Popularity among customers and ability to convey the message in an effective way remain the most important things that can ensure the success of a company. In order to be able to meet these requirements, many large companies develop special strategies and launch marketing campaigns that allow them to redefine their public images and demonstrate their ability to be in step with the times. Such campaigns may help to attract more attention to a particular problem within the field of work and its possible solutions proposed by a company. Nevertheless, the success of marketing campaign depends upon a variety of factors.
Developing the effective marketing campaign strategy is a highly sensitive task that includes many important steps such as defining its main objectives, analysing target audience and its needs, inventing the ways of how to incorporate vision of a company into the activities, and defining the most effective tools that would help to convey the message (Ewing, Stewart, Mather, & Newton, 2014). Nowadays, many companies use marketing campaigns; some of them turn out to be more effective than the others due to many reasons. More than one year ago, Xerox Corporation also decided to attract customers’ attention to its wide range of products with the help of the new marketing campaign called “Work Can Work Better”. There are different opinions on its effectiveness but it definitely encouraged the world to see Xerox Corporation and its activity in a different light.
The Campaign and the Present Position of Xerox Corporation
To begin with, Xerox Corporation belongs to the number of the largest companies in the United States. It is the company with a long history; it was established more than one hundred years ago. Xerox Corporation is believed to be one of the leading companies when it comes to office machinery and the development of digital printing technologies. Furthermore, the company takes an active part in developing new document technologies and professional solutions for business. Trying to increase the number of its products and keep up with the times, Xerox Corporation collaborated with other companies in order to invent new styles of computer mouse and modern interface of personal computers. The costs of this development were extremely large; due to that, the right to develop these ideas was given to other famous companies.
Nowadays, company remains very popular in more than one hundred countries all over the world. The company produces a wide range of products such as printers, printing paper, special software for printers and scanners. Trying to develop products that would provide a convenience of reference, the specialists from the research center of the company also invented devices that could fulfil all these functions simultaneously. Taking into consideration all these facts, it is necessary to conclude that the company remains quite successful as its products are still associated with a high quality, reliability, and performance. Nevertheless, last year was not the most successful for the company. Certain financial loss was recorded in 2015, and it was impossible to ameliorate the situation without developing additional solutions (“Financial highlights,” 2015).
The company remains the leader in the market of document technologies. Considering that, the company decided to uphold its positions and increase its popularity among customers even more. To achieve these goals, it developed and launched a campaign that was called “Work Can Work Better”. With the help of this campaign, the company wanted to demonstrate that its opportunities were not limited to hardware production. To be more precise, it aimed at putting an emphasis on a wide range of business services that had been developed recently. As it is clear from the present vision of Xerox Corporation, the company is going to spend larger sums of money and attract experienced specialists to develop even more tools for business and propel its products to the next level. Nowadays, the income gained with the help of business services is already a substantial part of an annual profit of the company. The discussed marketing campaign was launched in 2015.
Unlike many other marketing campaigns, the one launched by Xerox was not pointed at promoting the particular product that had been invented a short time ago. Instead, the company wanted to have a dialogue with its prospective customers in order to show that the way the company was seen in the market was not consistent with the reality. According to the key management personnel of the company, there are certain stereotypes concerning Xerox Corporation, and it is necessary to move beyond these outdated perceptions of their activity. To put it in other words, their primary goal was connected to the necessity for challenging stereotypes and showing the world the real Xerox Corporation that was capable of doing something besides manufacturing a range of office appliances. The primary problem for Xerox Corporation was connected to the fact that people all over the world were likely to associate the company only with a very specific field.
