You know the in-your-face victory dance that you do in the end zone after you score the winning touchdown? Me neither. But I’ll bet you can imagine it and forgive me for celebrating a 2013 Gold MarCom Award for Goldstein Group and our client, Keithley Instruments.
Those of you who are visualizing me shaking my skinny booty exuberantly, resist the urge to poke out your eyes. The truth is that I don’t feel like celebrating. Nope. Instead, I feel humbled.
Marketing agencies seldom get the chance to work with a corporate marketing team that not only knows the right things to do but can also execute them superbly. This winning campaign, called “Touch, Test, Invent,” launched Keithley’s Model 2450 SourceMeter® Source Measure Unit (SMU) Instrument. It is the industry’s first benchtop SMU with a capacitive touchscreen. If you’re not an electronics engineer, then just think “geek tech cool meets Nobel-Prize-winning research.”
It was a privilege to be part of a top-notch product launch, which had a lot of moving parts. The marketing components of the global launch included a www.touchtestinvent.com microsite, videos, web banner advertising, paid search advertising, face-to-face appointments with media, live remote product demos, brochures, white papers and other collateral. Goldstein Group assisted with many elements of the program, which were primarily executed by the Keithley marketing team, including all of the creative design.
The success of the program was built upon a uniting vision that emerged from customer conversations. The “Touch, Test, Invent” theme line supports the corporate brand message of empowering engineers and scientists in ways that make it easier for them to invent and innovate. In addition, it provides a robust platform for product feature messaging, including the ability to “reach out and touch your data” and an easy-to-learn user interface that helps novice users master the instrument quickly so they can complete testing faster and get on with their inventing.
I’ve worked in marketing communications since the days of manual typewriters, and a good theme still gives me goose bumps. (Yeah, kinda weird, I know.) Usually, the words just dangle, without firm ground to stand on. This is one of those exceptional times that all the marketing elements came together to support a unified set of messages based on real customer experiences. No wonder the MarCom Award judges at the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals gave us a trophy. Hmmm… okay, I guess we can dance a little.
We applied a variety of new techniques in our Keithley launch, some specific to engineers, one of our agency’s specialties. You might find some of them helpful as you’re planning for 2014. Read our latest white paper on Marketing to Engineers.
