What you need to know:

• Stokes family majority-owned Coates has taken the wrappers off a bold new integrated brand campaign to coincide with its 140-year anniversary that’s anything but usual for the business.  
• Featuring a new jingle and cast of animated characters that have assumed the personas of both its key customers plus value proposition, GM of marketing and communications, Sheridan Jones, says being brave with the creative was key if the business is to gain the talkability and cutthrough it needs to build better awareness of its end-to-end services offering, not just its traditional equipment hire proposition.
• Selling in the proposition took a solid grounding in research plus a progressive CEO and board who recognised the need to shake things up – and also got just how impactful other famous Aussie brand jingles, such as ‘I feel like a Tooheys’ and ‘BCFing fun’ have been for the brands that invested in them.
• The new brand campaign comes four years after Coates first dropped ‘Hire’ from its name and crafted a new brand strategy based around the concept of ‘equipped for anything’. Yet Covid along with macro conditions have made it difficult to land the proposition, admits Jones, who says “We haven’t truly owned ‘equip for anything’, and we don’t have that differentiation in market. So we really needed to assert ourselves in that way”.
• Jones is absolutely looking to drive awareness and consideration to drive revenue, increase that ownership of ‘equip for anything’, and cement Coates’ position as a dominator brand in market.

Earlier this month, Stokes family majority-owned construction solutions company, Coates, took the wrappers off a fresh integrated brand campaign, ‘Why don’t you just Coates it?’.

Complete with new jingle and a cast of customer persona-driven, singing animated characters, the campaign is unabashedly about building talkability and grabbing attention so the brand can land the message that it’s not just an equipment hire services, but offers end-to-end project management offerings.

The campaign also coincides with the company 140^th anniversary – the company was started back in 1885 by John Coates to support Victoria’s burgeoning gold-rush towns. Since 2017, the group has been 100 per cent owned by Seven Group Holdings and counts Kerry Stokes’ son, Ryan Stokes, as chairman. Today, it has more than 2,000 employees across a 145-branch network nationally and nearly 16,000 customers extending from traffic management and temporary works to construction, maintenance, power and HVAC and events. In FY24, Coates reported revenue of $1.1 billion and EBIT of $372 million, up 9 per cent year-on-year. The Stokes family owns 51 per cent of SGH.

The new integrated campaign is now running across radio, out-of-home, social and digital channels and is led by a 30-second brand campaign video. It’s running in two media bursts, with a second phase planned later this year.

Notably, it’s taking bold creative approach – which raised a few eyebrows internally – but will be critical if Coates is to become top of mind for more than just hire equipment, says group manager of marketing and communications, Sheridan Jones.

“It was one of my more nerve-wracking moments. I love being creative, and I like pushing boundaries and being different, but obviously you’ve got to take everyone on the journey with you,” she tells Mi3. “I think what helped us sell the concept was the amount of research and the robust strategy we had behind the campaign – that really supported the approach we wanted to take. Without a doubt, the jingle was sold.

“Think of those brands that have jingles still running today, whether it’s ‘I feel like a Tooheys’, or ‘BCFing fun’ – all those jingles are still alive and well in the market, and there is a little bit of space in the market at the moment where there isn’t really a new jingle. So we felt that could be a winner.”

The creative decision to bring the equipment to life as animated characters is also about exploring a fun, but memorable approach. Connecting the dots through to the customer, each of the new animated equipment characters has been designed with a particular persona in mind, along with an ascribed Coates value, all articulated in their own bios. Sky the Scissor Lift, for example, is described as ‘a realist, and a high performer who takes her job seriously’ and who exhibits the value of ‘be our best’. The struts choir, meanwhile, is about working as one team ‘to provide both physical and emotional support onsite while making every product sing’, and exhibits the value of ‘be one team’. 

“When you’re driving new ideas creatively, there’s always going to be those differences of opinions. People like it, may not like it or don’t know how they feel about it,” Jones comments. “But what we’re finding is it creates talkability, and that’s what we want. We want people to talk about Coates, and that’s what’s happening. One week into the campaign, it’s absolutely taking that effect.

“I’m very thankful we’ve got a very forward-thinking CEO, Murray Vitlich, who is very open minded, but also in our chairman and board. It was something they really were quite blown away by and see as a step forward for the brand. They recognised it was something that could potentially really cut through.”

