• by Aaron Baar , October 25, 2011

A biologist studying shark behavior, an expedition team to the South Pole, a volunteer firerighter and an explorer rowing solo across the Pacific Ocean are out to show the rest of the world how durable labels from Brother International Corp. (yes, the things one puts on file folders and cupboards around the home and office) can be.

Brother, maker of P-touch label maker, has enlisted seven “Extreme Office Ambassadors” to showcase exactly how durable the labels are in extreme work environments. The idea is that if the labels can survive some of the harshest environments, they can certainly handle regular office work.

“One of the things about P-touch that’s the [differentiator] of our category is that we have durable laminated labels,” Linda Sanford, director of marketing for Brother Electronic Stationery Products, tells Marketing Daily. “We wanted to design a campaign that talks to the durability and sets us apart from everyone else.”

Over the next six months, the so-called Extreme Office Test Team will use the labels in their working environments, posting videos and usage of the P-touch labels to a dedicated Web site, www.ptouchtough.com.  In addition to the marine biologist, ocean explorer, firefighter and South Pole expedition, other extreme labelers will include a cross-country road-trip, solar astronomer and an adventurer crossing the Danakil Desert on foot. While the company is reasonably certain the labels will fare well over the six-month program, Sanford says she’s eager to see how they are used.

“We’ve put these [labels] through controlled situations in our own environment, so we feel pretty confident they’ll hold up under these extreme conditions,” she says. “But that’s kind of the beauty of the campaign because we don’t know how these ambassadors are going to use them.”

The initiative will be supported through television advertising (with a spot depicting how the labels are used in a firehouse -- although not the one to be depicted in the videos), as well as digital banner ads and social media outreach, all directing consumers to the ptouchtough.com Web site. The Web site will also profile mom and dad bloggers who have put the labels through their own rigorous household tests. The varied uses that many of these bloggers (as well as office workers around the country) have used the label makers for inspired the idea for the campaign, Sanford says.

“Although we think of labels for file folders most of the time,” she says, “what we find in an office is it’s not just for file folders -- they’re also used as signage around offices.”