Archive for the 'Direct' Category

Need food for a business meeting? Try Source

Published on November 25, 2011 in Direct and Web. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

The Source site gives you all kinds of office catering options. Order today. Delivered tomorrow.

If you’re in West London, getting food for meetings or social events in your office is really easy. Just go to our website for Source at www.sourcefood.co.uk and you’ll find a huge selection of catering options that can be delivered – straight to your office and with delivery free of charge – the very next day.

For a limited time, there’s also 20% off your first order through the website!

Source provide great catering options – from sandwich platters to sushi, and from curries to quiche – so it’s easy to order whatever your guests and staff require, straight from the website. Source can give advice on all kinds of things too – like how many canapes you’ll need for an evening reception, or what kind of options you could have for a breakfast briefing.

Talk to Source too, about wine, beer and soft drinks to make a meeting or a party go with a swing.

The Source site is just one of the eCommerce sites we’ve completed for our clients over the years, and if that’s the kind of thing that you need for your business, then please get in touch with us.

 

Price and value. Incentives to succeed

Published on November 2, 2011 in Direct. 0 Comments

Building B2B brands often implies a positive exchange of value. A brand gives something of value in order to establish its place and position within a potential buyer’s psyche.

That all sounds tremendously grand, but what does it really mean?

Well, it could mean that to gain some kind of traction with large-scale purchasers, a brand needs to think laterally about the difference between price (what a thing actually costs to buy) and value (the worth perceived by the recipient).

That these are two totally different things is fairly easy to demonstrate.

A few years ago, I worked for a company with a motor-racing sponsorship. We asked that some posters be signed by one of the team’s drivers. Cost (given that we had already paid our sponsorship fee) was zero. Value, to the customers and prospects to whom we gave them, was substantial.

Always, when confronted with the task of generating response, dialogue and interest within a hard-to-reach community, our instincts are to find things that will have value to that community, but which may not actually have a big price attached.

Sometimes though, it is even necessary to step outside that framework.

When we were asked to build awareness and presence for a software company with Times Top 250 finance directors, we were stumped, until someone suggested a remote control model car. The unit cost would not be insubstantial. We would have to repackage the car to make our point about our client and its product.

But when we looked at the cost of alternatives (a page in the Financial Times, perhaps?) our method provided better value. And we could do other things too.

We could make the mailing a two part exercise, sending the car first, and only sending the controller for the car if a simple card was returned to signify receipt. (That would underline our client’s message about ‘staying in control’ also, and might also open up a necessary dialogue).

We could phone to check that we weren’t infringing any corporate governance issues. (We offered an equivalent to a nominated charity). At the same time we could test to see if our message had got home.

The results were spectacular, but I have to say we can’t always be that clever, and I have to thank our client for being brave.

Maybe it was just a one-off, and things don’t really work like that any more. Maybe.

But maybe more companies need to think about value and price when planning direct response campaigns into precisely defined markets?

Creating dialogue. Difficulties and solutions

Published on July 13, 2011 in Direct and Marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Ask any B2B company what they are trying to do, and the phrase ‘creating dialogue’ comes up.

That’s why companies take the time and trouble to;

- update their website regularly
- do the same with their blog or blogs
- use Twitter and Linkedin to promote both
- advertise or direct market, with the web as a destination
- try to add value to the user experience

That’s why this blog is here.

It’s not a complicated formula, but it does take some time and concentration to get that ‘dialogue’ going. Especially so, if you go beyond your immediate, ‘most available’ markets.

Most available are the ones who know you. They are aware of you either by reputation (what you’ve done) or by the company you keep (who you work for), your specialisms (examples of your work) or specific market sectors (in our case, finance and business services).

Go beyond that group, though, and things become more difficult. Your brand is unknown, your reputation yet to be established.

This was precisely the problem a new client of ours faced. Our proposed solution was to market hard to prospects in this space, taking a two part approach.

The first effort segmented their prospects by potential. Potentially large clients were given a special offer to respond, with the promise of more if they kept up the dialogue. This segment was low-volume, but high payback.

The second part of the programme took a traditional volume-based approach. Using clever technology and light touch creative work to encourage volume response and help to qualify the market more thoroughly in the future.

Sadly, our client backed off. Better, they thought, to keep on addressing the market they were used to working with, rather than to take a leap into the unknown. They made a decision not to leave their comfort zone.

We were disappointed, but we appreciate the problem. Going into markets where you are unknown is a worrying proposition for any company, and yet it could mean the difference between maintaining market share, and growing it substantially.

Brand-building or response?

Published on June 7, 2011 in Brand and identity, Direct and Marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Short term needs and long term requirements – how do you fit both together in  a coherent marketing strategy?

