Gaffey
From best-kept secret to category leader — the Gaffey Hyprolyser® story
What is the Gaffey Hyprolyser® electrochlorination system?
Gaffey has been doing something remarkable for over forty years. Their Hyprolyser® electrochlorination system generates safe, low-strength sodium hypochlorite on-site, on-demand, from nothing more than salt, water and electricity. No hazardous chemical deliveries. No COSHH nightmares. No drums, tankers or specialist handling. Just clean, consistent water chlorination, developed through over four decades of British engineering.
By any rational measure, it should have been the default choice across the water treatment sector long before now. It wasn't. Not because the technology fell short. But because the majority of the market had never really heard of it.
The challenge: marketing a water treatment system with long buying cycles
Replacement cycles in water treatment are long. Capital investment is significant. The realistic window in which buyers are actively in-market at any given moment is narrow. Which means a campaign focused purely on lead generation would be like fishing in a paddling pool.
The brief was about something harder, more ambitious, and more valuable: mental availability. Making Hyprolyser® so recognisable, so clearly understood, and so obviously superior that when the moment of need arrived; a system failure, a new build, a specifier's shortlist, it was already in the room.
Gaffey also had a braver and broader ambition. They wanted to shift perception from pool market supplier to global category leader across leisure, building services, healthcare and industry. The campaign had to carry that credibility too. The proposition did that; a product truth and a human truth on a single platform: Gaffey Hyprolyser: Simply. Better.
The campaign idea: Believe the Hype
We developed three concepts, each stress-tested for cut-through, flexibility across sectors and channels, and the right balance of confidence and proof. The one that won was a real clarion call: Believe the Hype.
The tension is baked right in. No-one believes the hype. Hype is the word the world has learned not to trust. Products over-promise. Marketing overstates. Cynicism is the default setting. But what if the hype was completely, provably justified? What if you could believe it? What if hype became the mnemonic?
What if every bold claim was underwritten by a decade of field-proven performance, a global install base, and a system trusted to supply drinking water to an entire South Atlantic island?
That's the Hyprolyser® story. And that tension, between a word that invites scepticism and a product that blows it out the water, became the creative catalyst.
The visual system gave the campaign line physical substance: letterforms constructed from the three core ingredients of the electrochlorination process. Salt. Water. Electricity. Product truth and creative expression, absolutely inseparable.
Campaign strategy: seen, understood, believed
The Believe the Hype activation plan was built around three campaign objectives.
Paid - getting seen: LinkedIn targeting installers, facility managers and specifiers; sector trade media; PPC focused on high-intent searches.
Owned - getting understood: a campaign landing page, updated product pages, email to existing customers, organic social, a hero insight piece positioning Gaffey as the category authority and go-to experts.
Earned - getting believed: PR, trade press features and global case studies from New Zealand to Cyprus to a historic London theatre.
The proof pillars of reliability, remote control, ease of use and smarter engineering sat across every channel: each one proven and credible. Campaign messaging was built to flex across sectors; pools, building services and industrial with every audience-specific pressure targeted with those proof points.
Why bold creative works in technical B2B categories
The Hyprolyser® campaign is a clear example of what happens when a bold creative rationale meets a genuine product truth. In a category defined by technical complexity, long buying cycles and an embedded resistance to switching, the instinct is to reach for reassurance and play it safe; talk specs, lead with features, show the product close-up.
We made the decision to go the other way: confident, unapologetic and memorable, but never bolshie.
Results: a campaign built to accumulate
Believe the Hype is a campaign built to accumulate. To make the Hyprolyser® name spring to mind within a nanosecond of a plant room needing an upgrade, a new facility going to spec, or a facilities manager finally calling time on chemical drum deliveries.
From audience insight and proposition development through to campaign concept, creative direction, messaging architecture and channel planning; the hype was, and still is, real. The campaign Workhouse created simply made it impossible to ignore.