Merrell Case Study
BACKGROUND:
Merrell wanted to drive cultural relevance and buzz within London’s fitness and exploration communities, focusing on brand awareness among outdoor enthusiasts, cyclists, and active urban consumers.
Through Forest, Merrell successfully launched a sustainable, outdoor-first mobility campaign that engaged audiences contextually, reaching them in moments of movement, discovery, and activity rather than passive media consumption.
The partnership hit every corner of a 360-marketing campaign; physical branding moving across the city, support existing Out-of-Home, onhand event presence for PR moments, and scalable exposure through in-app and social.
THE CAMPAIGN:
In order to maximise Merrell’s presence in North London, like King’s Cross, Waterloo, and Finsbury Park, they utilised Forest’s unique ability to amplify existing Out of Home spend through strategic fleet deployment. The physical branding on our fleet complimented the cross-campaign imagery, extended through in-app placements.
Forest used tried and tested means of engaging our riders with an exciting competition where everyone that rode a branded Merrell bike was automatically entered into a draw to win a pair of the Hero Product of the campaign: Merrell Moab Speed 2s.
In addition, we offered on hand support for their primary influencer event, deploying branded and fully wrapped bikes, adding an additional level of excitement to the campaign and creating a louder buzz around Merrell’s presence across London.
IMPACT:
Every element of the campaign was driving attention, conversation, and awareness back to Merrell’s Outside in the City campaign. The social collaboration, physical branding, digital presence, and adhoc support delivered incredible engagement above industry standard!
106,137 trips were taken on branded bikes, with a peak of over +3.2% CTR on our Video reward Ads. Journey Ads and Virtual Bikes bolstered too, delivering over +17.5 million impressions and saw measurable traffic impact through brand uplift. Combined to ultimately deliver on Merrell’s goal; we saw brand recognition improve by 14.4% from the start to the end of the campaign. This is a meaningful shift away from Merrell being seen purely as a purist hiking brand and towards a more versatile, everyday-wearable on to the ICP, central London audience.