Landmark Impressions

About This Project:

Summary
Through carefully crafted creative, marketing campaigns, and online integration, we helped this New England printer increase sales, launch a new service, change client and prospect perception, and avoid name and location change attrition.

Challenge
Sales for the New England branch of a printing franchise Kwik Kopy hovered just shy of $1 million annually. The owner, Dana Wilson, wanted to get away from the franchise and launch his own brand, as well as move away from conventional printing to a more complete digital solution. His goal was to grow sales to $2 million—or higher if possible while providing a higher tech market solution to his clients.

Dana’s Kwik Kopy has been in business for almost thirty years, and has a large client list that has been built on conventional color printing and black and white copies. Getting clients to transition from perceiving the business as a quick printer to a marketing solutions provider would be a challenge. Printers across the U.S. were attempting this, with mixed results. Essentially, printers were trying to convince marketing people that they are now marketing solutions providers, going against the existing perceptions and prejudices of a highly jaded group. We couldn’t just plug in new services and hope that clients would buy. We had to change how they saw the company.

When we were contacted, Dana had already set wheels in motion to make these changes. He had decided to move away from the franchise, move to a larger location, and rename his business. He also had plans to offer a broader breadth of marketing related solutions, including online document solutions, high-speed digital color printing, and expanded in-house marketing services. He had run a contest, and had a new logo designed for free and was going to drive the entire campaign and business based on that. He initially requested only that we put together direct marketing pieces to launch his new business, communicate to existing clients, and promote his expanded services.

Solution
During our review of his business and existing materials, we analyzed his proposed set of new services—high-speed digital color, and in-house marketing and design services. We found a couple of interesting things. First, the logo that was designed for his new, high-tech and high end service was brown and green, and the icon was a book with the pages flying out. This was at complete odds with his intended message. In addition, he didn’t have the inhouse capabilities at the time to provide design and marketing services.

We proposed a complete rebranding, using the name that he had come up with, Landmark Impressions, but using a new logo to drive all of his marketing communications. We also proposed a multi tiered business and marketing approach to put the services in place that he would then be able to legitimately say they offered. Clients would be hard-pressed to make the “new name, new company, new location, new services” leap all at once. We would then help the newly branded business market those efforts and services through unique direct mail campaigns.

Our plan was as follows:

Create a new logo for the company that reflected high-tech, digital color solutions.

Create supporting marketing materials.

Establish a professional relationship with Landmark as their sole provider of marketing and design services.

Set up them up to sponsor seminars on print design, web integration and pdf file preparation to build credibility.

Produce regular monthly marketing promotions to generate interest and awareness. Each month we would give away and iPod or sports tickets.

Create a “we’re changing our name” campaign, and “we’re moving” campaign.

Develop sales and presentation materials and a new web site to support the rebranding/services effort.

Help senior management research, select, implement new marketing services partnerships to expand their marketing capabilities.

Create new purl programs internally to build interest, generate sales leads, and drive traffic to their web site. 

For the PURL service launch, naturally we used the purl program to market itself. We targeted a select group of existing clients, and a larger group of prospects (1500 total). We created a large folded direct mail card, with the recipient’s name and company embedded in the graphics on the cover. The mail side and inside of the piece were also personalized to the recipient. To increase the perceived value of the package, rather than close the piece with a tab, we enclosed it in a clear envelope. Recipients would have something to open, and the envelope helped the bright colors “pop”. Lastly, we offered something simple and valuable: a no obligation free tour of a new solution that would help internal marketing departments do three important things: boost response, generate higher quality sales leads, and track campaign ROI. With a 12.1% response rate, the campaign was a huge success, and set the tone for all direct marketing programs for Landmark for the next year.

The short- and long-term benefits of our programs have been outstanding. We helped grow Landmark’s business to almost $2 million in sales over 2 years targeted direct mail programs. We developed a comprehensive campaign to minimize customer attrition due to name change and relocation (they experienced nearly zero attrition). We helped them develop and expand their services with the selection their PURL solution partner, and launch the new service. Then we assumed the role of implementation partner, creating all of their programs for their clients. We have not only grown Landmark’s business, but actually changed the way they do business, helping to maximize their investment in new solutions, services and technology.