HP kicks off a run of educational ‘fuel stops’ for printers looking to help grow their business with its inaugural Relay 2013 event, focussed on predatory marketing. Printers were treated to an intimate and intensive workshop with guest speakers from renowned agency Step Change Marketing, and actually walked away with an individual, practical plan for their business to get predatory. The secret is to be a porcupine in an 800-pound gorilla fight.
- Jason Beckley and Ashton Bishop
It may sound silly, but predatory marketing is about being spiky. It’s about honing your business pitch to a clear and unique selling point, rather than slugging it out on the day-to-day. It’s important to have a broad offering to sell, but when it comes to marketing it’s critical to narrow the pitch; go inch-wide, mile-deep.
It was this real-world cut-through that prompted the team at HP, led by business development manager, Jason Beckley, to get Step Change involved with the event.
According to Beckley, “Our customers don’t need to know how to sell print, they need to know how to market it.”
In line with the current climate, Beckley devised Relay 2013 to stimulate the industry ecosystem with new ideas, to add value to HP’s customer-base and help fortify the right image behind digital print, moving into the future.
“It’s not just about engaging our customers and helping them, we’ve got to inject back into the industry or we’ll lose it a new competitor. I’m not talking about print suppliers, I’m talking about the Apples, and the tablets. It’s these people that are clawing away at our print,” he said.
“We’ve sold our customers a tool box, now we’re filling it up with the tools.”
Packing the tools in the case are Ashton Bishop and Adam Long, from Step Change Marketing, who challenged printer to “listen with fresh eyes.”
Ashton Bishop, head of strategy with Step Change, said, “The key to predatory marketing is to identify the weakness in your oppositions greatest strength, the point that inflicts the greatest damage and makes response the most difficult. That’s how you make your business stand out, because if don’t then you’re not promoting yourself, you’re just driving generic brand category noise.”
Bishop and Long’s refreshingly hands-on approach helped break through the noise, going one-on-one with the guests for a ruthless self-audit, and then helping to build a personalised plan for each.
Four more Relay sessions are planned to roll out next year, starting in February, each answering to a different business vertical or issue raised by customers, including a stream on lean manufacturing, and the ‘get, keep, grow’ principle of customer development.