Monthly Archive for October, 2009

Relocating or repatriating staff back to the UK?

Come back to EasyintoEngland soon and you could win a Harrods hamper

Come back to EasyintoEngland soon and you could win a Harrods hamper

If you are, then you’ll need to visit www.easyintoEngland.co.uk when it goes live in November. The landing pad site is part of a promotion in which HR and relocation professionals will be able to find out more about Pricoa services, and get the chance to win a Harrods hamper, in the Pricoa Relocation prize draw.

London can be an exciting place to live of course, but for anyone travelling here to live and work (or returning to England after some years away), it’s reassuring to know that a trusted partner like Pricoa Relocation can help with everything – from travel, to property and schools.

Taking away problems means that you’ll have staff resettled quickly, and making important contributions to your business effectiveness faster, instead of worrying about their family in a new environment.

What more do you need from us?

We’ve implemented a new web site. At the moment, it’s a simple holding site – in line with our bold new look. You can reach it on our old address (www.wildwildwest.co.uk) or on our new one – www.designwildwest.com

The pictures which you view through the WW device are samples of our work – from the ribbons on the Barclays Premier League trophy, through to our web site for Stock Spirits.

It is just a holding page really, but you can check our address, view or download our (very smart!) new credentials document or (of course) link through from the site to this blog (and we’ll be updating our blog header very soon too).

If you would like to see more from us – either on the web site or on this blog – then please let us know. At the moment we’re debating what we feature on the web site – our past award-winning work, case studies on topics as widely different as corporate naming or annual reports, or simply the kind comments we’ve had from our clients over the years. Please do get in touch if you have suggestions or comments!

And if you’ve not dealt with us before, maybe now is the time to think about whether we can help you? As you’ll see – in corporate design, in web and electronic marketing, and in sport sponsorship activation – we have a pretty good track record. Why not go to our web site now and take a look at our brand spanking new credentials document? We hope it will convince you to get in touch.

Please bookmark our address now: www.designwildwest.com

Direct response – time to forget email and go back to print?

an exclusive dm package

an exclusive dm package

A lot of people are saying to us these days that email is over-used as a marketing medium, that their spam filters have (at last) caught up with sorting out the desirable from the unwanted, and that they are turning back to print in a bid to get response rates back to where they once were.

It’s certainly true that e-marketing is over-used. We all have rafts of spam that is ill-directed and ill-targeted (and not very imaginative either, if it comes to that).

So, could I right now make a plea to all those who want to spam me in Russian or German not to bother? My Russian is non-existent, and my German is limited to asking for a loaf of bread and some onions. So, trying to interest me in your products (whether web-hosting or viagra) in either of those languages probably isn’t going to work.

Email is cheap, quick and available and probably that’s why it often isn’t working. It’s too easy to do without too much thought, and consequently can be counter-productive – sometimes, you’d be better off doing nothing than doing that.

Meanwhile, print campaigns, especially when well thought through, well targeted (ie they are sent to the right people) and thoughtfully followed up, DO work, even in these slightly straighened times.

Our campaign for Citroen Sport last year was a case in point. (In conjunction with our friends at Sports Media International, we helped to find the new sponsor they were looking for). And we’ve done it before, very effectively for Flying Pictures, a company whose business is concerned with hot-air balloons (!), and spectacularly for a software company called Ariba, who really gave us the scope (both budget and time) to do something effective.

Get in touch if you’d like to find out more about that Ariba initiative – it’s not often that a campaign directed at senior decision-makers gets a 60% response rate (and we only cheated a little!)

Consistent International Presence – Rule One for Growing Brands

When we were commissioned to design and build the corporate site for a rapidly growing branded drinks manufacturer, Stock Spirits Group, we were concerned that international sites (the company had several overseas companies) should have the same look and feel. The company agreed and now we have implemented not just a corporate site, but sites covering international sales, US, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Some of these sites are in three languages too, just to add to the complexity, but each one has a standard (though flexible) format. If you visit any one of them, you’ll be in no doubt that you are in a Stock Spirits Group site.

Working with Stock, we made the decision early on that it was important to give countries full flexibility in terms of marketing in their home territories – so we would link out from the corporate site to any brand sites which they had built and maintained for their particular markets.

That immediately defused the ‘not invented here’ syndrome and demonstrated that what we wanted was corporate consistency, but not a corporate straitjacket.

Stock keep on expanding, and as they do, their network of sites grows too. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the next territory to be covered, followed by Croatia. And the brand promise offered by Stock Spirits products and the reputation of the company both continue to strengthen and develop.

www.stockspiritsgroup.com

Ecommerce – solution or stumbling block?

Ecommerce (which means, if you’re in any doubt, buying and selling things through a web site or catalogue) can be a solution to the commonest of all problems – how do I get more sales? On the other hand, it can also be a part of the issue that you were trying to solve in the first place – that of the downward sales curve.

How can it be both?

It can be a solution only if you promote your new capability.

We’ve dealt with companies who sit back and wait when their new, ecommerce-enabled, site goes live. Google, they tell us, will do everything. Pretty soon, they’re back. How can I get my site up the ratings? And we have to tell them the basics of web wisdom – that a web site is (or should be) more like a magazine than a annual brochure; that a web site needs to be promoted if you are going to get traffic; that quality of service, quality of product, quality of communications are essential parts of the marketing mix.

If they listen (and invest too, as though this was a new branch of their operation), then ecommerce starts to become the solution they were looking for. They worry about it every morning. They check the statistics every day. If trends go the wrong way, then they do something about that.

If they don’t. it’s just a waste of money, time and effort, and in the end, that waste will drag a company down.

There are so many things that companies can do with and through the web these days. Don’t miss that opportunity.

Vintage Wine Gifts