Content Strategy & Copywriting: From Customer Gift to Marketing Asset
One of my company’s business units in China approached the Strategic Communications team for help creating a calendar that they gave as a client gift every year.
The calendar featured a small space on each month’s page highlighting household tips related to the retail industry.
Looking at previous iterations, I recognized an opportunity to use that space to showcase the business unit’s expertise. With a focus on my creative concept of sustainability, it was also an excellent candidate to incorporate the company’s first enterprise-wide brand campaign, “The World Runs on Trust.”
A cultural challenge
When I presented my expertise-forward content proposal, the marketer pushed back because they didn’t want the calendar to come across as too promotional and offend their customers. I developed some copy to provide some options, but the marketer was still wary. After several calls and emails, we were able to compromise and collaborate. After we found common ground, I wrote the 12 monthly promotional messages, as well as the calendar cover subhead.
The final results
Despite a very tight timeline to complete the calendar design to print by the end of the year, the designer and I were able to pull everything together with all required approvals by the deadline. The results were striking and compelling.
The calendar turned out so well that regional teams from China, Korea, and Taiwan also requested their own in-language versions to give to their customers — though they had never given customer gifts before.
Kudos from Leadership
After the calendar was published, my manager emailed the senior leadership team to highlight the project, and how it incorporated the enterprise brand campaign.
I wanted to share an awesome World Runs on Trust project that the team just wrapped up! It’s our first major activation of The World Runs on Trust and it was a huge lift for the team, both in terms of volume of work and learning how to use [the campaign guidelines].
Angie, [designer], and [project manager] hustled BIG TIME to make this happen and it looks amazing! I’m super proud of them, and wanted to make sure you had a chance to see their work!"
[The China team] approached us to help build a calendar that they give as a client gift every year. We saw this as an excellent opportunity to incorporate the World Runs on Trust.
"This looks great! Thanks to the team for making this happen."
"This is really eye-catching and a great application of the campaign treatment, well done. It was a pleasure to work with the team! I look forward to sharing this example with our Activation Group and in the slides that showcase our key enterprise activations."
