Description

AGENCY: Suhde
CLIENT NAME: Mainostoimisto Suhde
Campaign started: September 2020
Campaign ended: Ongoing
Created at: August 24, 2021

BRIEF

During the last couple of years, in our new business generation, we have realized that it is more and more challenging to have an opportunity to see business decision-makers to present our capabilities and sell our services. An offer to present ad agency services, solutions of client marketing, or digital campaigns did not any more open the doors to the corner offices. It was almost impossible to set up sales presentations.

What we needed, was a new way of approaching catching the interest of the decision-makers and allowing us to set up sales pitches.

As an outcome of this, we created a new innovative concept differing us from the other ad agencies bringing a totally new idea to the conservative direct marketing: The Suhde Bridge.

STRATEGY:

Suhde Ad Agency specializes in creating and developing continuous customer services; from the start, it was obvious that our new product should focus specifically on customer services marketing.

Due to globalization, digitalization, and channel fragmentation, it is ever more challenging to contact the clients and get their attraction.

In addition, in the world of clients, there have over the past few years been two significant changes leading to the fact that reaching expected results by traditional customer services marketing has proved to be difficult.

1)The clients´ expectations concerning businesses and their activities have changed and increased. There is always a gap between the business activities and the expectations of the clients. As businesses have not been able to meet the changing expectations, this gap has grown even deeper.

2) The clients always buy a product or a service at a certain price and they reflect this investment against the advantage or added value they get. In the past, this advantage was evaluated truly concretely, by pondering what kind of an economic or activity-related advantage the product or service provides. Nowadays, also qualitative factors affect even more the advantage experience. This means that the clients evaluate in which way the product/service responds to their values, experiences, and preferences. The better a company meets them, the more probable it will be selected.

Inspired by these changes, we created The Suhde Bridge. It is a tool bridging the gap between the company´s activities and the clients´ expectations using contemporary customer service marketing.

In this Bridge project, we focus on finding means of meeting the client´s expectations for qualitative factors. The Suhde Bridge, to put it simply, generates a plan of activities giving the business a possibility to attract the clients by appealing to the senses – only by addressing the senses a business can get the attraction of a client. And only by attracting the senses and feelings, we can generate purchase decisions.

The Suhde Bridge views the customer service and marketing ideas with the help of five Bridge pillars:
1) Communality
With the changing world, there are several changes concerning commonality. Which are relevant to the business?
2) Care
Clients expect that the businesses and brands take care of, for example, the community, environment, or future.
3) Dialog
Modern customer service marketing requires that we move on from dialog to genuine interaction.
4) Experimentalism
Which are activities that, in the kinds of clients, make us interesting and attractive?
5) The heroism factor
Defines the competitive edge specifically based on the customer experience and the added value they receive.

The four-step Bridge project:
1) Stating the starting point creates a view of the clients´ life and understanding regarding the advantages they expect to have and the problems they experience.
2) An analysis maps out the gaps and creates an understanding of their significance for the business.
3) In a co-creation we, together with the client, brainstorm means and activities for bridging this gap.
4) The activity recommendation includes an idea of how to sharpen the client´s customer service concept and marketing and also a concrete suggestion of measures with a year clock and road map.

The Bridge project takes about six weeks and, during the corona period, it can be implemented completely virtually.

RESULTS:

The Suhde Bridge has worked exactly the way we thought. It has aroused interest, as it represents, in addition to a completely new way of thinking in customer service marketing, something genuinely new compared to what the competition offers. As a result, it has been easy to book sales pitch meetings and we have also been able to complete several Bridge projects. It has been particularly gratifying to see that we have been able to land sales visits with big companies which normally wouldn´t take an interest in a rather small customer service-oriented ad agency.

September 2020 – May 2021
* 99 sales calls
* 30 agreed Bridge presentations
* 3 completed Bridge projects (all are new clients)
* The most important thing is to get these as permanent clients with continual campaigns.
* When the Bridge basis is once created it is scalable to any client, meaning we don’t have to start from scratch when starting a Bridge project with a new client.

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