Resource on tap

Good cross media execution for Leeds-based Resource is based on an understanding of marketing communications. It helps to have a marketer in the ranks.

No-one, apparently, phones Resource and asks for a cross media campaign. The analysis of suitability, the education of the client, the understanding of marketing, and very often the creative execution itself, comes from within the Leeds company.

It has risen from franchise copy shop pre-2003 to become, as it regards itself, one of the few companies in the UK print industry that can meaningfully call itself a marketing service provider. In making that rise, it has helped to have a man like chartered marketer Asif Choudry involved as sales and marketing director. He would probably be too modest to identify himself as a kingpin, but in many ways it is there when he says: ‘Cross media has evolved and that’s why the marketing knowledge in a print company has become paramount. If you’ve not got anyone influencing campaign strategy that understands marketing and production, and has insight into what the web can offer, it all falls down. That’s why I think we are amongst a handful of people doing this.’

He is not particularly flattering of other print companies that have taken what might be termed a short cut to the MSP discussion. ‘I only consider two companies that I know of as real MSPs: ProCo and Prime Group. They are genuinely working as MSPs. Other printers have bought XMPie or Pageflex and all of a sudden they are MSPs, but they started selling it like they are selling print, and I think they have totally stripped away the value that we could have given as an industry.’

At the heart of the complaint is the fact that things such as PURLs and QR codes have been sold without real marketing thought going into their use. Cross media now means much than this for Resource – it is really about multi-channel campaigns; something like the following project that Resource has delivered for a client.

It did a pilot campaign to 250 out of a social housing customer’s database of 12,000 contacts. There were postal addresses for all of these, but the email addresses and mobile phone number proportions were patchier – 75% and 40% respectively. Resource did the concept creative, looked at the tactical execution, and created a four-page piece of sealed DM, fully personalised. It sent e-shots to the email addresses and SMS to mobile, all encouraging people to visit a web page or pick up the phone. It did the entire execution, design build and send of the e-shots and SMS, and it gave the client full analytics.

‘The client reported that they saw a significant increase in calls to the contact centre and website traffic based on email and SMS,’ said Mr Choudry. ‘It will now be rolled out across their entire customer base. They paid far more for the data handling and creative execution than the outputs. That’s the kind of work we want.’

Mr Choudry himself spent some years doing the conference circuit to talk about multi-channel communications, championing print alongside all other channels. Having done that, Resource is now more committed to its own events, where it is gaining what seems an eager audience of marketers and brands.

‘We have become regarded as experts in comms, which you would not expect from a printer,’ he continued. ‘We focus our time on customers’ communications challenges now and that’s how “Comms Hero” came about. When we moved to new premises last May, we steered away from doing an open house, but we thought: let’s be braver and put on our own event; let’s see if we can get 50 people to come along, get some speakers, do something more dynamic, and use it to promote ourselves through people seeing what we do.’

The first Comms Hero event took place in Manchester and four more have followed throughout the next year. When delegates booked they received a personal phone call, then a personalised welcome pack with a printed ticket (costing £180) and personalised letter. Social media references were looked up to increase the personal aspect. At the event itself there were more personalised materials waiting for them, including a t-shirt.

‘Across the events we had 250 marketing contacts there, with a tweet reach of half a million accounts. We wanted to demonstrate to people how multi-channel works. We made the experience much more friendly for them and we continued to showcase print through banners and things. People wrote blogs about it – a printer putting on an event where we actually had agencies asking to come along. That was very flattering but we had kept those places for end users and marketers.’

While Resource is still a printer and will continue to invest in kit and print sheets and deliver them to clients if that is what they want, the 44-employee company’s multi-channel approach, allied to its investments in creative design, data management, web development and non-traditional sales personnel, has moved it up the food chain.

‘We’ve got strategic marketing skills, senior creatives and graphic designers, just like an agency. We’re doing what agencies have been doing for years: sucking up the value and giving the rubbish bits to the printer,’ stated Mr Choudry. The difference is that Resource itself is the printer also, and can add value to any printed aspect of a campaign too. It can, for example, engineer the size of a DM piece so that it fits most economically on the SRA3 sheet for its HP Indigo. It is not a company that has fallen out of love with print by any means.

‘We want to showcase print, but we’re not just going to send out a sheet full of Celloglas finishes; it’s got to have context. Our customers are seeing the difference and they are re-engaging with print because they are seeing that the novelty of social media and e-shots is starting to diminish.’

Resource does not have anything like the firepower of that other Leeds luminary, Communisis, but it does have the intelligence, claims Mr Choudry, and it deploys this right at the start of a project, through fusing marketing knowledge with data segmentation. He said that clients generally do not know what they can do with their data, connected to the output, and this is where Resource ‘can really come into our own’. The company has ISO 27001 for data management, which was a ‘natural progression’.

‘For us it’s just as commonplace as ISO 9001 was,’ said Mr Choudry. ‘It’s going to become standard for people. We are doing things that mailing houses do as standard but we are not detached from the creative and production ends. We are end-to-end and it makes a big difference.’