upmarket audience, within a relevant, appealing context and saw the benefits of that partnership in terms of achieving brand awareness, very quickly. Over the years it has proved a very successful platform and association for our brand.”

Sofology Ispon Unit

Research source IFF 2014-2017