PendryWhite Re-Launches Website & Post-Crunch Positioning

Until today, PendryWhite’s website was proof that cobblers’ children are in danger of going unshod. What was state of the art some three years ago is no longer so. It was a static brochure with gizmos that described a traditional public relations business with marketing aspects. Since then, responding to a major economic crisis, the market has changed, we have changed and so our website has changed.

The website launched today makes traditional public relations a relatively insignificant part of our business. Yes, we still do media relations and we have an excellent side line in press office management for the HNWI clients of our sister company TPPR. However, the vast bulk of our work is now strategic reputation-based marketing that makes full use of the new media that are rapidly replacing the old print newspapers that seem to be hovering between breakdown and hiding behind exclusive online paywalls.

The new website is simple and draws you into a dialogue with us and, using the blog and Twitter, it becomes an intellectual resource which you can return to periodically. The RSS tool keeps you up to date with opinions and Twitter with news. This blog posting won’t puff up what you can read very quickly for yourself on the site but simply draws your attention to its existence and to our Clients whose quality speaks for itself.

In our view, it is difficult for any corporation or firm to steer their way between the Scylla of over-enthusiasm and uncritical engagement in the new media world and the Charybdis of fearful refusal not to innovate. This is why PendryWhite has spent three years building a proposition to act as guide between these monsters. The new web positioning expresses this change.

If you need strategic, marketing, new media or international support to deal with rapid market changes and our approach appeals to you, please do not hesitate to call us on +44 (0) 20 7549 1672 and ask to speak to Roger White, Managing Director, or Jenina Bas, Director of Client Services.

have my card … but don’t try to use it!

During the build up to the re-launch of our sister company Communication First, a provider of creative solutions and marketing support to smaller SMEs and start ups, the marketing team spent a frustrating and tiring few hours going through hundreds of business cards to update the database.

Why frustrating and tiring? Well, having gone through this exercise, they began to wonder whether people really wanted to be contacted by potential customers. It is especially true for small companies and start ups. They really need to make an impact. Yet even the big boys make mistakes.

So, here are Communication First’s list of the top five things that people get wrong with their business cards

1              Non standard size cards – Some people think using a different size or shape card to the norm will make them stand out more. It does, but for all the wrong reasons! Yours will certainly be the first to get ditched if it doesn’t fit in standard card boxes, folders, someone’s pocket or any of the normal places that we generally choose to keep business cards.

2              Tiny type –  After trying to read some people’s cards, our team begin to doubt whether they actually wanted anyone to contact them. Have you ever tried reading your own card? Don’t let some local print shop tell you tiny type is the latest trend – it’s not and it does you no favours!  

3              No email address or website – You have just gone to all the trouble of handing over a business card with every conceivable telephone number on it but it has no email address on it and no website for anyone to find out more about you. Why? Both are critical in the modern world if you want to have a successful growing business. Pendry White is even busy putting on its Whiteboard and Twitter addresses as each of its business cards comes up for reprint.

4              Vague generic email addresses – Just as irritating as no email address is the almost meaningless info@, sales@, enquiries@ and the like – they are fine as a response mechanism on your website but come on guys … you have just given me a business card presumably so that I can contact you personally – so why hide behind something that tells me that I am going to get dumped in a general inbox that gets looked at once a week by an over-worked assistant?

5              Nothing to say what you do – This is one we hadn’t thought about too much ourselves. Just a simple one liner is very powerful as a reminder of who you are and what you do – this is particularly so if your company name doesn’t give a clue – “Kitchen Transformations” you can take a good guess at but “Jones & Jones” …?   Pendry White is ‘Reputation Marketing’ because that is what we do!

It is very easy to avoid any and all of these errors. Getting it right doesn’t need to cost you a lot of money but get it wrong and you are just wasting your earnings.

