Xerox
Engaging businesses with a global brand
We revived an old-fashioned brand by demonstrating the practical and emotional benefits of colour in the business environment.
The challenge
Grow Xerox's colour sales and revenues
Xerox was struggling to shake off its image as an old-fashioned black and white copier company. They asked us to help them reinvigorate their brand within the high value business colour marketplace, and create Active Engagement with senior business decision-makers. Our goals were to grow sales and revenues of colour products and services, and gain a significant share of the colour sector in 15 European markets.
Our insight
Demonstrate the practical and emotional benefits of colour
Corporate decision-making responsibility for copiers, printers and multi-functional devices lies with a range of stakeholders from office managers to IT and finance people - and a large proportion of these people are colour-cautious. They see colour as expensive, and they do not appreciate the value that it can bring to documents and presentations.
Our research led to the key insight: people only recognize the value and benefit of colour when it is within a black and white context. We needed to find a way of demonstrating the practical and emotional benefits of colour in the business environment.
Our solution
Build campaign around adding or removing colour from media environments
We targeted opportunities to add colour to traditional mono environments, or to remove colour from environments where people expect to see it.
Key decision makers spend a lot of time online or using mobile devices. So we created transitional ads across major business portals where the site would open in mono and gradually turn to colour with a Xerox advertising message. Xerox was first to develop clickable colour ads on the BlackBerry® version of FT.com.
We developed partnerships with leading newspapers, transforming normally mono business sections into colour. In the UK, The Daily Telegraph's Alex cartoon was published in colour for the first time, with the strip content also reinforcing the advantages of colour.
We booked prestige outdoor sites to engage with people on the move, exploiting special technology to communicate our message.
For the soccer World Cup, we created branded content vignettes, starting off in mono and gradually introducing colour to show viewers the benefit.
The results
- Sales tripled in the key colour segment
- Market share up 5.6%
- Revenues up 18%
