“Mai Dep Nha Sang” is a disruptive campaign, conducted by NS Bluescope Vietnam & Vietwind Group, for spreading modern and preeminent architectures to Vietnamese rural houses. This campaign aims to consolidate Bluescope Zacs’s brand position as a recommendation brand from Vietnamese construction contractors & architects. Besides, the company also seeks to link the marketing campaign with their ecosystem, which is a mobile application for contractors and Zacs agents nationwide that Vietwind had built before.

CONTEXT

With the worldwide fluctuation of the steel industry, the year 2018 was considered as a challenging year for Vietnamese businesses in the industry. From a competitive perspective, the brand Bluescope Zacs confronted not only the long-standing traditional competitors (e.g., Ton Dong A & Ton Hoa Sen) but also other strong new entries (e.g., Ton Hoa Phat).

While the game was being significant unbalance, regarding the company’s market shares & resources for marketing in comparison with its competitors, NS Bluescope was struggling in finding a breakthrough idea that could open their avenue and change the game.

UNDERSTANDING

After considering the situation, Vietwind Group researched Bluescope Zacs’s target customers by using a survey approach. From this research, Vietwind found that there were 90% of Bluescope Zacs’s customers living in the countryside of Vietnam. Those customers have limited knowledge of modern materials and architectures due to the accessibility to architects.

On the other hand, construction contractors are typically responsible for consulting the architectural design of rural houses based on their experience and online samples. The houses in these areas, consequently, have the inappropriate architecture in terms of local culture and construction materials.

BRAND COMMUNITY STRATEGY & THE BIG IDEA

Understanding the core issues of Bluescope Zacs as well as the urgency in the renewal of the Vietnamese countryside, Vietwind Group proposed a brand community strategy to inspire Vietnamese architects & create a spreading effect of the community to optimize the company budget in comparison with their competitors.

Step 1: Building “Mai Dep Nha Sang” forum and a system of integrated marketing channels

The brief idea is to build a forum where house owners could find their proper designs for applying to their houses without further efforts. On the other hand, architects who want to contribute to the community could publish their design samples on this forum, which is also an effective way to get feedback and learn from other experts. To improve the audience experience while they access the website, Vietwind suggested the ideas of advisory activities, which are listed below:

• 24/7 virtual assistant
• House visiting with 360-​​degree perspective
• Feng shui consultation
• Price consultation
• Changing the roof color according to the actual material
• Detailed construction drawings
• Consulting the application of modern construction techniques to rural architecture
• Exclusive articles from leading Vietnamese architectural experts
• Connecting with construction contractors

The integrated communication channels which supported “Mai Dep Nha Sang” included:

• Website: http://maidepnhasang.vn/
• YouTube channel
• Facebook fanpage
• Zalo fanpage

Rural architecture and housing have always been a special concern of the Vietnamese government and architects, but there has not been any iconic program that achieved inspiring spillover effects for Architects nationwide to participate.

After being completed and achieved good effect, the forum Mai Dep Nha Sang immediately connected with the Vietnam Association of Architects and agencies of more than 20 provinces to organize an architectural design competition: Join hands for the renovation of Vietnam’s rural houses.

Step 2 – A competition for architectural design “Join hands for the renovation of Vietnam’s rural houses”.

While the expenditure to convince an architect is considered high, this competition is the next step of our brand community strategy, which aims to optimize NS Bluescope’s budget for marketing activities.

The competition seeks to attract public attention to the website & fanpage as well as to build a rural housing library, which would be used to display on the forum.

The main activities of the contest were:

• The first round of examination, operated in Vung Tau, comes with the National Youth Festival 2019, with the participation of 1500 young architects.
• Comment and vote online on the website – 2 weeks (from 11st May to 25th May 2019).
• Announcement and award ceremony in Hanoi on 14th June 2019, which attracted more than 120 architects & university students with about 250 visitors for the exam exhibition in Vietnam Architects Hall.

The campaign uses reputable major newspapers & media, which have significant impacts on the architecture community, and enlists the support of relevant Vietnamese agencies to create a widespread effect.

ACHIEVEMENTS

The campaign helped NS Bluescope achieve the initial goals, which are building a library, connecting the brand with the public, architects, and construction contractors. Furthermore, the campaign not only consolidated the Bluescope Zacs image but also showed their social responsibility to the public. The particular statics are indicated below:

• Reached the largest number of participants ever, which is 200 exams.
• Spread to 21 provinces.
• Accessed to 2500 architects directly via local activities as well as 6000 targets per week indirectly via online advertising & email marketing.
• Facebook fanpage reached 10,000 followers during the competition.
• Received 50,000 votes on the website.
• The keyword “cuoc thi thiet ke kien truc” (i.e. architectural design competition) became one of the top google search results.
• Attracted 300,000 traffics to the website landing page.
• 76 news articles & 6 televisions news about the contest were written.

Read more about Vietwind Group.