Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

Previous DesignLens special features on marketing campaigns focused on how builders and developers reach homebuyers. This edition turns the lens on building product manufacturers, examining how brands like Elkay, Pella, Caesarstone, LP Building Solutions, Kohler, and Brava Roof Tile are crafting campaigns that influence not just consumers, but the architects, designers, and trade professionals who specify and sell their products every day. The strategies range from influencer-driven product launches and cinematic brand films to designer collaborations, digital specification tools, and omnichannel awareness campaigns — each offering transferable lessons for anyone marketing in the residential space.

Elkay’s Filtration with Imagination Campaign
Submitted by Elkay

In 2025, Elkay introduced Liv EZ, a wall-mounted residential water dispenser that brings filtered hydration – long standard in airports, schools, and commercial buildings – into the home for the first time. The "Filtration with Imagination" campaign positioned the product not as a kitchen upgrade, but as a whole-home wellness feature: equally at home in a mudroom, playroom, home gym, or wet bar.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

Several campaign images center around kids using the Liv EZ dispenser throughout the home. This particular ad also highlights the product’s ease of use, delivering clean water at the touch of a button.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

Powered by influencer partnerships, paid media, and strategic PR, Elkay reports the campaign drove over 1 million impressions to the campaign landing page; the product also earned a KBB Product Award and secured coverage in publications including Men's Health.

Link to campaign video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzCUModjek8

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

Pella’s Make Life Brighter Campaign
Submitted by Pella

Launched in March 2025 in partnership with creative agency Singlethread, Pella's "Make Life Brighter" campaign makes a deliberate break from the product-driven messaging that dominates the window and door category. The campaign taps into the emotional meaning of home where families want to feel both protected and connected to the world outside. The hero of the campaign, a spirited 9-year-old dancing freely inside her home as a storm builds outside, functions as a metaphor for the emotional promise Pella is making: that even as extreme weather intensifies, home should remain a source of stability and optimism.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

This image is the visual and strategic core of the campaign. The floor-to-ceiling windows don't appear as a product feature; they appear as the threshold between chaos and calm, which is exactly how Pella wants builders and homeowners to think about them. Pella has a long history of testing windows against extreme weather conditions, and that credibility is embedded in the scene. The campaign was concept-tested using AI tools before production, scoring in Kantar's top 1% of all ads, a validation that the emotional strategy was worth the investment in long-form creative.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

Pella released the campaign as a 2-minute hero film alongside 30- and 60-second cutdowns. The film ranked above an Apple spot directed by Spike Jonze in AdAge coverage, was shortlisted at Cannes Lions 2025 in both Film Classic and Film Craft categories and spread organically across social media and trade networks before any paid media support.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

The campaign generated new sales leads and trade relationships directly attributed to the film, a result Pella describes as rare in a high-consideration purchase category. It strengthened appeal among Millennial and Gen Z homeowners while maintaining loyalty among Gen X buyers, and expanded influence with architects, interior designers, and tastemakers.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

Caesarstone’s Porcelain Portfolio
Submitted by Caesarstone

In 2025, Caesarstone expanded its porcelain portfolio with new 12-mm and 20-mm thickness. Despite offering porcelain for some time, the brand remained primarily associated with quartz countertops. This campaign was designed to broaden that perception, reinforcing that Caesarstone offers a portfolio of high-performance surfaces across multiple materials and applications, including porcelain for floors, walls, cladding, countertops, and more. The target audience was trade-focused, including architects, designers, fabricators and suppliers, and the messaging pushed both aesthetics and application versatility, with copy lines like "Where artistry meets durability" and "A surface as versatile as your vision," carrying both the product story and brand repositioning at once.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

The campaign ran across social media and paid digital advertising, supported by a dedicated 2025 Collection landing page built around SEO and keyword strategy to grow organic traffic. The results support the approach: the campaign served over 3 million impressions through programmatic advertising, search proved the most efficient conversion channel with a cost-per-click of $1.46, and Caesarstone reports an increase in porcelain sample orders across both consumer and trade audiences.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