Obviously, Communication First thinks that it can help you avoid these pitfalls. Not only can it get your business cards right for you, but it can sometimes arrange special offers on complete stationery packs so that you are presenting a uniform, quality image to the world. 

It can also create a new company logo and a visual identity for the smaller company, design and produce new marketing materials (it will be doing this for Pendry White’s smaller more cost-conscious clients) or create a basic website that tells people what they need to know about you.

If you would like to know more about it and how it can help you, you can call us or cut out the middle man and go straight to gillkennedy@communicationfirst.co.uk – or check out the website at http://www.communicationfirst.co.uk/.

handling YouTube – a new product from Pendry White

Pendry White tends to play at the top of the market – strategic marketing counselling for the services sector – but Managing Director Roger White has always insisted that the company should never suggest anything new to a client unless Pendry White knows that its implementation can be managed either by his own team or by bringing on board specialists that he and his colleagues can control from a position of knowledge.

He calls this ‘thinking/doing’ and the mentality includes a commitment to helping companies to do things more effectively in-house through training and/or finding the most effective low cost suppliers, often out of London, to handle those simple, repetitive tasks that we might call classic old world PR or marketing agency work.

The approach, based on White’s senior management experience inside big ticket business, emphasises his role as outsourced marketing support within the client team, supporting the Marketing or Business Development Director personally and directly in order to achieve his or her objectives.

This does not mean that Pendry White is not interested in the commodity end of marketing communications but only that it is interested in managing innovation in a way that provides maximum effectiveness for busy in-house staff.

Its primary concerns are content and the management of delivery and it leaves the ‘nerds’ and the techies to innovate. Our interest starts when the Marketing Department knows that something is happening out there of which it has imperfect knowledge and for which it needs practical and cost-effective solutions in managing its entry into new territory.

Regular readers will have noted that we refuse to be enthusiasts for new technologies and that we avoid ‘evangelists’ – ‘evangelists’ on our Twitter account quickly get unfollowed because an ‘evangelist’ is almost by definition, in this context, an impractical bore. Leave evangelism to those concerned with spiritual matters not to matters of business delivery.

We already have a product for effective management of the content for multiple Twitter accounts and Pendry White has now launched, to a few close clients and associates, its integrated system for the production and distribution of small-scale videos working with its long term independent associate Endorfin TV.

Finely priced (call us as a bona fide potential customer and we’ll tell you how finely), this product integrates content production (scripts, filming and editing) with a commitment to defining the right marketing message and to distribution through the appropriate web channels, with search engine optimisation and follow-up monitoring services.

Nor does the product assume that the Marketing Department knows as much as it might like. The service will set up the accounts that you need and the films can be one-offs or short campaigns built around our understanding of what the public wants to hear about what you have to offer.

The purpose of this, and of other Pendry White products of a similar type covering sales development and the new media, is to give mid-sized businesses and the overstretched marketing departments of larger businesses an ‘in’ into the potential of global communications channels at relatively low cost. The aim is to create content that is not only friendly to the new media but encourages onward viral distribution.

This is not a small community. There are well over 300 video sharing sites on the web in almost every language. Videos can be tailored quite easily to specific types of site and language zones.

Given our historic experience in the Middle East, this product may be of special interest to businesses wanting to export products, services and ideas to an Arab market that, in our experience, much prefers to see rather than read about what is being offered at first stage of the sales process.

The close synergy between the biggest site, YouTube, and Google means that search engine optimisation can be linked to advertising strategies and the provision of creative content to create an unbeatable argument for contacting your sales department amongst the people who most need or want to talk to you – who are, by far, the best sort of customer.

Get it right and you dictate the terms of your reputation, not only for sales development but also for issues management, public affairs and in support of that intangible sense that the company is worth working for and adds more brand value to its customers than just the service it provides.

For more more information, not only on the Pendry White strategy for online video management but also on its Twitter and other online management services, contact either Roger White on rwhite@pendrywhite.com or Laura Hodges on lhodges@pendrywhite.com