The business challenge behind the brand campaign

The big brand challenges Jones needed to address is what exactly Coates is known for. Up until 2021, the lion’s share of focus was on equipment hire – it was part of the company’s name up until ‘hire’ was dropped from the brand lock-up in 2021. Since then, the company has been expanding its suite of engineering, industrial, power and HVAC solutions. For example, for the West Gate Tunnel project in Victoria, Coates supplied over 1000 pieces of equipment and designed systems for shoring, water management and temporary power and cooling.

As the 140-year milestone birthday loomed, it was evident the company needed to better embed the Coates value proposition, ‘equipped for anything’, which it had worked so hard to crystallise and launch in 2021. Four years on, the tagline and value proposition basically hadn’t stuck.

“We find every year, when we do our own brand research, that we are still known as a hire company,” Jones explains. “We haven’t truly owned ‘equipped for anything’, and we don’t have that differentiation in market. So we really needed to assert ourselves in that way.

“I don’t think we’ve truly extracted everything we want to achieve out of being ‘equipped for anything’.”

Jones attributes this in part to market conditions. Like many companies, Coates and its customers have had to manage through the Covid pandemic and macro challenges such as labour shortages, inflation and stymied or delayed construction projects.

“We’re always in the background, synonymous with heavy industry and construction – everyone there knows who we are and that we stand for a modern and progressive organisation. Even though we’re 140 years old, we continue to change, innovate and evolve. So we really wanted to bring to life a campaign that connected with our customers, and connected with the community, but also bring some fun and personality back to the brand.”

Jones admits to a two-year cultural change journey to get to this point. “We have a diverse workforce, plus our seasoned professionals that are really the foundation of what we are. Then we’ve got new the new generation coming in. So it’s taken a while for that to take effect and for people to really embrace Coates. I won’t lie, that’s taken time,” she says.

“But what I’m really excited about with this particular brand campaign is for the first time we’ve also taken the opportunity to create compelling EVP, and we’ve done that in conjunction with the brand work.”

Launching on 2 April, the EVP is ‘we’ve got your back’ and comes off the back of 12 months’ worth of research.

“We haven’t just created this overnight. We’ve done a lot of research, we’ve put a lot of strategy around our approach to the new brand campaign, as much as we have to the new EVP, so it’s actually aligned,” says Jones.

“We did a lot of internal engagement around the launch of the brand campaign, first and foremost, before it went to market. We’ve had everything you can imagine. Everybody absolutely loves the jingle. We know the campaign can be a bit polarising, and some people won’t like it, others do. But what we want is talkability, and we want it to be memorable. That’s what we’re achieving, which is awesome. So we’re pretty excited by the results so far. But there’s definitely a groundswell internally around bringing fun and personality back to the brand. That’s been the best outcome so far.”

Campaign credentials and planning

The new campaign was created with Abel, Coates’ creative agency of record for the past two years. Sound house, Sonar, which also created the ‘I feel like a Toohey’s’ tune created the new Coates jingle, while animation was done by Jono Chong at Dropbear, with production overseen by director, Stef Smith.

In terms of media scheduling, Coates is going hard on radio. “We need to create an ear worm, and we want that flooding the airways and everybody’s singing along with Coates. It is catchy and we have a lot of people saying to us they can’t get it out of their heads,” Jones says.

“For the second burst, we will reassess how it’s all performed, then we’ll look to explore other channels. We did think about other new channels, but because we want to be really targeted with this burst, we don’t want to waste the investment and make sure it really cuts through. We’re really being very targeted in what we what we have to do this time round.”

TikTok is one of those yet-to-be-embarked on channels. “We still want to explore it, and we still will do that, but we just want to really focus on embedding the jingle and embedding the campaign as it is today, then reviewing how that’s performed and adjusting for the next burst,” says Jones.

Jones is “absolutely looking to drive awareness and consideration to drive revenue”. “We also want to increase that ownership of ‘equip for anything’ – it’s a big driver for us internally and externally,” she says.  

“A year ago, we managed to move the brand from a leading brand to a dominator brand. That was a massive step for us across our sector. We really want to take it further and cement our position as the dominator brand. We have campaign metrics being measured at the moment and we’ll look at how we’ve fared with that over the next couple of months.”

Outside of the campaign work, Coates is running customer events through the year for its 140-year anniversary, as well as internally for staff, including a big bash in April and employee barbeques.

“It’s amazing being 140 years old and working for an organisation that still continues to evolve and change to meet market needs and the needs of our customers,” concludes Jones.