KitchenAid

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Year:

2024

Organization:

WoW Studios @ Whirlpool

Services:

Business Transformation,
Brand Strategy,
Global Creative Platform,
Creative Strategy

The entire kitchen appliance industry had fallen into a classic economic trap: they assumed people hated being in the kitchen. Every competitor was locked in an absurd engineering race to sell speed and convenience - getting people out of the room as fast as possible. But optimizing for speed is a bit like making a train journey faster rather than making the train ride more pleasant; it misses the fundamental human psychology. Rushing gets you full, but it leaves you completely unfulfilled. KitchenAid’s brand equity wasn't built on saving three minutes on a weeknight; it was built on emotional resonance and human memory. We helped them pivot from an efficiency play to a behavioral one - repositioning the brand around inspiring a life lived "hands-on". Instead of competing to save people time, KitchenAid gained a monopoly on giving them a reason to stay, manifesting as the “Make More Than Meals” creative platform.

Once you apply this behavioral lens, the espresso category looks utterly ridiculous. It’s dominated by cold, stainless-steel status symbols, pretentious celebrity endorsements, and the mild psychological torture of cafe tip screens. Instead of selling another overly complex piece of kitchen gadgetry, we used KitchenAid’s warm, approachable authority to reframe coffee making as a delightful, grounding daily ritual - a moment to pause rather than a task to accelerate.

We took the exact same counter-intuitive thinking to dishwashers. Engineers love to compete on technical specifications, but consumers don't buy decibel ratings; they buy emotional outcomes. Searching through customer reviews, we found an extraordinary anomaly: people genuinely loved their KitchenAid dishwashers, specifically praising the racks. Rather than shouting about features, we leaned into that irrational human joy - converting a customer’s review into an original love song and music video. By swapping cold functional claims for genuine human emotion, "Love the Racks" flipped the category rules entirely, taking KitchenAid from the #4 position to the #1 preferred dishwasher brand.