A tale about a training consultancy, customers and cake
‘Marketing’
- Action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.’
Thank-you, Oxford Dictionary. You are dependable in your provision of deceivingly simple clarifications. In reality, Marketing is a multi-faceted, demanding place to be.
We walk the tightrope of perfect product placement, pricing, promotion and placing with one eye on budget, ROI and competition, and the other on changing trends, emerging technologies and Google’s menagerie of updates!
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised, if someone was to invest some time in collecting the stats, if each year a significant number of Marketing professionals ran away to the circus. Not for any derogatory reasons, but because we have a number of transferable skills including juggling, plate spinning and being Ring Masters of communication and the visual spectacle.
So please may I ask that you put down your plates, balls & top hat for just a moment. I want to take a leaf from the Oxford Dictionary and tell you a much simpler tale. One about a training consultancy, customers and cake!
At RightTrack Consultancy we specialise in bespoke learning and development solutions; we have a strong focus on the customer, innovation and results.
Once a quarter we put some of the more traditional marketing methods to one side and try to do customer engagement in a more innovative way. Righttrack’s 25th birthday last year seemed just the perfect opportunity to combine birthday celebrations with our objective to make a positive, lasting impression upon the minds of those we work with.
Brainstorming Customer Engagement Ideas
Four of us met to play with ideas; three from Righttrack, and a fourth from Wow Internet. We very quickly came up with the idea of cake. Sharing our (hypothetical) birthday cake with customers was a fab idea.
We hadn’t yet thought about the practicalities of carriage (not surprisingly none of us had dabbled in cup-cake trafficking before) but we knew we could work that out in due course. Next we needed to brand it up and think of a punch-line. We grabbed a coffee, shared out the last of the massive Dairy Milk from the fridge, and carried on brainstorming ideas for customer engagement….
Testing these Customer Engagement Ideas
Visions of a three-story cupcake adorned with buttercream butterflies and glistening with edible jewels were quickly put into perspective. Dummy runs number one, two and three came back melted, squashed and upside down respectively.
After many weeks of testing boxes, combinations of coloured ribbon, tissue paper, cupcake pods, and of course cupcakes, we finally landed on the winning combination.
The really fun bit was the fact the sender of this beautiful orange box wrapped in blue ribbon remained a mystery.
There was no mention of RightTrack anywhere. The only note we included was a business card with instructions explaining (to those less tech savvy) how to scan the QR code that was printed onto the top of the cake.
Once deciphered, the QR code led to a webpage that was all about RightTrack and Learning & Development in 1988 through to today (including pictures of the team 25 years ago – goodness me, there are some real beauts there!)
Customer Engagement Execution
I could tell you of the numerous phone calls, 6 meetings, 3 thank-you emails, 4 proposals and 2 orders in excess of £25,000 we got (so far) as a result of this campaign.
However, as a representative of ‘mission accomplished’, instead I’ll leave you with a letter we received from one of our lovely customers.
(If I have been asked to write something to describe the impact I wanted this campaign to have on customers, then I couldn’t have captured it better. But I didn’t write this. It’s real. Thank you Taran!)
Dear Righttrack
The daily routines of Slough Council’s open office environment were enlivened this afternoon with a delightful surprise!
The attention of about 10-15 people from different teams was diverted when everyone overheard our post room courier say, “Taran you’ve got an admirer” as he handed me a box-shaped parcel wrapped in orange paper with shiny blue gift wrap. I suddenly had an audience wondering who could be this secret admirer far from Valentine’s day and xmas.
After cries of, “Go on Taran, open it now”, and many curious eyes fixated on wanting me to urgently reveal what was inside the box, I peeled off the layers until a cupcake with the scan code was revealed, at which point a collective. “WOW…” rang all-round the office.
The doubters were thinking, “Great concept but would the QR code work”? An excited colleague immediately checked it with their smart phone and we learnt it was Righttrack’s 25th anniversary. Not only was the idea a first and imaginative, but the technology also worked. It was a brave idea and you pulled it off.
Thank you so much for sharing Righttrack’s anniversary celebration in such a delightful manner.”
Regards
Taran PanesarOrganisational Development Officer
Slough Borough Council