CASE STUDY
Geeking out on Quality
The Client
World Quality Month (WQM) is celebrated every November by quality experts and enthusiasts globally. It’s a dedicated period for increasing quality awareness, establishing new objectives, and recognizing quality accomplishments by individuals and organizations over the past year. The American Society for Quality (ASQ) is a key advocate for WQM, offering knowledge, certification, and various tools and resources to quality professionals and members worldwide, while also striving to make the annual celebration particularly impactful.
Concepting
Social Planning & Assets
Digital Promotions
Marketing & Print Collateral
The Ask
Calling all Dungeon Masters!
Our “Planner Scanner” theme was a hit two years in a row, but it was time to dream up something more bodacious. The ASQ marketing team had the brilliant idea to turn World Quality Month into a Dungeons and Dragons-style game for participants to play throughout November. Our challenge? Without a budget to design, produce, and mail out physical gameboards, how could we make this year’s celebration feel more tangible even though it would only play out on social media?
The Answer
Greetings, brave guardians of excellence!
Remember when arcade adventures, 8-bit battles, and late-night quests sparked inspiration and creativity? With this in mind, we invented an interactive game, steeped in 1980s nostalgia, dubbed Quality Quest. In our gameplay lore, a mysterious anomaly disrupted the harmony of the Quality Realms. Nefarious forces of Chaos and Defects threatened to plunge our world into disarray. As a Masters of Improvement, we asked our ASQ quality professionals to help us restore order by assembling their league of masterminds to test their skills, answer ancient trivia, and solve cryptic puzzles. Along the way, they would unlock legendary tomes and earn honorable medals of merit.
Join Our Tron Wizard Space Adventure
For the concept design, we leaned on late 20th century tech and video game “vaporwave” aesthetics. Early personal computers, glitchy textures, mirrored text paired with otherworldly dreamscapes that a Dungeon Master might parlay in grand detail during a campaign. We didn’t want to lean too heavily on one genre like LOTR’s medieval maps and magic or Star Wars’ intergalactic space opera. A single direction would feel too cliché, too on-the-nose. Much like what the Netflix series Stranger Things did to refresh the genre, we borrowed a little of this and that to create our own retro futuristic aesthetic.
Ready Player One?
To make the experience feel more real, everything we designed needed a three-dimensional tangibility—from the playing cards and game pieces to the Quality Realms landscape itself. Because Quality professionals love their digital badges, we increased trivia difficulty to boost the incentive to earn rewards along the way. The month’s activities were all packaged in a Quality Quest “Game Guide,” complete with a calendar that looked like a board game, which featured pewter game tokens and a 20-sided die, obviously.
Give ’em the goods
After we nailed down the aesthetic concept, we developed a suite of digital assets for ASQ’s marketing team to post throughout the month. For social, we crafted Quality Quest launch teasers, play cards, and graphics to support ASQ’s “Which Quality Hero Are You?” interactive game. We produced a slew of digital freebies like email signatures, phone wallpaper and Zoom backgrounds, plus five gleaming medals to be doled out each week. We also designed retro-futuristic ASQ Member digital trading cards and a D&D-style Hero Spotlight “character sheet.” Participants could download, fill out, and print or repost the sheet on socials to show off their special skills and passion projects, which turned out to be the highlight of the month.
The Results
More than just the numbers
By November’s end, both teams were stoked to see engagement increase for a third year since Streamline Jacks took over the World Quality Month campaign design. The best part was following the ASQ social channels to watch people participate, comment, and share their Quality Hero results, character sheets, and overall enthusiasm over the Quality Quest experience.
2024 vs. 2023 Engagement Comparisons for the Win!
The Takeaways
Teamwork makes the scheme work
When presenting an idea like “We’re gonna do WQM but D&D” to the CEO, the follow-through better pay off. Between both our and ASQ teams’ hard work, we demonstrated to leadership once again how important it is to freshen up campaign ideas and never fear nerding out. (Especially if we get to sneak a little wizard named “Qualdo” deep into the ASQ.org website.) The experience was such a hit, the ASQ marketing team tapped us again to inject a little fun into the summer with “Camp Quality” a few months later!
