Canon wanted to improve the quality of the marketing support they provided for their EMBU region. Our first project led to high participation levels across the entire region.
Canon wanted to improve the quality and flexibility of the marketing support they provided for their EMBU sales and marketing teams, who operate across 97 countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Rather than using campaigns created for western Europe, as they had done in the past with little success, they wanted to empower regional managers to deliver marketing solutions using bespoke campaign toolkits that were more likely to meet local market needs.
They searched for a London marketing agency and found Abacus. We already had some useful hands-on experience in the delivery of similar toolkit-based campaigns across EMEA, as a consequence of the channel marketing campaigns we had created and delivered for IBM and Xerox. This knowledge informed us of some of the challenges we were likely to encounter, as well as providing some useful insights into what we would need to do to overcome them.
The first step in the process was to understand their marketplace, and Canon were incredibly helpful in investing the time and energy necessary to bring us up to speed as quickly as possible. They shared information with us about the Canon brand and all its products and services, and they explained all the issues we might face when putting together campaigns for the EMBU region. They told us what had worked well in the past, and what had not. They advised us on all the issues we needed to be aware of to avoid any political and cultural faux pas.
The first campaign brief we worked on was to create a toolkit of assets to promote sales of a camera that had been launched some months previously without any marketing support – and something needed to be done to help the local markets ASAP. The brief was primarily to deliver social media advertising campaigns and retail point of sale. From a very early stage in the process, we realised that it would be advantageous to offer local markets a choice of different campaign themes within the toolkit, so that each territory had the opportunity to choose the one that best suited their needs.
Our marketing team took the brief and researched the product. Our design studio provided various creative services, including creative direction, graphic design, artworking, image searching, retouching and copywriting. Our project management team provided a proactive interface with the client to make sure that assets were signed off as efficiently as possible by various Canon stakeholders working within their marketing, branding, sales, product, content and legal teams. The toolkit was a huge success, with regional managers supporting the initiative, and a large number of localised campaigns ran across the EMBU region.
We were subsequently appointed to deliver additional campaigns to promote other products and services in the EMBU region. Most of the work we now deliver includes the production of films to promote these campaigns on social media – that means storyboarding, casting, filming and editing, as well as creating a soundtrack, animations and graphics. We enhanced the toolkit with extra assets too, as well as offering ideas for retail promotions and social promotions to help local markets deliver an even more integrated marketing solution.
“Really pleased with the work that Abacus has delivered for us so far. They are very easy to work with. I was impressed with how quickly they understood what we wanted to achieve.”
Saeed Mughal
Marketing Manager
Canon Europe
London marketing agency
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