LP Building Solutions SmartSide Campaign
Submitted by LP Building Solutions

LP Building Solutions designed this campaign to build name recognition for LP SmartSide among both professionals and homeowners, deploying ads across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Paid Search, Display, Connected TV, The Weather Channel, and billboards in video and GIF formats. The creative leans into wit: "Siding that's light on you and heavy on the curb appeal?" positions durability and aesthetics as equally valuable without requiring the audience to choose between them.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

These three frames are pulled from a single GIF ad, walking the viewer through a complete product story in a matter of seconds. The first frame establishes lifestyle aspiration, the second pivots to technical credibility, and the third lands on the brand tagline, "That's Smart." — a payoff that doubles as a nod to the SmartSide product name itself. According to LP Building Solutions, contractors and trade partners responded positively and adopted the durability-plus-beauty messaging in their own customer conversations, a downstream effect that signals the campaign succeeded.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

Kohler x Martha Stewart
Submitted by Kohler

In summer 2025, Kohler named Martha Stewart as its first Cast Iron Ambassador, a partnership grounded in a shared commitment to quality, timeless design, and the enduring relevance of enameled cast iron. In February 2026, the company launched the next phase of that partnership, bringing Martha into the manufacturing environment of Kohler’s historic foundry in Kohler, Wisconsin. Martha's personal credibility as a longtime advocate for enameled cast iron transfers directly to Kohler's material story, validating the product not as old-fashioned, but as heritage luxury with present-day relevance.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

The campaign delivers a cinematic view inside Kohler’s manufacturing plant to artfully showcase the time-honored material. Cast iron is where Kohler’s story started. Kohler Co. was established in 1873 as a company that produced cast iron farm equipment and castings. In 1883, their founder, John Michael Kohler, applied enamel to a cast iron horse trough, and sold it as a bathtub, marking their entry into the plumbing industry. Fast forward over 150 years and they’re still producing high-craft cast iron plumbing products within their foundry in Kohler, WI.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

SVP of Marketing Scott Edmunds describes the campaign as a continuation of a partnership grounded in shared principles of quality and authenticity, positioning cast iron as both integral to Kohler's legacy and as a meaningful differentiator for future growth.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

Kohler x Studio McGee
Submitted by Kohler

The Kohler x Studio McGee partnership began in 2023 with six collaborative collections and expanded in February 2026 with the Audrine kitchen sink, the first kitchen sink co-designed by the two brands. Shea McGee was involved from initial concept through market launch, making this a fully integrated two-way collaboration. These products are designed for both consumers and trade professionals.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

The sink is a statement in modern classic design and pairs seamlessly with the existing Edalyn kitchen faucet by Kohler and Studio McGee to create a space that feels timeless, distinct, and complete. "The Studio McGee team are incredible collaborators, and they truly understand Kohler's vision of creating beautiful and intentional pieces for the home," says Kohler Studio Manager Margaret Mazz. "Partnering with Shea always brings a fresh perspective – her elegant aesthetic, rooted in classic style, perfectly complements the enduring quality and design legacy that Kohler is known for."

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

Brava Roof Tile’s Lightbeans partnership
Submitted by Venveo

In September 2025, Brava Roof Tile partnered with Lightbeans to integrate photorealistic, lighting-responsive virtual textures and samples directly into Brava's product pages — giving architects and specifiers the ability to evaluate materials in real time, at project scale, and across changing light conditions, all without requesting a physical sample.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

The deeper layer of the integration is what happens after a specifier engages on the website: Brava's full texture and color library is available for direct download into the 3D tools architects and designers already work in such as Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, 3ds Max, Enscape, Twinmotion, and V-Ray. Drag-and-drop, ready-to-use Brava materials drop directly into BIM models and renderings, compressing the specification timeline and removing a step that previously required waiting on physical samples. Since launch, approximately 900 active professionals have engaged with the tool and roughly 2,100 texture downloads have been recorded. These insights further inform future product development strategy.

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

Special Feature: Building Product Marketing Campaigns

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