Train With Heart

Aligning Mio’s products with various tiers of runners, bikers and swimmers meant immersing ourselves in the portfolio. For several days, our office was crawling with heart rate wristbands. We counted steps. We tracked our health data. Some of us even took up running again. Emboldened by our research, we connected each product feature with the emotional wants and needs of Mio’s audiences, and laid the foundation for more relevant messaging.

Oftentimes MAGNETIC will develop a custom brand persona for our partners – a personification of the brand that gives both clients and creatives a lens through which to think, write, and create. It gets a little ethereal, but damn if it doesn’t help the process. For Mio Global’s brand persona, we conjured up a competitive, intelligent, and intensely motivating brand persona who could identify with dedicated performance athletes.

With a clear understanding of Mio’s brand strengths, a grasp on the challenges ahead, and our athletes segmented into different heats, our race was ready to begin.

While there were plenty of heart rate competitors, no brand did it with more accuracy and precision than Mio’s optical heart rate monitors. By placing “heart” at the center of our brand experience, we could own Mio’s core strength while honoring the emotional fortitude it takes to be a performance athlete. From this core idea, we discovered Mio Global’s True North - "To empower athletes to improve training and performance".

To enliven Mio’s photography assets, we produced multiple product and lifestyle shoots showing hardcore athletes reaching successive heart rate zones. We even had one of our own step into the spotlight. To promote awareness, we built a short-run campaign of paid media placements, still focusing on product but from a performance athlete’s point of view.

To improve sell-through at retail, we redesigned Mio’s packaging with relevant feature-benefit callouts based on audience segmentation.

The concept for Mio’s brand video follows a variety of performance athletes through intense workouts. As the story progresses, MAG’s video team used sound engineering to mimic the beat of their pounding hearts. Along with a custom percussion track and a minimalist VO, the video quickly ramps up to a fever pitch.

We also created a series of individiual product videos to use across Mio’s retailers, the website, YouTube channel, social media, paid placements, tradeshows and assisted sales tools.

Rolling out our Train With Heart mentality meant re-tooling the look, feel, and content of Mio’s entire website, not to mention all the behind-the-scenes optimizations. While MAG’s web developers sweat the details of ecommerce UI and user flows, our content and creative teams whipped copy, imagery, and search terms into shape.

We tapped into Mio’s brand ambassador program to highlight performance athletes tracking their heart rate data. We even developed the Heart Rate Zone Calculator, which helps fitness seekers at all levels to understand and calibrate their specific heart rate levels.

In support of Mio’s ongoing sales initiatives, the MAG team devised a way to engage their audiences before, during, and after trade shows like CES and Interbike. We started by designing a branded booth experience using Mio’s new aesthetic and big bold messages. Requiring a simple, low-cost solution for compiling CRM contacts, we equipped Mio’s booth with a custom iPad app to collect emails and feed visitors with product education.

To educate passersby on the Mio GO app, we created a looping video to run throughout their events. And to keep Mio top-of-mind after the event, we designed an all-new brand brochure as a high-impact handout.

Our clients often ask us how they can create their own digital assets using the look we’ve established. In Mio’s case, we delivered a set of customizable email templates their marketing team can use in any given scenario, from sales promotions to event outreach.

And to cap it off, MAG’s design and content teams deployed a series of web ads with a retargeting strategy that drives traffic back to Mio’s new website.