Hack Market pushed globally our answer to a major societal challenge, even if we had to risk a major trial for it.

This campaign is an in-store activation, with a clear call-to-action: buy refurbished instead of new.

Except… the stores are not BackMarket’s (a marketplace without physical stores), but Apple’s, where we could reach our core target of buyers of new devices at the perfect moment. And our media placement is not traditional POS, but the actual devices that we don’t want people to purchase.

A never-seen-before brand experience that reached a larger audience thanks to a strong online echo.

BackMarket is the leading European marketplace for refurbished tech, currently valued at 5.7 $Bn, and ranked #18 Most Innovative Company in the World by FastCompany in 2022.

Refurbished has found a natural audience in consumers looking to buy tech cheaper, offering them a more qualitative and reliable option than peer-to-peer second-hand marketplaces like eBay.

But BackMarket’s fight is not against second-hand: it’s against the New, for more sustainable consumption behaviors.

And compared to buying new, buying refurbished is still perceived by most consumers as a trade-off, if not a downgrade.

To convince more people to adopt this new mode of consumption, to choose refurbished beyond the promise of a good deal, BackMarket must demonstrate that it’s not a trade-off, but a better & smarter choice. One everybody should be proud of.

Because a refurbished smartphone is not only cheaper than a new one: its carbon footprint is 92% lower.

To make buyers pay attention to another rational fact about sustainability, we decided to hijack their purchase journey and challenge their behavior precisely when they were considering buying a brand new device.

In the very “temple of new tech”: Apple Stores©.

For Earth Day, BackMarket launched Hack Market, a campaign using Apple’s own technology – AirDrop© ; and brand new iPhones©, to advertise OUR messages for a greener alternative.

Whenever shoppers were grabbing a device, a bot AirDropped© video ads that played right in front of their eyes, leading them to choose the greener and cheaper alternative on BackMarket instead of Apple.

Different messages were displayed, such as “The seller won’t tell you that you can buy the same model - but reduce 92% of its carbon footprint. Luckily we just did. Go refurbished ; “Did you know this iPhone is available in black, white, blue, and greener? Go refurbished.”

It is intuitively obvious to anyone that buying refurbished is more sustainable than buying new. But by how much? So we asked ADEME, the Public Agency for Ecological Transition in France, to conduct a dedicated research.

It took 2 years to get the answers and hard facts, but habits die hard, and dry facts can hardly compete against ingrained behavior. Especially when this behavior is nurtured everyday by brands that make their “new stuff” always more desirable, and the need to enjoy it always more compelling.

An awareness campaign alone would not be enough. So we decided to focus our efforts when and where it would get the most attention: by hijacking the purchase journey of consumers, and making them think twice right before they were about to make a new purchase. And by doing it when it would have the strongest PR echo: for Earth Day 2022.

The foundations of Hack Market were “Leverage your opponent’s strengths”:

- Apple has stores, Backmarket doesn’t.

- Apple invests a gigantic marketing budget to get people to visit their stores and try new devices.

- They have developed AirDrop©, a great technology to smoothly send a file to a device located nearby.

Then, we just developed a simple bot to AirDrop© hundreds of messages to shoppers on the devices on display inside Apple stores©, through iPhones© and MacBooks© turned into 4G relays and hidden in backpacks or water bottles nearby all the Apple Stores© in Paris, London and Berlin.

And to ensure our provocative sustainability message would get the strongest echo among the general public we launched the campaign for #Earthday (April 22, 2022) and amplified our operation with digital videos featuring local influencers documenting the in-store experience, promoted with paid media during one week to kickstart a viral diffusion.

On April 22nd, based on accepted Airdrops©, we reached an estimated 5200 shoppers in the six Apple Stores of Paris, Berlin and London (FYI - 1M people visit Apple Stores across the world each day).

The one-day campaign also generated a strong echo beyond the stores the following week:

- 90 articles covered the operation in online and offline media across all continents, helping BackMarket strengthen its status as a contender in the tech category.

- The social videos of the operation went viral on all platforms (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube) and accumulated more than 100 million impressions (from April 22nd to April 29th).

Beyond this exposure for the brand, HackMarket had a fantastic impact as well for the refurbished category:

- intent to purchase refurbished increased on average by 27% following the campaign in the three countries

- refurbished was one of the key topics of Earthday 2022.