Genuity

Filling Genuity's Black Rocket seminars with 100's of high quality senior IT leads

Quote: "The Arrow campaign developed by ECM produced virtually 100% recall in those followed up with telemarketing - I'd call that a direct mail bullseye."

Chris Unsworth, International Marketing Director
Genuity Europe

Genuity is one of the world's great inventors, with a big history. BBN, the original company from which Genuity was later formed, played a significant part in the development of the Internet! Genuity's latest innovations include a sophisticated VPN (Virtual Private Network) and Black Rocket, an Enterprise Network Platform for international hosting.

Genuity chose ECM for its European launch of the VPN, starting with the UK market. The brief was to be as inventive as the inventor - because the target market has the reputation for being the hardest to impress, namely Senior IT Executives in large financial organisations.

ECM first researched the market to find out how these prospective customers preferred to receive information, and what information they felt was key for VPNs. Using the research results, ECM then developed a highly creative communications package which set out to make the target audience take notice, and Genuity itself stand out from the competition.

As the research also indicated that seminars would be considered useful, ECM began researching unusual venues, and put together an integrated marketing communications package to ensure multiple 'hits' with prospects remaining on a rigorously cleaned and qualified database.

A VPN provides a secure environment for a company's private business. ECM took its creative lead from one of history's own VPNs and the seminar venue for London-based targets - the Tower of London, private sanctuary to the Royal Family for hundreds of years. The invitation to the seminar was written on a scroll wrapped around a real 16-inch arrow (to represent the lack of security inherent in some methods of communication) with hand-calligraphied, personalised addressing and a specially constructed presentation box.

Seminar bookings were managed on a specially-designed landing page on the Genuity website, and e-mail follow-ups were sent out after the arrow, with a hot-link to the registration page.

The Arrow Campaign turned out to be one of the most memorable and effective pieces of direct mail ever produced for this market. When telemarketing interviewers followed up the mailing, the response was almost unanimous: all targets remembered the invitation - the big question was whether they could attend on the day, not whether they wanted to!

The seminars themselves were a great success. Over 200 high quality leads were created for the Genuity sales team in the UK, and the campaign is now being rolled out across France.