Kawai UK: a year of content, and 104 films in a single day

Kawai UK make pianos, and until 2025 they sold them almost entirely offline. Their social accounts showed it. The same Christmas post had run four years in a row, and after five years on Instagram they had fewer than two thousand followers. Their competitors are Steinway and Yamaha.

The first change

We started with supply rather than a campaign. Kawai were already creating things worth filming: concerts, product launches, a public piano at St Pancras, customers with something to say. Each of those became video, photography and shorter social pieces, so there was always something ready to post instead of a gap to fill.

Within a year the UK account had grown by around seven thousand followers. Kawai run a separate account for each market, so the internal comparison was against Japan, the US, China, France, Spain, Poland and the European account. The UK was the fastest-growing Kawai market in the world.

Then they asked for 104 films

By late 2025 Kawai wanted to post twice a week through the whole of 2026. That is 104 pieces of content, and the budget allowed one filming day.

Fifty-two separate shoots was never going to happen. The only route to that number was to decide, in advance, exactly what all 104 films were.

How one day held 104 films

We wrote 104 scripts before anyone picked up a camera. We found a building with eight rooms, so a single location could hold eight setups and several pianos, and planned the running order room by room. Two crews, fifty-two films each, every handover mapped.

When we took the plan to Kawai’s European marketing team, they told us it could not be done.

By midday both crews were about two hours behind. Because every script, room and handover had been settled in advance, we were able to recover the schedule and finish at seven in the evening, an hour inside the deadline. All 104 films were edited within the month, including feedback, and subtitled for Kawai’s other territories.

What came out of it

Neil, their sales director, told us the business had over-achieved its sales target for the first time since COVID. Plenty else was happening in that company over the same year and we would not claim the sales figure as ours alone. What is directly ours is the account itself: fewer than two thousand followers to the fastest-growing Kawai market in the world, and a full year of content already scripted, filmed and scheduled before January.

The part that transfers

Working out what 104 films had to be, before the day, is the same exercise we run for a business booking a single session. Decide what the content has to do first, then film once, properly.

If your business creates more opportunities to film than it currently turns into useful content, we can plan around what you already have.