case study:
The Icon
The Icon is a professional photo lab and one of the last remaining full-service labs in the country that offers traditional color and B&W lab services as well as state of the art digital services. When the recession hit they needed to market their company, for the first time ever. I was brought in to define an overall strategy that included re-branding, awareness building, and sales outreach. We defined and launched new services to create additional revenue streams and customer base.
We started with a branding campaign. Perception-wise it is important to look your best. First impressions do count when soliciting new customers. We refreshed an old outdated website to create a very sophisticated look that showcased their strengths, emphasized by testimonials and images from some of their high-end clients and well-known professional photographers. If other photographers saw that the best of the best use this lab, they would follow. And they did!
Collateral materials were designed and printed for distribution at point-of-sale, a stunning ad campaign was released in all the major photo trade publications continuing the theme from the website and highlighting their star clients work.
New services were added, refurbishment of their lobby and client workroom and a gallery was erected to bring additional foot traffic in from busy Wilshire Boulevard (Museum Row) as well as give reason to highlight their star clients. Gallery openings gave reason for publicity on a regular basis, and parties and events allowed customers to inter-mingle. Word of mouth helped to increase business from these events alone.
However, the biggest sales tool was the enhancement of their online presence. Building awareness online is economical, organic and effective. The owner, Ramesh Venugopal identified this as an important task so much that he dedicated one of his front counter employees to being a full time New Media specialist. Joe followed the procedures that I provided to a “T” in designing and constantly maintaining the necessary social networking platforms (FaceBook, Twitter, Blogger, YouTube and other enhanced strategies,) and continued to build upon this presence by implementing an effective SEO/SEM (google adwords) strategy and worked diligently to bring the share of the analytics pie to an even mix of Search (organic) / Referrals (links) / Direct traffic to the website.
Today, The Icon is flourishing amidst a downturn in the economy and depressed ad market; and as other labs are closing, The Icon is thriving.