The Accidental Genius of Bunnings' DIY Videos
Let’s talk about the sleeper hit of New Zealand’s marketing world: the grainy, endearingly awkward charm of Bunnings’ DIY videos. They’re shot like your uncle trying to make a YouTube channel and edited with the finesse of a bog-standard PowerPoint. Are they slick? Not remotely. Are they strangely hypnotic? Absolutely.
Here’s the twist: in an industry addicted to polish and perfectly-lit influencers, Bunnings stumbled across a kind of anti-glamour that works. These clips – and yes, I’ve watched more than I dare count – do something refreshing. They let the product do the heavy lifting. No soaring music. No lifestyle vignettes. Just a bloke, a boot-full of soil, and the quiet hum of a suburban afternoon. In a digital landscape stuffed with try-hard tutorials, their videos feel like a cuppa with your neighbour. There’s a trustworthiness in their plainness. You don’t expect a hard sell, and none comes.
It made me wonder: are we overproducing ourselves into oblivion? We keep layering and polishing until consumers can’t see the wood for the branding. Meanwhile, the Bunnings model whispers a kind of magic. Just show up. Show it working. Speak like a human who’d actually use the thing. It’s not anti-marketing. It’s marketing that remembers how people actually behave.
There’s a lesson here for New Zealand marketers buried under decks of strategy slides and tone-of-voice docs. Drop the gloss now and then. The audience is smarter than you think. And sometimes, a paintbrush and a bit of gravel go further than a cinematic ad ever could.
Here’s the twist: in an industry addicted to polish and perfectly-lit influencers, Bunnings stumbled across a kind of anti-glamour that works. These clips – and yes, I’ve watched more than I dare count – do something refreshing. They let the product do the heavy lifting. No soaring music. No lifestyle vignettes. Just a bloke, a boot-full of soil, and the quiet hum of a suburban afternoon. In a digital landscape stuffed with try-hard tutorials, their videos feel like a cuppa with your neighbour. There’s a trustworthiness in their plainness. You don’t expect a hard sell, and none comes.
It made me wonder: are we overproducing ourselves into oblivion? We keep layering and polishing until consumers can’t see the wood for the branding. Meanwhile, the Bunnings model whispers a kind of magic. Just show up. Show it working. Speak like a human who’d actually use the thing. It’s not anti-marketing. It’s marketing that remembers how people actually behave.
There’s a lesson here for New Zealand marketers buried under decks of strategy slides and tone-of-voice docs. Drop the gloss now and then. The audience is smarter than you think. And sometimes, a paintbrush and a bit of gravel go further than a cinematic ad ever could.