Adare: inspiring better marketing and corporate communication
As companies look to communicate with a more selective consumer base in different ways, Adare believes it has the core skills to help its clients carry out that communication more effectively.
Some time ago an employee of Adare received three mail shots in the same day from the same estate agency chain. It turned out to be a seminal moment in the way that the estate agent contacts its prospective clients – Adare has now provided Hamptons with a template driven centralised marketing resource, linked to names of occupiers, mailing history, length of residency, council tax bands and the like for each area, allowing individual branches to quickly and simply create personalised mailers to very specific targets.
“That’s what we mean by solutions,” says Robert Whiteside, Adare’s chief executive. “It allows Hamptons to communicate better and faster with its customers, and that’s what our clients require.”
The example also serves to demonstrate how far removed Adare has become from a “traditional” print management role, to occupy the new territory it enjoys. Whiteside continues: “We did not come at the problem from a print management perspective, or just to get volume through our Xerox iGen printers. It was ‘there is a communications problem, let’s help you with that’, and they now have a very slick mailing tool.”
Adare itself is an organisation that has undergone substantial change in recent years, following a management buy out, then a re-branding and whole new outlook on the way it operates. The company now talks about “Inspired Communications”; not print, or print management, because print is only one part of what the marketing and corporate world requires.
Whiteside explains how the print buying market has evolved since the 1990s, from the tactical buying of small in-house teams in every company, to the adoption of the early print management model that leveraged spend to create buying power, through to the initial moves in recent times to integrate solutions to carry this out more effectively. It’s an evolution that has also seen print management progress towards document management.
Now it’s time for the next stage, and Adare believes it is ideally positioned. Says Whiteside: “The market is now going from buying better to doing what you do smarter; to becoming a communications solutions market place. Companies need a communications strategy and they recognise that they need to be more customer-centric, providing many more self-service solutions, because customers are selecting what they want to receive and how. So the output is medianeutral, and we’re going from document management to marketing and corporate communications – the ability to generate revenue through communications.
“All of these things that are driving the market are in our proposition – data driven one-to-one communications, multimedia output, push and pull, dynamic content. All of these skill sets existed here anyway, but in the last year we have brought them all together, and it’s very powerful as a joined-up solution.”
Adare therefore specialises in a wide range of areas, which can assist brands to communicate more effectively with their customers. It has a rapidly growing creative services capability, already handling £4 million of business and doubling every year; it has data expertise, and core skills in in-store marketing, direct marketing, print management, transactional communications, and document management. All of these it sees as hot buttons for corporate marketers to press in the acquisition and retention of, and then strengthening of ties with, customers.
Whiteside explains: “Regardless of what the media is, we are there to help the marketers create their ‘own space’ in their own markets. On the one-toone marketing side, we can manage the creative, data and the output and then we can measure the results for them, giving them new and more accurate insights into their client base, which ultimately leads to improved return on their marketing investment.
“On the retail side, where we are very strong, we can design campaigns, profile stores so clients can understand the point of sale requirement, and help them manage it across geographical borders. Our technology solutions enable us to deliver that. It allows a marketer to create a virtual store and visualise where POS material can be best placed without them moving out of the office. It’s about taking time and process out of their day.”
In addition to their in-store retail and brand marketing solutions, Adare has the unique capability to service retailer’s packaging requirements as well.
Whiteside says: “We have created a unique proposition in packaging solutions. Building on Adare’s wealth of experience in packaging and global supply chain management and complementing this with significant investments in technology, we have created a solutions lead packaging business which is helping many well known food retailers to change the way they think about designing and sourcing their packing. Apart from providing significant cost savings, a really powerful component of Adare’s solution is that we are focussing on sourcing environmentally friendly products. We’re also trying to reduce the amount of packaging and the amount of distribution required, and we’re working on reducing customers’ carbon footprints, and that’s a big driver for clients in packaging solutions.”
Adare’s solution does not only focus on helping clients to acquire new customers, it also calls for a re-appraisal of the way that companies communicate with existing customers. Communications such as bank statements and policy documents have traditionally been a flat medium, used purely for the functional requirements of information. Adare’s philosophy is that every time a company talks to a client is an opportunity to put marketing messages in front of them also.
“We understand the components that underline a whole marketing and corporate communications strategy. What drives a strategy is creating the right message, delivering it to the right people in the right way at the right time. Instead of four identical letters coming through the same letter box, our data teams are helping clients to gain control of the data and giving these large corporate organisations a single view of the customer.”
“We want to help customers be smarter with data. They may have a £10 million print spend, but our argument is why do you need to spend £10 million on print? You could probably win the same volume of business and only spend £2-3 million pounds,” Whiteside continues.
Working with blue chip clients and some of the world’s best known brands, Whiteside adds that every solution is tailor made for each customer. It is still important to deliver the savings but clients increasingly are looking for a new generation of marketing support. “They’re now starting to buy the intelligence behind the commodity – the ability to handle data properly, the innovation we bring to their products and their business. Savings are a given, we’re interested in unseen costs, the process costs, the environmental costs, not just the commodity costs.”
“We have all the key elements in the whole channel of communications, and that’s our advantage in this space – clients now recognise that we can provide them with a far more strategic insight into how they can win new customers and grow the relationship with the customers they already have. That’s a very different view of Adare to what people had a few years ago, and that’s as much about what we have done with the business as it is listening to the clients,” says Whiteside.
“Our view is that there’s no other organisation in the marketplace with all the same core competencies. Only when you connect all these elements can you make a difference to what clients are doing. The market drivers are still around ROI though: people want their buck to work harder and smarter,” says Whiteside.
Case study - Legal & General
Adare manages a single source print management contract for Legal & General, including the provision of design, artwork, print and direct marketing campaigns. Adare’s onsite team manages around 300 projects per month, ranging from 2-page leaflets to million-plus runs of direct mail campaigns. In addition, a digital asset management system, holding more than 40,000 files has been developed.
This is all impressive enough, but it’s put in the shade by Adare’s environmental achievements with Legal & General. Adare won the client’s Environmental Supplier of the Year for 2006 – the second time it has received such an accolade, having won in 2003 also.
Adare has researched options and advised Legal & General on a move to environmentally-friendly paper stocks, with Legal & General now using recycled and FSC-certified paper stocks for all its coated cut sheet marketing collateral. The project was delivered in conjunction with WRAP (the Waste & Resources Action Programme) and Legal & General can now publicly state that it specifies FSC-certified paper on all its marketing literature.
“Adare’s expertise and market knowledge have proven invaluable to the delivery of this important initiative,” says Legal & General’s Linda Skinner.