However, it is necessary to say that this very situation was caused by enormous popularity of copying machines manufactured by the company. In fact, the role of Xerox company cannot be overstated. Another obvious evidence of this universal popularity was the fact that in many countries (primarily in Russian speaking ones) the name of the company turned into a generic term used to denote any copying machine produced by any company. Nevertheless, such state of things could have a negative influence on company’s ability to expand the horizons and promote their products of other types in an effective way. Within the last few years, the specialists working for the Xerox Corporation have opened up a lot of different technologies. The latter allowed the company to work out a modern strategy of work and join the ranks of the most successful companies providing business services. The campaign launched by the company included a few important elements helping to promote the ideas of the real image of Xerox Corporation.
Therefore, the designers and public relations consultants working for the company prepared a series of short video clips advertising the new set of tools for document flow proposed by the company. It shows an unpleasant situation when chief executive is constantly distracted by the people using a language for specific purposes. As it is clear from people’s reaction to the discussed campaign, the use of such advertising trick has turned out to be a successful way to propagate a necessary idea. It is not a secret that the advertisement seen as funny is likely to have a greater chance to be retained in the memory of prospective customers and business partners. To continue, the campaign included a few printed sources designed to state the company’s ability to make many processes connected to business activity easier. In the end, within the frame of the discussed campaign, a few changes connected to the design of the official website of Xerox Corporation were introduced in order to catch the interest of a wider audience.
Key Aims of “Work Can Work Better” Marketing Campaign
Speaking about a particular marketing campaign, it is necessary to reveal its main functions as it can help to analyse its effectiveness. In general, marketing campaign presents a range of activities performed in order to inform standing and prospective customers about new services or products, highlight their importance for customers, and make them believe that buying the product from this particular company would be the best decision for them. In other words, marketing campaigns are usually pointed at advertising. Nevertheless, there can also be additional goals and objectives connected to the details of the company’s performance and its desired areas of growth (Parente & Strausbaugh-Hutchinson, 2014, p.131).
Thus, companies may launch marketing campaigns in order to improve their public images or differentiate themselves from other companies with the help of unusual tools. As for Xerox Corporation, it is necessary to say that its managers believe that there are certain things connected to company’s public image that have to be improved. “Work Can Work Better” marketing campaign was launched in order to promote the newest version of the system for content management that allows businesspeople to pay more attention to the most important tasks and significantly decrease the amount of time devoted to paperwork. This upgraded version of the system makes it possible to control the activities connected to document flow with the help of smartphones and other devices.
Thus, it can be stated that this particular marketing campaign has a few goals. At first, it increases customers’ awareness of the new set of tools helping to facilitate document flow. What is more, it allows Xerox Corporation to attract additional attention to its products that are not strongly connected to printing technologies; therefore, the campaign makes it possible for the company to change the way it is seen by wider audience. Furthermore, “Work Can Work Better” allows the company to demonstrate that it really cares about its customers and wants to solve some of the most common problems connected to their businesses. Due to that, the company has the chance to earn the loyalty of its prospective customers. To conclude, the launch of this campaign can be regarded as an important decision allowing to achieve a few goals.
Who Is the Target Audience for the Campaign?
“Work Can Work Better” is a marketing campaign promoting a set of tools helping to prevent spending a lot of time on paperwork connected to business activities. Therefore, it is obvious that the campaign is aimed at the specific group of people. At first, target audience of the discussed marketing campaign consists of businesspeople. Besides, the DocuShare platform proposed by Xerox Corporation is a type of product that is connected to the workflow system of a company. Developing and introducing new solutions connected to documents possessing certain value for a company is a highly sensitive task. Therefore, a person who is interested in such product is more likely to hold a senior position within an organisation. It is also possible to make a conclusion about target audience of the campaign based on video clip posted by Xerox Corporation on YouTube. It serves as one of the most important tools helping to state the company’s position; it shows specific situations connected to the life of upper executive management. With the help of intentional exaggerations and humor used in the advertisement, Xerox Corporation manages to reach out to its target audience represented by executives of different companies.
