HORNBACH has a history of creating communication pieces that make customers feel heard and understood. This time: Their customers almost crazy, childlike joy over springtime.

Why do we face more smiling faces in spring? Why is love in the air? Why are our moods up? To understand and portrait those feeling, it was important to understand what the wintertime period of forced idleness feels like for those, who wants to be active the most.

Passionate about their gardens and outside plants and plans, those adults all feel like trapped in winter. They experience the winterblues as an especially cruel time. And the winter depressions and general mental health declining in the grey months of winter is not an inkling, but factual.

After a long and grey winter, HORNBACH needed to rekindle the passion for gardening in their customers.

But instead of forgetting what’s behind us, HORNBACH used the strain of the winter season as an explanation for the campaigns core idea: Exuberant childlike joy for the spring season. And the healthy dose of madness that comes with it.

The task was to really bond and click with the hearts and minds of gardening fans. A challenge, as HORNBACH needs to get this joy across year after year, pumping up their customers for a new round of spending time and money on their homes and gardens. In times of turmoil and uncertainty, where optimism wavers, reclaiming that playful joy has never been more crucial.

HORNBACH reminds gardeners of the emotional impact of spring season, freeing us from the tight, cold grip of winter. Thus, fraternizing again with their most important client base: Passionate DIYers and gardeners.

By really understanding of what the forced break of winter time means to them, and in conclusion, how much of a relief spring is. A challenge, as HORNBACH needs to get this joy across year after year, pumping up their customers for a new round of spending time and money on their homes and gardens.

But to urge people to create things with their bare hands it would be nonsensical for HORNBACH to create digital CG Worlds and flash people with grandiose but ultimately unreal creations. So then how to create a childlike, yet not absurd scenery, house interiors that feel like imprisoned fever-dreams, and foot-chase-scenes that go after a larger-than-life Toy truck, tall as a house? The answer is to built it all by hand. In painstakingly detail.

The intricate sets and empathetic story, the wrestle between moody desolation and joyful outburst, as well as the madness of a larger-than-life DIY-Truck – all those show the deep love and devotion for meticulously handcrafted visuals and emotional storytelling of all minds involved.

The results prove the campaign to be a success. Numbers aside, a flood of comments and interactions with viewers confirm, this is exactly how they felt like. Feeling understood and challenged, viewers vowed to now jump on it and make this the best spring ever.

The campaign succeeded across the entire funnel, driving a boost in consideration, a surge in purchase intent and a significant rise in brand reputation.