• by Karl Greenberg , January 16, 2012

The GearWrench line of hand tools is pitching industrial mechanics with a new ad campaign via Raleigh, N.C.-based Baldwin&, which won the account from GearWrench parent company, Apex, N.C.-based Apex Tool Group, LLC.

The new campaign takes the GearWrench brand, which is well known among auto mechanics, into a new area of the B-to-B world, the industrial side of bolt spinning. The company says the new market strategy for the tools, designed for working in tight spaces (thus the auto category) is to "celebrate the end user, the industrial maintenance engineer," per Baldwin& (whose clients include BMWGolf, Burt’s Bees, and Habitat for Humanity). The GearWrench line of ratcheting wrenches sell at stores like Sears, Lowe's, Napa, and Ace Hardware.

The agency says the campaign comprises six dryly humorous full and junior page ads each presenting a GearWrench product, with straight-talk supers in a gritty font. The agency calls it a “no excuses” approach, with an "access-ability" theme and an implicit message that the tools are common-sense innovations that, apparently, nobody has had the common sense to innovate till now. The ads center on straight-ahead photos of the products, with text above and below.

The ad for the Double X Pliers says, “It’ll make your job easier. And by easier, we mean still hard. Just less hard.” The text for the "Indexing Combination Ratcheting Wrench" reads, “Ever tried to fit a ratchet with a 30 degree swing arc in a space with only 5 degrees? Of course, you haven’t. Because you can’t.”

Agency principal David Baldwin tells Marketing Daily that the agency, which has worked with Apex on a project basis around everything from digital to package design, is shepherding the tool brand into new territory with the industrial-engineering pitch.

"Coming into a completely new market, you have to do it in a way that's authentic and solves a problem for these guys," he says of a segment where brands like Stanley's Proto are established. "One thing we are trying to do with this campaign is show that we get it. We are trying to get very 'inside' to talk about things they deal with every day." 

The company is putting the ads in titles like Industrial Equipment News, Industrial Maintenance &Plant Operation, New Equipment Digest and Industrial Supply. The buy runs through September.