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More Than Mail: Think You Know Pitney Bowes? Think Again
Building Awareness and Shifting Perceptions of an Industry Icon
By Adryanna Sutherland, President-Cincinnati
GyroHSR
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GyroHSR’s “There’s a lot more here than you think” campaign takes Pitney Bowes’ brand beyond the envelope. |
What do you envision when you think about Pitney Bowes? According to the company’s internal research, if you’re like 83 percent of individuals you think of postage metering equipment. Pitney Bowes is trying to change that. The company, which has a strong and familiar brand, has been typecast as a postage metering company despite having acquired more than 70 companies over the past eight years. Through these acquisitions, Pitney Bowes has expanded its capabilities well outside the mailroom.
The company now offers relationship marketing, channel marketing, location intelligence, predictive analytics, operational intelligence and document management capabilities. Unfortunately, Pitney Bowes’ target audience wasn’t aware of the extent of these capabilities. Many only considered it a postage metering company, when in fact the company has so much more to offer. As a result, it’s hard for Pitney Bowes to communicate its new products and services to potential buyers because they assume any marketing material from Pitney Bowes only applies to metering mail.
Pitney Bowes approached GyroHSR to change the perception of its brand. The challenge was to raise awareness of Pitney Bowes’ capabilities outside the mailroom, without diminishing—and even reinforcing—the premium value of its heritage postage meter and supply business. GyroHSR created the “There’s a lot more here than you think” campaign designed to do just that.
Elements of a Successful Campaign
There isn’t a lot of copy on an ad, because advertisers only have a few seconds to capture a reader’s attention. The key is to entice the reader—to peak their curiosity—and direct them to a place with more detailed information. For Pitney Bowes, that place was the Connection Center (www.pbconnect.com), an online resource center that further told the Pitney Bowes story and explained the value the company brings to various market segments.
The site creates a unique experience for each individual segment with relevant white papers, case studies and other collateral to illustrate how Pitney Bowes’ capabilities can be applied to specific business challenges. Users are encouraged to interact with materials on the site by recommending or providing comments. It gives visitors a sense of what might be of interest to them and helps Pitney Bowes develop new materials for the site.
The site also features a blog that provides industry commentary from Pitney Bowes executives, business leaders, authors and academics. The blog includes interactive surveys to gauge opinions about important industry topics and a Twitter feed which announces new blog postings and updates on industry events.
Getting individuals to the Connection Center site required great creative. That’s what GyroHSR delivered.
As a first step, GyroHSR met with Pitney Bowes business units to better understand their challenges and capabilities. From here, the agency developed benefit-based messaging that spoke directly to six different audiences—senior executives, IT professionals, marketing professionals, small/medium businesses, business operations and mail operations professionals. These messages reinforced the company’s brand position, while expanding perceptions in a way that was relevant to each audience segment.
At the same time, the agency developed creative concepts that were interesting enough to get the attention of those that wouldn’t automatically assume a Pitney Bowes message was directed at them. In short, make them stop dead in their tracks and look at an ad that they think doesn’t apply to them. Not an easy feat.
To do this, GyroHSR used eye-catching imagery that broke through the mental Pitney Bowes-mail metering association without straying too far from its mail services roots. After all, the company wanted to generate awareness of its new capabilities but also protect and grow its core business inside the mailroom.
Beyond the Envelope
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Ads directed individuals to Pitney Bowes' Connection Center, an online resource center for more detailed information. |
The campaign included nine ads that were placed in publications relevant to the target audiences. Each ad included an industry-specific image emerging from an envelope, as an extension of the envelope. The idea was that the envelope represented Pitney Bowes’ core mail business, but the image represented other capabilities the company offers.
This presented a challenge. GyroHSR was careful not to make the envelope the focal point of the creative because this risked compromising the intent of the campaign. For example, if a reader sees an envelope and the “Pitney Bowes” moniker, they might simply associate the company with mail and move on. The objective was to make them stop and read the messaging, and to do this the envelope played a critical role in the creative, but the focal point of the creative was the surprise element, which came out of the envelope.
One of the ads featured a tree emerging from an open envelope, its extensive root system visible at the bottom of the envelope. The accompanying message reads, “Confidence. Information is rooted in a tangle of raw data—disorganized, inaccurate and hard to understand. With software from Pitney Bowes, disconnected data grows into solid business intelligence, branching out as a source of decisive answers. Companies in 85 countries use Pitney Bowes software to make confident decisions.”
Another image shows vehicles traveling on a suspension bridge that originates from inside an envelope. The message reads, “The bridge to business insight. Mail and operational data is solid business intelligence, showing you how to better connect your company to your customers. Pitney Bowes Business Insight capabilities help companies worldwide bridge the gap between business data and customer relationships.”
