Sheaffer’s New Website Really Worx

By Grant Copeland
The Worx Group

There are many fine resources out there for creatives and marketing professionals to see great work by great agencies for great clients. What I’ve always longed for is to be able to get special insight on the project and see how the exact process worked — how the strategy was built, where the creative sparks came from, what roadblocks altered the process, and so on. Well, maybe I can put the first foot forward and show other creatives the process from my own experience.

Without further ado, I am about to take you behind the scenes of a recent project I led at The Worx Group, where I am the Creative Director. What appears at first glance like another web experience from a major brand is really a hard-earned collaboration between client and agency which shows the pivotal role that strategic thinking and functional execution play in creative, and on the battle for consumer mindshare and industry marketshare.

I said without further ado, didn’t I? OK, here goes. Behind the scenes of the Sheaffer website: the strategies, the sketches, the whole swingin’ thing!

Sheaffer has long been regarded as one of the true innovators in the writing instrument category. Your father or grandfather may have mentioned this brand to you, or may have given you one of their beautiful pens. This was part of the “problem” as we began discussions with Sheaffer about their website. You see, Sheaffer has seen declining market share over the past few decades, losing traction to competition in the market from aggressive brands like Mont Blanc, Cross and Waterman. While other brands broadened their demographic, Sheaffer’s focus in many ways remained on business executives who were now either retired or about to step out of the working world.

The Worx Group was called in by Sheaffer to — as the original scope detailed — “reskin” their current site. I was intrigued by the request from the first meeting, since I believed there had to be more to the scope than just an aesthetic refresh. We knew their demographic was the mature executive or retiree, and we unearthed more confirmation that the brand was doing very little to speak to a younger executive. We also found that the brand had never targeted females at any level. In my eyes, this was repositioning opportunity number one.

The Sheaffer website as it looked when we were contracted.

Further investigation into their current site revealed something else: this was a consumer-facing brand, a B-to-C brand, that looked and acted like a business-to-business brand. The current site made the assumption that you were already interested in Sheaffer pens and were simply ready to decide which pen you wanted to purchase. The site had almost no emotive content to start a dialogue with the consumer. Herein lied repositioning opportunity number two.

Armed with these strategic insights, we met with the Marketing and Sales Director of Sheaffer and asked him if he would allow us to be frank. He agreed (thank you Chris — more clients should be as receptive to honest brand feedback as you were). I detailed to him how the site experience, and the brand at large, was not capitalizing on some basic opportunities to steal mindshare.

My thoughts included a few central points:

1. The brand needed to speak to both the current demographic and the younger executive, both male and female. We didn’t want to lose the loyal consumer or jeopardize positive brand equity for the sake of cracking new ground with a broader demographic.
2. We needed to engrain a more “campaignable” idea within the site — a simple, “big” theme that would resonate with all audiences.
3. The site needed to start at the beginning of the sales process by engaging the audience, then inspiring them, and finally providing the impetus to buy via specific product info.
4. The product needed to speak to the consumer’s lifestyle; we asked, “why can’t people see Sheaffer pens in the same way that they view other accessories, like clothes, shoes or bags?”
5. The brand needed to be more visceral and tell its story more powerfully.

An example of early strategic sketches.

With the client’s buy-in on our perspective, we dove into concepts. The challenge was to translate these philosophical ideas into functional and creative elements on the site. Speaking to a wider demographic was easy; we would show the demographic “themselves” — in lifestyle situations that viewers could immediately identify with. We thought a strong positioning idea was to play off of Sheaffer’s tagline, “The Signature Pen Since 1913.” I was intrigued by the duplicity in the word “signature” — it connoted both a literal written signature, but also a defining attribute of the person using the pen, like a signature hairstyle or signature saying. From that I built the “I Have a Signature” platform, an idea that would pervade the site experience. The theme not only seemed to work for the project at hand, but also has so many viral and long-term promotional possibilities.

Basic navigation and “I Have a Signature” positioning.

We wanted the consumer to have more insight into Sheaffer’s diverse pen lines, and to find a way to connect the lines to the true style of each viewer. One of our team members provided the initial spark, saying “If I wanted to get myself a pen, or my husband, where would I even start?” In reaction to this, the client provided a full matrix of audience attributes that their international sales force used to sell each line of pen. This insight was strategic gold, and got me thinking that we should build an interactive “Signature Style Selector” where the viewer could answer simple questions about their business roles and style interests, and get one or more recommendations back about which pens to look at, with direct links to specific product information.

“Signature Style Selector” concept and Flash functionality matrix.

To engage the audience more viscerally and offer another messaging avenue for the brand, we recommended telling more stories. Not stories about pens, but stories inspired by actual letters Sheaffer had received over the years about their pens being a part of someone’s amazing life story. In reading some of these letters, I constructed the idea of doing multimedia pieces that play like mini-brand movies on the site, called “Signature Stories.”

We presented three concepts for the site. The first attempted to evolve the site by clearly bridging the generational gap of the older and younger demographic with a focus on the product; the second took a bold approach to the demographic with an emphasis on lifestyle; the third placed a focus on the timeless appeal of the product lines and on functional brand building elements.

Concept 1: A product-focused evolution.

Concept 2: Emphasize the younger demographic.

Concept 3: Simple and functional.

While all three concepts were very well received (mainly because we had already built the strategy for the site, which eliminated many questions the client may have had about aesthetic or design choices), the client was most intrigued by the second concept. The client’s one request was to make the concept “less busy and more simplified.” Off we went into a few more explorations which yielded the final layout.

Truth be told, the main photo of the young executive was actually one of our account managers shot just for the concept outside in our office parking lot. But the client loved the shot so much that we did further editing to put her into a more urban setting and used it in the final site.

Concept presentation photo and final photo.

Like any project, our team was met with creative challenges throughout the process. For example, for our product page concepts we put the pens on a faux-glass surface, which the client loved. But when we had to build out the actual site, we had to create this effect — across several hundred products — from an image library with different shots, sizes and backgrounds for each pen. Well, thanks to writing a custom Photoshop action, this overwhelming task took only a few hours (with some troubleshooting, of course). On the Signature Stories, we used a combination of stock photos and my personal family photos, with voiceover talent from the agency to create them quickly and effectively. And, the new site was originally built by our team with a full e-commerce backend, which had to be pulled at the last minute due to logistics issues with the client’s third-party fulfillment entity.

The new site experience has repositioned Sheaffer as both a historically-powerful brand and a modern innovator. It creates a brand experience that is much more scalable. And, it delivers functional solutions and engaging content simply and creatively, creating more ways to expedite the consumer buying process.

At the time of the launch, the Marketing and Sales Director of Sheaffer had this to say: “Not only will The Worx Group’s strategy for this site rejuvenate the Sheaffer brand, but it will redefine how all other sites in the industry are viewed.”

sheaffer.com
theworxgroup.com

Grant Copeland is the Vice President of Design and Creative Director at The Worx Group, a Prospect-based integrated marketing agency. His work has won numerous regional and national awards in categories including branding, print, web, multimedia and packaging, for clients such as AT&T, FedEx, IBM, Holiday Inn and ESPN. Copeland was named by Graphic Design USA magazine as one of its “People to Watch” in 2006.