Scholz & Friends: Print campaign for USM
The USM Haller modular system is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2015. As part of the anniversary celebrations, Scholz & Friends developed the extensive cross-media campaign “project50” for USM. The international print campaign has been running since mid-January.
The six motifs show architecture and design students from Tokyo, New York, Paris, Milan, Karlsruhe and Lausanne in their living or working environment together with a piece of USM Haller furniture. Its use and placement was left up to the students. In authentic statements, they express their thoughts on the design classic. The unusually natural and unvarnished portraits were realized together with the Swiss photographer Lukas Wassmann.
With this atypical appearance for a design furniture manufacturer, a completely new image style was created for USM. Contrary to industry practice, it puts people in their own personal environment in the foreground. The focus is not on the prestige, design or functionality of the piece of furniture, but rather on a deeper, meaningful value. This goes hand in hand with USM's efforts to bring the product closer to the people and, at the same time, to inspire future opinion leaders for the brand. The portraits of the students are closely linked to a cooperation with seven of the most internationally renowned design and architecture universities from the USA, Japan, Germany, England, Italy, Switzerland and France. In the spirit of an open discourse between USM and the opinion makers of the future, students led by their lecturers and a team of curators completely reinterpreted the principle of modularity as part of the cultural project "rethink the modular". In addition, a revealing experiment was conducted at the participating universities, in which students were asked to steal pieces of USM furniture.
The ad copy refers the reader to the digital platform Usm.com/project50which, as content hub, accompanies all measures of the extensive 360° campaign throughout the year (Werbewoche.ch reported).
Responsible at USM U. Schärer Söhne: Alexander Schärer (Chairman), Stéphanie Borge (Group Marketing Director), Deepak Matthews (Digital Marketing Manager), Sandra Schär (PR). Responsible at Scholz & Friends Switzerland: Dan Nessler, Manuela Miksa, Gregor Fitz, Sabine Bremermann, Lukas Frei (creation); Michèle Gutmann, Tanita Bohny, Petra Moser, Tobias Baumann, Martin Samsel (consulting and strategy). Photography: Lukas Wassmann