Today, brand management is more complex than ever, and for business-to-business brands, where decision horizons tend to be more distant, there’s a continued conflict between gaining response and pursuing the longer term goal of brand engagement.

WildWest has experience at both ends of the spectrum – producing enquiries for business-to-business products and services, and in helping companies begin the process of building brand value for the long term. But balancing those two very different priorities is never easy, especially in a market where quarterly numbers are as important as establishing a reputation for quality and service, and the desirability that goes with that reputation.

So on the one hand, our most successful piece of direct marketing, ever http://www.designwildwest.com/blog/2010/06/our-most-successful-piece-of-direct-marketing-ever/ and on the other, producing brand collateral that has helped organisations like Mahindra Racing (India’s first MotoGP team) and Citroen Sport attract sponsorship – produced for our clients and friends at Sports Media International – http://www.sports-media-intl.com/

We’re currently working on a project for a credit and travel management organisation, where we have to fit both into a framework that will work in both the short and medium-term.

If that’s the kind of issue that your company is facing, then maybe you’d like to talk to us. We would love to hear from you.

High-level audiences? Treat them with respect

Published on May 20, 2011 in Corporate, Design, Direct and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

My credit card company sent me a mailer recently. It was so flimsy that I doubted the sales proposition even before I read it, and it wasn’t much of a surprise to find the offer totally valueless. Better to send me nothing than this kind of thing.

On the other hand, WildWest has proven over the years that producing high quality items (with a little imagination mixed in) really does produce good results.

Like? Like the two-part mailing we once developed for a software company. It was aimed at Times Top 250 finance directors – a market we thought was well nigh impossible to reach, let alone get response from. Our mailing had a theme – power and control. The message was that you can’t be powerful unless you are in control (our client’s software promised control over corporate expenditure).

Our pack contained a remote-control car – a bright red Porsche model. We branded and re-packaged it to reflect our message, and we sent it out with one omission. The controller for the car. You didn’t get that unless you sent back the card in the first pack.

There was no catch. No salesman would call (unless requested). No marketing material would be sent.

It wasn’t too much of a surprise to find that we had a 60% response rate within a week. What was more surprising was how many of our target market wanted to meet with our client and to find out more about that software. Our client – previously unknown in this market – suddenly had a hugely valuable sales pipeline.

The same theme is reflected in the work we have been doing with sports marketing agency, SMI.


Sports Media International market sponsorship packages in motorsport, sailing and soccer, and the really high quality marketing packs that we have developed for their clients (at Citroen Sport and Mahindra Racing) are both appropriate and respected. So too, with the brand-building photo-books which we produce for Barclays and their work with the Barclays Premier League.

The message is simple. If you have a high-quality product, you need high-quality materials to back it up. And of course, there’s no one better to meet those demands than WildWest design.

They’ve responded. And someone’s asleep..?

Published on May 12, 2011 in Direct and Marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , .

A huge number of businesses don't even respond when people reply to direct marketing or advertising

According to an article in Harvard Business Review recently, some American companies, most of whom are putting more and more marketing budget into slick and captivating direct marketing campaigns, are wasting their money.

HBR tested responses from outbound email, from websites and from traditional direct marketing campaigns. Remember, they weren’t testing how or how many responses an individual campaign received, but instead looked at what happened to those responses.

Did anything happen? Was information promised actually sent? Did a salesperson call to check that the information had been received?

You’d think that firms would be slick at this kind of thing, but while some were, a massive 23% of all the HBR test responses went totally unanswered. Not just a slow reply, or a poor quality reply but no reply at all.

It all reminds me of a test that the Ford motor company did in the 1960′s. They found that in some instances, fewer people who had seen their advertising actually bought a Ford than those who had never seen some of their advertising. They might as well have spent an afternoon burning their money in the car park.

It all goes to prove that advertising and direct marketing is still struggling to become a science, and that more marketing people need to realise that marketing is an end-to-end process that doesn’t even stop with a purchase.

 

Email bulletins, or print?

Published on August 13, 2010 in Direct. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

There isn’t an easy answer to this question.

On the one hand, email bulletins are simple, easy to put together and cheap to deliver. On the other, if you’re not careful with how you maintain your mailing list, you may be accused of spamming, what you send may not be what is actually delivered and your message may not even get by a corporate mail-server, no matter how well you know the individual it is addressed to.

On the other hand, printed mailers are more expensive, you have all the problems of street addresses and postage and just the sheer bulk of it all.

Ease of use has been a key factor in undermining the use of email for marketing purposes. Because it was easy, it was over-used. It still is. I am getting spam in German and Russian, and, just for the record, my knowledge of either language is not great.

Click-throughs used to solve some of the problems but too often they were used as Trojan horses to deliver viruses into your computer.

