FMBE Awards 2023: Operational Success of the Year
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GOLD Option1 – Orange
It only took a phone call from Orange Poland to its long term Field Marketing agency Option1. That was enough to mobilise the team to set off immediately to set up refugee centres on the Ukrainian border as the first of 13 million Ukrainians fled the conflict with 8.2 milllion making the journey in the first 3 months.
The first two border centres were established on day 2 of the conflict, each with 24 staff and a 24/7 operation in process.
The two main objectives of these centres:
- to distribute free Orange SIM cards to enable refugees to contact their relatives in Ukraine both, via phone and internet;
- to offer practical guidance as to where to go next, how to get to and use public transportation in Poland etc., along with giving out hot tea/coffee.
Orange has charted its humanitarian priorities. https://www.orange.com/en/newsroom/news/2022/solidarity-ukrainians-orange-mobilizes#
Option1’s response was top down, led from the front by its managing partner. At peak 556 staff were deployed. Reaching peak was by day 12. There were 100 refugee centres. Many of the staff used for the project came from Ukrainians already employed by Option1 in Poland creating a vital bilingual welcome.
At the time of entry 5 centres remain open.
SILVER Willow Park – Cisco
To drive their Cisco Meraki business, Cisco’s Senior Managers, Marketeers and Sales Teams regularly attend face-to-face demonstration / proof-of-concept meetings and events within their local territories, around the world.
The purpose of those meetings is to create sales opportunities for the business, by driving awareness and understanding of Cisco Meraki’s Networking products and their competitive advantages. These meetings also serve to win ‘Hearts & Minds’ for Cisco: to build their very valuable personal relationships with Cisco partners and customers, helping to maintain Cisco’s reputation as a supplier of the highest quality.
Willow Park has become a critical operational/logistical enabler of those demonstration meetings. Following requests from their sales colleagues, (channelled through Cisco’s USA-based Head Office Field Marketing teams,) Willow Park fulfils and delivers all the materials that are needed for these meetings to proceed successfully. Wherever in the world the meeting is to take place Willow Park is tasked to ensure that the local Cisco representatives are fully equipped to undertake their business, driving sales.
Willow Park delivers all items involved for each meeting: from complex live Meraki Networking demonstration equipment, through to appropriate language-specific and content-specific banners and other booth dressings, right down a wide variety of Cisco-branded promotional items.
The salesperson just arrives.
All their requested items are there waiting for them, customs cleared, fully processed, at the venue.
After the meeting, Willow Park then efficiently retrieves all relevant items, back to its local warehouses, for further re-use, within the territory, at future events. The risk of reputational damage, and lost business opportunity, should Willow Park fail to deliver to the agreed schedule, is very high.
The numbers that report the level of activity are certainly imptressive. From July 2021 to the end of July 2023, Willow Park successfully processed 1,363 individual global orders for Cisco. Within those orders, the team has hand-picked and delivered 56,969 Cisco-owned items. These have been sent to over 55 different countries around the world.
This magic has been achieved using 5 storage facilities globally and with the help of Willow’s specific Ordering Portal.
SILVER eXPD8 – Tesco
How many field marketers does it take to change the light bulbs?
The numbers in this one are confidential so we will offer you the problem that was solved using highly effective field marketing. The problem: the rule makers called time on an out-of-date ratings system for light bulb efficiency so the labelling had to be changed, something that would leave relevant retailers, including Tesco, with a significant amount of stock to relabel.
BRONZE Circle – Costa
This excellent piece of experiential opportunism came about after Costa appointed Ronan Keating as Director of Love. Working on very shorty notice the brand team devised a love hearts campaign to all Costa to spread the love, using inflatable hearts to capture the imagination in 10 unmissable locations as part of a 2 day stunt.
Though hastily produced the eye-catching ‘Love Landmarks’ campaign was never short on quality and drew in excellent results including impressive ROI for Costa.
BRONZE SmartSpotter – PPL PRS
This is the first FMBE award for new entrant in 2023, SmartSpotter, an Advantage Smollen team that uses an app to reach out to the crowd, its ‘spotters’. The team is definitely ‘one to watch’.
In this case spotters were recruited to report on music being played at live venues without a licence from PPL PRS. This was a highly effective use of spotters. The data on this one remains confidential.
