Stuf Car Care Products

This campaign involved an entire brand development, starting before the company opened. Everything from the logo design, website, advertising and through developing the customer service model was covered.

When we started working on Stuf, we asked ourselves, "Does the world really need another car care line?" In 1965, did the world really need another tennis shoe line? In 1971, did the world need another package delivery company? And, in 1984, did we really need another desktop computer company? Yeah. Well, the world sure doesn't need just another car care products line, but it does need an authentic one. In fact it craves one. One that is true to itself; that never looks to its competition to define who it is. One that has its own vision and acts on it. A company that is entrepreneurial, visionary and as creative as its customers. One that acts like its customers would if they ran it. (Pretty deep, huh?)

The idea of Stuf grew out of a frustration with what was currently on the market. Who was making it. And what really motivated them. It seemed like all the major players were big businesses that had lost sight of their product. And they didn't relate to car folks.

Well the owners of Stuf were all a bunch of car (and motorcycle) nuts. Fanatics actually. They started the company because it's what they wanted to do. Because they were fanatics. But the company had very specific ideas about its products and how to market them. The plan was to make a very limited line of products of very high quality (not twenty-three different versions of wax, shiny wax, really shiny wax and show-car super shiny wax like the others). Stuf stayed away from the retail mega-discount stores too, and put its efforts into the specialty retail shops. Stuf approached the model much like a craft brewed beer: a refined product line in which every bottle was actually hand signed. The persona of the brand was also carefully developed and included every part that the consumer, trade and press touched.

Stuf was a very unique company and was driven to make the best products they could, and to market them with a clear, no hype attitude. The owners own natural attitude. They don't want people just to buy their products, they wanted them to buy their company. When developing the marketing and advertising campaign for Stuf, we wanted to embody the owners own natural attitude.

"People don't read advertising, they read what interests them. Sometimes it's an ad." - Howard Gossage

Well, most advertising really is dull and boring.

The bulk of advertising is just more irritating clutter and noise you have to put up with every day. It blends in with the neighbor's rottweiler barking at the poodle who's trying to dig under the fence. The 178 spam e-mails you just deleted. The kids fighting over who gets to use the computer next. The fax machine endlessly spitting out messages from roofing companies and dentists. And the news broadcast about Ben Bernanke's latest prediction about why the economy isn't yet ready to turn around. It's all distraction.

To make matters worse, most advertising boasts and brags about how great the company thinks it is. It blatantly hammers consumers with messages about why they should buy their product. But they don't care about that. They care about themselves. They care about what's important to themselves, not to the advertiser.

So when we sat down to create the Stuf ad campaign, we knew we wanted to accomplish a few things.

First, we didn't want to make ads that barked at people. That told them how great Stuf's car care products were. Or, how much better Stuf's Carnauba shines than anyone else. Or, show pictures of things reflected in shiny cars. (If you photograph it right, anything can look shiny.) Any company can do that, and many do. Boring.

Second, we wanted the ads to be a conversation between people who love rides. About shared experiences. Like a letter to a friend. We knew we wanted to touch people with the same thoughts that all car nuts have about their rides. And do it in an unusual, funny, maybe irreverent way. It was the conversation that was important. We wanted to get across Stuf's attitude that it's not just the shine, it's what's under the shine that's really important.

And last, we wanted to build relationships based on who Stuf was as a company, not just the bottle of car polish the consumer held in their hand. Because when it comes right down to it, a brand isn't about a product. It's about how people feel about the company that makes the product. It's about who makes it and what they're all about. Nike makes shoes, but they're really all about competition. Crest makes toothpaste, but they're really all about healthy teeth. Stuf makes wax, but we're really all about cars.

View the "Robert In Flames" television commercial: