Background
WILA Lighting Ltd (WILA) is based in Oxfordshire, UK, and creates customised lighting solutions for corporate, cultural and retail environments such as the BBC, KPMG London, Heathrow Airport Terminal 4, and Blavatnik School, Oxford University.
The Challenge
WILA had undergone a Management Buy Out from the parent company two years earlier, retaining close ties with the German-based group. Having successfully steered the company through its first years, the Managing Director was keen to put in place a plan for growth.
They already had a strong UK sales team, a marketing executive providing some coordination and implementation and an outsourced website agency but were missing a marketing strategy and a Marketing Director.
They have a complex buying process including lighting design engineers, electrical engineers and architects and wanted to make it easier for current and future clients to engage and purchase. Additionally, without a dedicated marketing plan (or a team to implement one) they were unsure of how to build relationships with the new generation of lighting engineers.
They approached Priddey Marketing to assess their current marketing and to identify what the best steps would be to improve marketing, and brand awareness and increase online sales in the short, medium and long term.
Approach
The key to identifying the challenges faced by WILA UK was to research the current sales process and client needs. Priddey Marketing approached it in a series of steps:
- Interviewing the Managing Director and Senior Commercial Director to understand what they believed the challenges and the causes to be.
- Creating a framework and interviewing the six members of the customer-facing team.
- Creating a survey and directly contacting clients and potential clients to identify how they would like to be communicated with and their opinions of the company.
These interviews and questionnaires confirmed that the relationship WILA held with old, trusted clients was substantial, but they weren’t as well-connected or as well-known with the new generation of lighting engineers.
A surprising output of the client and potential client interviews, for the Managing Director, was the honest feedback received – not all of it wholly positive. If they had not engaged a third-party to conduct the interviews this valuable information may never have been gathered and acted upon.
Result
The result of all the work that Priddey Marketing carried out with WILA UK was a written report which presented the findings and recommended three key marketing strategies to plan for growth. These strategies were broken down into immediate, medium term and a 5-year plan.
This report was presented to the Managing Director and Commercial Director, and then to the German board, who were impressed and expressed an intention to implement a number of the recommendations themselves.
Su is very easy to deal with, friendly, and makes the whole process very simple. She quickly got to grips with our segment, which is not straightforward, in terms of different brands and route to market, and can sometimes take others a long time.
It’s all good, Su gave us the ingredients to move forward.