Necessary Tools and Positioning of Marketing Campaigns
Speaking about marketing campaigns, it is essential to discuss the tools that can be used by companies to achieve the goals and kindle interest of their target audience. Furthermore, there are particular tools that allow to evaluate the effectiveness of a certain marketing campaign, and it is extremely important for marketing specialists working for corporations to take this information into consideration. Having defined the target audience and analysed customers’ preferences, it is necessary to identify the tools that are the most likely to attract the attention of the audience. There are a lot of applications that help to compare different ideas concerning future marketing campaigns, evaluate their effectiveness beforehand, and define a time frame.
Furthermore, developing a marketing campaign one can conduct a specific analysis in order to define which types of content interest the target audience the most. It is important to use these tools during the preparatory stage as they allow to set an attainable goal and collect the data that cannot be ignored. The data on customers’ preferences, goals, and expectations should be collected and analysed really thoroughly as any poor judgment shown during this stage may have squandering the budget of a company as a consequence. Furthermore, there is a variety of types of content that may help to propagate necessary ideas and create a positive image of a product or a service which is advertised. Nowadays, it often happens that companies prefer to rely on different social media while developing a marketing campaign. Social media are often seen as the most important advertising channel as they allow to send a message to a great number of people belonging to different social groups; furthermore, such way to advertise new products or services does not involve heavy expenses.
On the whole, the Internet is regarded as a channel that makes it possible to reach a wide audience and increase popularity of a company (Taiminen, 2016). Different companies may use such tools as e-mail advertising, promoting the products with the help of official sites, radio, television, and printed materials. As for the particular tools that were used in order to increase people’s awareness of a new system developed by Xerox Corporation, there were a few types of content distributed by the company. First of all, a funny video advertisement was posted on YouTube in order to attract the attention of the potential users of DocuShare system. Besides, there were a few printed sources describing the new functions of the document management system in details. These sources included printed advertisements and the brochure. What is more, the company changed the design of its official website in order to put an emphasis on “Work Can Work Better” marketing campaign and encourage the people visiting the site to look through the additional materials devoted to the revised system.
Apart from the ways used to convey the message, there are plenty of tools that may be applied to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign and decide whether the efforts seem to be fruitful. There is a wide range of applications such as Eloqua and ViralHeat that can help companies to forecast the results of marketing campaigns (Phillipson, 2016). Such applications allow to make close assessments due to a great number of factors taken into consideration.
Strategic planning remains very important during running a marketing campaign. As for the discussed campaign launched by Xerox Corporation, I believe that it can be regarded as an example of a successful strategy. To begin with, the campaign is declared to help the company to follow the “user-centric” strategy (“New Xerox brand strategy,” 2015). Personally, I suppose that it was a very important step as it allowed the company to show that the primary goal of the system was to facilitate business processes and help the clients to spend more time on significant tasks. What is more, Xerox Corporation has managed to do a great job if we speak about the ways to promote a primary idea. The company created the content of different types; due to that, it has managed to reach a wider audience. For example, a series of short video advertisements posted on YouTube seems to have acted as an attraction helping to make a mainstream audience aware of present activities of the company. As for other materials, they seem to be pointed at gaining loyalty of the target audience and providing them with all the details concerning the product. Therefore, it may be stated that the company has created a strategy working with customers on many levels.
References
Ewing, M. T., Stewart, D. B., Mather, D. R., & Newton, J. D. (2014). How contagious is your viral marketing campaign? Journal of Advertising Research, 54(2), 205-216.
Financial highlights. (2015). Web.
New Xerox brand strategy puts focus on helping businesses and governments achieve better results. (2015). Web.
Parente, D., & Strausbaugh-Hutchinson, K. (2014). Advertising campaign strategy: A guide to marketing communication plans. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.
Phillipson, C. (2016). Top 50 tools to measure the effectiveness of your enterprise marketing campaigns. Web.
Taiminen, H. (2016). One gets what one orders: Utilisation of digital marketing tools. The Marketing Review, 16(4), 389-404.