From Customer Truth
to Brand Platform

What began as a minor social campaign struck a chord and grew into a multi-year brand platform and the core theme for the industry’s key event, Bauma 2025, and beyond, delivered with a lean, clever production approach.

The way that we interpreted toughness — not steel and specs, but mindset and resolve — strongly resonated with customers in testing. The line “The Tough Choose Bobcat” speaks about customers’ inner strength and the resulting brand choice.

To make the idea instantly recognisable, we also created a simple “stamp”: the Bobcat logo paired with the line “When the Going Gets Tough”. 
It started as a small graphic element, but it quickly became a fan favourite and showed up everywhere from campaign and event branding and social posts to dealer materials and merch.

With the message and story in place, it was time to make campaign videos. To keep it cost-effective, we built a simple production model that still felt big on screen. We shot four “tough conditions” stories in one studio day on green screen (rain, dust, ice, mud), then expanded the world using real Bobcat archive footage from our well-tagged library.

The minimal set-up matched what the research told us people respond to: work that feels real, environments they recognise, and toughness that shows in small human moments, not in forced hero shots. The result was a modular campaign, adaptable for different markets, dealers, and events.

Before this became a full campaign, we put the early ads through proper customer testing with 1:1 video interviews and guided sessions. We didn’t just ask if people “liked it”. We explore what felt true, what felt off, and whether the stories on screen matched their real work.