We’ve been helping our firiends at the leading PR agency, Brands2Life, this month, helping them to create an ad dramatising one of their most spectacular achievements!
The agency was asked to deliver a high impact launch for the introduction of the new Nikon 1 camera. Their campaign of six-metre high hands in capital cities across Europe certainly delivered.
Our ad for the agency just takes that dramatic statement and puts it on the page.
Silverfleet Capital is a leading European private equity firm specialising in mid-market buyouts.
Silverfleet Capital business sectors page
For 25 years, Silverfleet has been backing exceptional management teams in exciting businesses across Europe. The company has an investment team based in London, Paris, Munich and Chicago to help its portfolio companies make bolt-on acquisitions and to achieve strong organic growth.
WildWest has been working with Silverfleet for over a year, helping the company to dramatise its unique approach to investors and potential investee companies. Now, we’ve achieved our biggest landmark yet, a new website (in three European languages) which builds and develops the Silverfleet identity, as well as providing a private, password-protected area specifically for existing investors in the company’s portfolio.
The introduction for investors at the Silverfleet Capital website
WildWest design will be maintaining and updating all three language versions so that European companies can keep up to date with developments at the company. Find out more about Silverfleet Capital (and WildWest web capabilities!) at
www.silverfleetcapital.com
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.
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.
emerge poverty free's latest annual report
If you are looking to support a charity this Christmas, then of course, you have a big choice before you. But maybe think about our clients at emerge poverty free as a candidate?
emerge poverty free do just what they say – help individuals and communities to work their way out of poverty and dependency. They run a tight organisation and as you’ll see from their annual report (which was designed and produced by us), a big proportion of the money they raise goes straight to the beneficiaries, rather than being spent on administration.
If you can help, or you need more information, go to www.emergepovertyfree.org
We were pleased to see an optimistic report on a survey of entrepreneurs, covered by BBC Business this week. It confirms what we really already knew; that entrepreneurs keep chasing business no matter what the economists are saying.
We know that design is a critical part of the way that companies present themselves, and just this week, we’ve had two enquiries from clients who want to move their business on.
We love working with companies like this, because they will never just sit on their hands and wait till the world decides that things are getting better. By the time that happens, they will already have moved on, and be established in new markets, building their brands as they go.
The full report can be seen here: www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15848838
For us, leaders and brand-builders are marked out by some key characteristics:-
- leaders always concentrate on market expansion. Their goal is to grow the market (or a market sector) and then secure a larger place within it, while followers, on the other hand, tend to go for strictly ‘knock-off’ tactics. Leaders think too about how to create new market sectors. (Ezra Pound said at the beginning of the last century that we ‘advance by discrimination, by seeing things which we thought of as separate and distinct as harmoniously linked.’)
- leaders have confidence. Confidence leads to an approach – visible everywhere – that emphasises quality and core values. Those who are confident are prepared to use humour too, to make their point. They certainly always have a distinctive style
- their style lasts. They tend not to get bored with an approach which works. Of course, they will amend it over time, but once they have a position which is comfortable, it doesn’t change too often – something which reassures consumers who like to know where they are
- leaders use intelligent approaches to the market. Leaders respect the people who use their products and don’t talk down to them, while followers are often prepared to state the obvious
- leaders want quality and consistency in their approach, and are prepared to make sure they get it. They tend to come down heavily on product managers who want to compromise the whole approach for some short-term sales gain, or something that is dangerously off message
We always like working with leaders and brand-builders. If you’re there already or if you’re working to become one, please do get in touch with us at WildWest.
We think that our clients should be able to manage their website content. If they want, they should be able to add blog entries, upload news items, keep text (and maybe images too) current and relevant.
But the choice of CMS isn’t always easy. We’ve built entire sites in WordPress for example, which provides a user with a wonderfully easy interface that’s actually quite difficult to get very wrong. Even with my fairly uneasy relationship with technology, I find can get along with it. For an example, take a look at our site for INCo, an IT sales lead company. You can view it at www.inco-online.com.
