Building share of voice

It is a familiar dilemma for any ambitious and fast-growing company: how does it break the market stranglehold exerted by its larger enterprise competitors? And how does it build brand awareness and strengthen the perception of its business solutions across key vertical sectors.

The Challenge

OKI Printing Solutions is a global business-to-business brand dedicated to creating professional printed communications products, applications and services. Long established in the UK and with a loyal base of end users and channel partners, OKI nevertheless suffered from a lack of brand awareness, especially in comparison with industry giants like HP.

This was confirmed by a study from Apollo Research, which placed OKI tenth in a list of leading printing vendors, in UK media share of voice for the March- August 2007 timeframe, with just 1.8% of coverage compared to 39.1% for HP.

In appointing Whiteoaks, OKI was confident that the PR consultancy could raise its awareness levels across its core print, channel and vertical press. In turn, this would build brand recognition with end users and customers.

The Response

Whiteoaks recognised that a high impact, fast return media relations campaign would help to communicate OKI’s value proposition to the market, to position OKI in the target media as one of the industry’s leading players and to build brand recognition with customers.

Whiteoaks focused on achieving rapid visibility with the media and building cross-vertical awareness of OKI’s products and services. In the campaign’s first six months, 30 product reviews were achieved along with 12 competition placements, 12 mid-form product features and three award entries. Whiteoaks also generated a range of customer case studies to promote third party endorsement of OKI’s printing solutions.

To build on this strong start, Whiteoaks broadened its campaign, developing different strategic approaches for each area of the business from corporate affairs to channel strategy, taking in new product launches and promoting key new services such as OKI Flatrate,

A flexible and evolving set of messages has been created to support OKI’s desired positioning around delivering customer-focused innovation backed by quality, value and performance.  These messages have been woven into all copy created from product press releases to opinion leadership articles, commentary pieces and customer case studies. 

Whiteoaks has leveraged PR materials from OKI Europe Ltd to the benefit of the UK team. It has generated content that has driven high levels of press interest and has resulted in the media approaching Whiteoaks directly for future opportunities.

The Result

The Whiteoaks campaign achieved immediate results in raising OKI’s share-of-voice. In the September-November 2007 timeframe, share was up 2.4% to 4.2% compared to the March-August period.

Among print vendors, OKI rose from tenth place in share of voice rankings to seventh and moved ahead of Samsung, Epson and Konica Minolta. And this immediate success proved to be no ‘flash in the pan'.

Critically, Whiteoaks has helped OKI to sustain this dramatic rise in share. OKI first reached third place in the table in May 2008 and in September 2009 – the latest month for which figures are available - was still there with a 14.3% share of voice, representing an eightfold rise in share in just over two years.

Significantly, this figure put OKI nearly five percentage points ahead of the average of its competitors and the gap with HP has been more than halved, with OKI now just 15.8 points behind its rival.    

These results illustrate the extent to which awareness of OKI has grown within the UK market. And Whiteoaks is now focused on helping to increase awareness levels still further by building brand recognition with current and prospective end users and customers.