Every brand has something the world has decided isn't cool. The job. The bus. The budget shoe. The second-hand car. The high-vis jacket. The IKEA catalogue. The received wisdom says you work with what you've got — apologise for the uncool truth, bury it in aspirational language, and hope nobody notices. These campaigns didn't hide the uncool thing. They changed what uncool means.
Here are seven creative tactics from the Shift Perception Engine that turned "a liability" into cultural capital.
- Treat It Like a Blockbuster
- Crash a Prestige Context
- Turn the Job Into a Drop
- Make the Catalogue the Content
- Give Everyone the Production Values
- Turn the Safety Gear Into the Fashion Show
- Remove the Label and Let the Product Win
1. Treat It Like a Blockbuster
Take the thing everyone ignores — and produce it like the thing everyone watches.
Epic Bus — Midttrafik, Falkenberg, 2017
The brief: make people consider taking the bus in a market where public transport was seen as dull, inconvenient, and the choice of people with no other options. The reframe: produce a spoof Hollywood action trailer for the local bus service — with a full cinematic treatment, luxury-product-launch energy, the kind of production register reserved for things people actually want. The bus didn't change. The frame around it did. By borrowing the codes of entertainment and spectacle, the campaign repositioned an uncool utility as something worth paying attention to.
The product was always the same bus on the same route. The production values said otherwise. Treat something like a blockbuster and people start watching it like one.
