Client: Back Market
Product: Mobile
Title: Refurbished Tweets
Media: Case
Country: France
Date Of Campaign: 12/04/2019

Background: In 2019, Back Market, the French startup that has become in 5 years the European leader of refurbished products, decided to expand to the American market. This new opportunity to increase the brand’s revenue was a complex challenge as people in America are proud to buy expensive brand-new gadgets (from smartphones to voice assistants) as proof of personal achievement. The category in itself (refurbished products) is perceived as a second-hand market, even if most of the parts are replaced to make the products brand new again.Also, in the USA novelty is a constant advertising argument that cannot be applied to what Back Market sell. We had to find a clever solution to show Back Market as a trendy and cheap alternative to brand new electronic devices. Our brief was simple: getting noticed despite the market perception of what we do, without any media budget.

Idea: Our first thought was to use influencers to value what we sell. Sadly, American global superstars with millions of followers were absurdly out of our budget, asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars to publish a single tweet or an Instagram picture. But we also realised that most of these American celebrities really wanted our products and had already tweeted about that years ago. So, to promote our refurbished products, we decided to refurbish their tweets. We retweeted them as if they were published the day before and sent them the smartphones of their (past) dreams, creating the biggest online influencer campaign ever, for free, without the influencers even knowing it.

Results: All of the following results were made without media investment, through a 100% organic spread of our idea.- We refurbished 311 old tweets from old celebrities, including 2 POTUS (Barack Obama, Donald Trump) dozen of actors, singers, hip hop artists, novelists, TV show presenters, athletes, comic book artists, and even the founder of twitter- A jump from an average of 100 customers per day before the launch on our US website to over 26 000 orders in the first 48 hours. - A global increase of 427% of orders on our website for the month following the launch of our campaign. - 3 different celebrities “involved” during the campaign acknowledged the initiative online after receiving the smartphones of their (past) dreams.