A third ad shows a bouquet of flowers appearing from an envelope. Its message reads, “The personal touch. The more you treat your customers as individuals, the more motivated they are to listen to what you’re saying and buy what you’re selling. Pitney Bowes helps businesses worldwide create the highly personalized communications that create long-term relationships and loyalty.”
Other ads include an envelope and a telescope, sailboat, waterfall, rocket, highway and a DNA strand, each of which includes relevant messaging that ties the image to a specific audience segment.
Each symbolic image was created to communicate to a different audience: the tree to IT professionals, the bridge to business operations professionals, and the bouquet of flowers to marketing professionals and small business operators. The ads speak to different audiences, but they all share a unifying theme—something not typically found in an envelope captures the reader’s attention and visually connects the image to the key message. In addition to the tagline, “There’s a lot more here than you think,” each ad also includes a unique URL that directs the reader online to the Connection Center site for more information.
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The agency created online banner ads using the same visual elements but with an interactive spin. |
Targeting Readers Through Print and Online
Because the Pitney Bowes campaign targeted six different audience segments, GyroHSR placed the ads in vertical publications that catered to these audiences. For example, the tree ad appeared in Information Week, CIO and Government Technology; the flower ad in Fortune Small Business, Forbes.com, CNNMoney.com and DMNews; and the bridge ad in Site Selections, Supply & Demand Chain Executive and Global Logistics & Supply Chain Management.
GyroHSR also created online banner ads using the same creative elements but with a more interactive spin. The bridge banner ad includes animated vehicles traversing the bridge, the tree grows from seedling to maturity and an envelope opens to reveal a bouquet of flowers. As with the print ads, the online banner ads were placed on sites specific to each target audience. Readers that clicked on the ads were directed to the appropriate audience segment page on the Pitney Bowes’ Connection Center site for more information.
Measuring Success
It’s important to mention that the campaign was created to raise awareness of Pitney Bowes’ capabilities and drive traffic to the Connection Center site, not to generate leads. Therefore, its success couldn’t be measured in new sales or accounts; measuring an individual’s perception is more complex.
One of the most effective measurement tools has been the Connection Center Analytics Dashboard, an application created by GyroHSR that aggregates data from several sources and distills it into a single view for easy-to-interpret reporting. The dashboard provides dials, similar to a car’s fuel gauge, with green, yellow and red indicators. Pitney Bowes can look at these dials and determine at a glance which audiences are receptive to the overall campaign and which are falling flat.
Timely reporting is critical to any high-impact and highly competitive digital marketing activity, but it is often complex to interpret. This application, however, only shows two top-level metrics for each audience: engagement and conversion.
The conversion metric evaluates several “opt-in” features, such as filling out a “contact us” form, subscribing to Pitney Bowes’ newsletter, downloading an asset, viewing a webinar, subscribing to an RSS feed or clicking on the ShareThis widget. The engagement metric evaluates the average time an individual spends on the site, audience retention rates, page visits and page views, number of new and repeat visitors, poll responses and the number of asset downloads.
Each of these actions is weighted in terms of its importance. For example, filling out a "contact us" form is far more important than viewing a webinar to the conversion category. The application compares these metrics to industry benchmarks and the result is a customized, yet flexible reporting view that allows Pitney Bowes stakeholders to look at the dials and tell immediately whether or not the program is working.
Understanding which audiences have the highest and lowest engagement and conversion metrics allows GyroHSR and Pitney Bowes to fine-tune the campaign. For example, if the engagement metric is very low for the IT audience, Pitney Bowes can reallocate funds to media programs that better target that audience.
The campaign is still ongoing, but early results indicate increased overall awareness of Pitney Bowes capabilities, strong portal site traffic and higher-than-average banner ad click-through rates. Pitney Bowes plans to conduct a follow-up survey at the conclusion of the campaign—which it will compare to the initial survey conducted prior to the campaign launch—to evaluate the change in perception.
Even though the ability to raise awareness and change perceptions of Pitney Bowes’ brand is still being measured, the campaign’s creative merit has already been evaluated. Earlier this year, the campaign was recognized with a Pro-Comm Award, one of the advertising industry’s most sought-after awards. It received the “Best of Division” award for total communications program. The creative elements of the campaign were also featured in BtoB magazine, a leading business-to-business marketing trade publication.
Need more information?
President-Cincinnati
GyroHSR Cincinnati
300 E-Business Way, Suite 500
Cincinnati, Ohio 45241
513-671-3811
Fax: 513-671-8163
adryanna.sutherland@gyrohsr.com