Unboxing the brief

For over forty years, Pelican has been known commercially as the industry standard in equipment protection. No matter what the challenge or conditions, Pelican always protects your gear.

The business was looking to grow its brand, taking it into completely new territory for the company. Having established an unmatched reputation in non-consumer circles (such as profession- al photography and film) it made sense to replicate this elsewhere.

However, despite their superior product offering, as well as a range of innovative, lifestyle products already available to buy, the levels of consumer brand recognition required simply weren't there.

We needed to understand why...

Carrying out a full audience and competitor audit, we analyzed how the existing brand was being perceived and why. This offered four key areas for consideration to drive our creative and strategic direction. Creating a culture with a more meaningful story.

1. Marketing Culture

Despite their incredible heritage and reputation, Pelican possessed limited organisational understanding of how to leverage brand storytelling and had barely any of the tools and assets in place required to do so. We therefore needed to support their team (from top to bottom) in terms of developing a consumer market- ing culture.

2. Category Trends

With so many copycat military-grade products in the market, Pelican’s underdeveloped lifestyle messaging was being drowned out by more effectively marketed, consumer-savvy brands. It was vital therefore that we identified Pelican’s true brand DNA and tell a clearer, more meaningful story.

3. Audience Insight

Pelican hadn’t identified what today’s diverse and influential outdoors consum- ers really expected from a lifestyle brand. We knew this meant they needed to rationalise their product purpose more clearly, and present themselves in increasingly multi-channel, lifestyle orientated ways.

4. Price-Point

Due to the incredible technical quality of Pelican products, their manufacturing processes are expensive, meaning the price-point of their products would always remain relatively high. This meant attracting the right kind of consumer was essential, one that was unafraid to invest in owning the best.