INNOCEAN, Inno21

INNOCEAN is a global marketing and communication enterprise with 30 offices in 16 countries. It is a hub for creative ideas and bold implementations, often with surprisingly unconventional touchpoints that provide consumers with multisensory brand experiences. The agency’s creative team also developed an offbeat marketing campaign for MUSINSA.

Interview with INNOCEAN, Inno21

Red Dot: The objective of the award-winning campaign was to generate consumer interest in Korea’s leading fashion platform. Why was the level of interest in fashion so low after the pandemic?
INNOCEAN: The pandemic didn’t really make people less interested in fashion. It made them more interested in travel because they had been prevented from travelling for so long. That’s why travel fashions seem to be so important to the younger generation today. We wanted to market that and encourage people to use the MUSINSA fashion platform as part of their travel preparations.

To link the fashion platform to the successful travel platform, you created the MUSINSA Travel T-KET. Can you briefly explain the concept?
Young people love taking Instagrammable fashion photos during their travels. So we decided to take advantage of this by putting MUSINSA ads on the travel app with direct link-outs to the fashion platform, where travellers could look for fashion outfits that meet their needs – outfits that allow them to travel in style. That’s how we came up with the idea for Travel T-KET, the first ever T-shirt that sends you on a trip. We gave the T-shirt a boarding pass design, launched an advertising campaign and gave away free tickets to Bangkok in a competition. An outdoor guerrilla poster promotion featuring the printed T-shirts also met with an enthusiastic response from the target audience.

You chose to use a handwritten font for the Travel T-KET. What was the reason for this?
We wanted to capture that warm and fuzzy feeling that people have when they’re about to embark on a trip. Instead of the regular boarding pass design, we played with the witty idea of the T-shirt becoming a plane ticket. That’s why the campaign text “I can go on a flight with this T-shirt?” was in a handwritten font.

What role did the packaging design play?
Everybody looks forward to the food being served on a flight, so we thought it would be perfect to package the T-shirt in a food container. Reflecting the campaign, it combines travel with fashion. When you open the container, the T-shirt appears. What a great surprise! The mission was to demonstrate that MUSINSA is a brand that always knows how to captivate its clientele.