The funny thing is that INCo don’t actually want to manage their content. They are busy people and are quite content that we (with their involvement and help) keep their blog up to date and their website fresh. Their priority was to have a site that would be continually refreshed, and we applaud them in that. (As we’ve said before, the key to SEO is good content, not any kind of magic bullet).
Other companies like to be in control of almost everything, and that can get quite involved, particularly when the website is actually the front end to some fairly important applications, as well as that shop window website. In this instance, you probably have two choices – head down the road with Microsoft on the path that leads to Sharepoint, or if you need to stay with an open source approach (the one that we prefer), have something built that is tailored to your applications.
There are many half-way points that in many instances are entirely acceptable and workable options for open source users, but the key thing is to be aware – preferably before any new website implementation is specified – exactly what the long-term plan is.
We don’t ask our clients to be psychic, but we always point out that it will help to extend the life of any site if something that could affect its structure 9and that of any CMS) is even being considered.
If a client makes it known that there are plans to link the site – to a database of shareholders, or a user group, or an application that will allow nominated users to be able to change a page of their own content – then these kind of things can be considered when the question of which CMS to use comes up.
A website, like any other piece of technology, probably won’t last forever. You should plan to make it last as long as possible though, and if you can, separate the shopwindow from the applications that may lie behind. And have reasonable expectations from the CMS you choose as well.
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?
When we first started designing websites, they were more like sculpture than a magazine. They were difficult to produce. Hand-crafted. Built to be prominent and to last.
Since then of course, things have changed dramatically. All kinds of things have become possible. Things like blogs (like this one), which have all but replaced ‘news’ pages. Things like linked outbound email, which can alert your audience (or a section of it) that something has happened on the site that they might just like to see. And of course, the ‘special privilege’ section of the site that no one but those whom you nominate can see.
These changes have undermined those ‘statues’. Static statements are just as old-fashioned as those sites that can’t be seen or read using the mobile devices that are being used now for up to 35% of web traffic. Their popularity has waned like a movie without sound.
Most of all, it is continued updating and continued ‘currency’ that visitors of all kinds want to see. That means taking issues head-on, having a view and expressing it (isn’t that what leaders do?), being topical and making a contribution to debate as well as just showing your product range.
The companies who can do all this are the ones that are gaining traction and business through the web. Others have opened their fancy showrooms on the backstreets of the internet where few people will visit.
We’ve worked for a number of new and emerging clients over the past few years. Inevitably, they’ve been both feisty and challenging – wanting rather more in terms of design, brand values and presence than they might get at a print shop on the corner, but not wanting to spend money unnecessarily in the process.
Some of them have gone on to greater things (Secerno, for example, a technology spin out from Oxford University were purchased by the ubiquitous Oracle Corporation, and Alcentra have become an international presence in investment markets), while many more continue to try to gain traction and impetus in the fragile economy that some see around us.
The initial goal for most of these companies is to get the basics in place. To have a business card that they can use in their first meetings without feeling embarassed by the quality. To get a website that engenders the spirit that they bring to their particular sector of the market. To have a high quality outbound emailer that they can use to keep in touch with their clients and prospects.
It has to be said too that they are often relieved that a company like ours exists. Because we integrate design and web and electronic development, we can ensure that quality stretches across every part of the marketing equation. Something that for a newer company is vital.
Hatton Grange are typical. A headhunting firm specialising in helping private equity firms to staff their new investments (particularly in the fields of new media and marketing), they have been excited and encouraged by the help that WildWest Design has been able to give them, setting up a simple but immensely stylish website and giving them a logo that is both impressive and simple to integrate on stationery and business cards, as well as on the marketing projects they have in mind for next year.
Source Foods are another example, a local company recreating themselves as a great value seller of an interesting range of food for offices and office workers. Our Source ecommerce site is effectively a new outlet for this pioneering firm as they plot the development of their service, which already includes food for meetings to companies anywhere in West London, delivered free of charge.
In similar circumstances, we have managed to help Resolute Asset Management, Satya Capital and most recently R3Location Ltd., a new company offering a more personal and all-embracing service to companies who need to relocate senior executives and their families to homes in London and the South East.
At WildWest Design, we’re very proud of our track record in helping emerging companies to establish themselves, and we always remember that, when they grow, we grow with them.