On balance, we’d always recommend short and simple email bulletins to people you know, or you have business relationships with. If you need to make clients and others more aware of what you are up to, then put that information in a website, or a blog like this.

Cover of Standard Bulletin magazine

Cover of Standard Bulletin magazine

If that doesn’t work, go back to print and deliver your message the old-fashioned way. Maybe that’s the reason why corporate magazines like The Standard Club’s Standard Bulletin are getting to be fashionable again.

Magazines like this have a stature and quality (if they are well-designed!) that it is difficult to replicated through any email.

Another development that’s easing the problems with the preparation and despatch of magazines, bulletins and mailers is the improvement in the quality of digital print.

Mailing addresses can be laser printed directly onto whatever material you need to despatch – no labels anymore!

Our most successful piece of direct marketing, ever

Published on June 23, 2010 in Advertising, Direct and Marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .
70% response? Impossible! (or not?)

70% response? Impossible! (or not?)

This direct marketing campaign happened when B2B eCommerce was the really sexy thing in IT.
Everyone was talking about it, and Ariba were the hot company within this particular technology.
The problem was that Ariba wanted to sell to big companies (Times Top 200, typically), their software was a big ticket item (for large companies it would have been a fairly substantial investment) and Ariba were new to the UK. They also wanted to talk at a high level (Finance Director).
Over a period, we jointly devised the idea of a remote-control car, branded and boxed, and a theme – ‘You can’t have power without control’ – to link the creative to the Ariba product. (‘Control your spending, get better value from every pound you spend’).
WildWest sourced the car via a German company who manufactured in Hong Kong. We sent artwork for them to brand the car, which included the Ariba phone no. We thought we would have done a job even if we got the car onto an office shelf.
The key idea though, (the ‘sting’, if you like) was that the recipient didn’t get the controller for the car until he returned a card – didn’t have to do anything else, though there were options to sign up for a seminar or request a meeting. The controller was similarly packaged and as soon as the card came back, it was sent off.
All this happened pre-Christmas (November) and there was a fantastic response – something like 60% in three days! There was telephone follow up just in case anyone was embarassed or had guidelines that didn’t allow them to accept (we would then send a donation to charity on their behalf). That allowed us to check whether the message had got across, if they remembered Ariba and what business they were in – all were great numbers.
We sent out about 240 of the cars. Final response was over 70%.
It wasn’t cheap. The whole exercise cost about 45k, but that was about the price of a dps in the FT – which was one of the other options considered.
Best of all was that Ariba got six sales direct from the campaign which paid for itself many times over.

Can Research Help You Build Market Share?

Published on July 28, 2009 in Corporate, Direct and Marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Sometimes, research is a powerful tool. Think about this as a model.

You start by asking questions about an issue that is live in your market. You give respondents the option to remain completely anonymous when they fill in your questionnaire. But, if they wish, they can leave a name and address and receive a full copy of the report when it’s complete. Give respondents an incentive to respond in the form of a donation to a charity.

Now, get the results in and compile the report. It should look credible and properly presented.

You can deliver that report to all the people who wanted it. You can feed the report into your PR campaign. (“Here’s what 200 managers said about…”). You could host a reception or seminar to tell clients or others about the results. You can use your web site to display headlines from the report you’ve written.

Do this once and it gets you noticed. Repeat it, and it begins to demonstrate your leadership qualities, and starts the all-important dialogue with potential clients that leads to new business.

We’ve successfully completed this programme with a law firm and a software company. It works!

Citroen Sport – Selling the Sponsor Package

Published on July 23, 2009 in Direct, Marketing and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .
Sports Media International commissioned this dramatic brochure to sell the Citroen Sport WRC package

Sports Media International commissioned this dramatic brochure to sell the Citroen Sport WRC package

Sports Media International help companies to select and evaluate sponsorship packages in many different sports – motorsport (cars and bikes), soccer and sailing are the principal ones used by the company’s clients – but from time to time it also sells sponsor packages to clients, like the Citroen World Rally Championship sponsor package. (More at www.citroen-wrc.com)

To help win attention, Wild West produced this stunning brochure, (in two languages) which utilised excellent photography and stunning design to deliver a real Wow! factor when it arrived on the desks of busy senior marketing officers at leading European companies.

Result? The sponsorship package was sold in weeks, even though it had  a substantial price tag, which reflected the kind of multi-country brand exposure that the sponsorship would provide.

Sports Media International are a long term Wild West client and partner too. Read more about what they are able to offer and the valuable experience they can provide on http://www.sports-media-intl.com/

As Sports Media will tell you, sport can be a huge factor in establishing brands (especially new brands from overseas) into the European market.