ordinary. extraordinary.
Creating a worldwide communication strategy and global marketing campaign for Thomson Reuters that talks to each and every customer, by name.
Multinationals, SMEs, start-ups. Everyone wants it big. Big ideas. Big results. Big impact. We may still be young as a company, but we have a serious wealth of experience behind us. Working on big brands, in large award-winning London design agencies, it's this experience that allows us to surprise and delight even our biggest clients with creative solutions that are far from ordinary.
The brief
This assignment was more than just a design challenge. It was a strategic one. The task was two-fold:
Internally, our campaign needed to engage, enthuse and educate the sales teams, and arm them with the tools for the perfect pitch when meeting both existing and potential customers, ultimately increasing product sales.
Externally, our messages and campaign, built on focused customer benefits, needed to resonate with time-poor Foreign Exchange (FX) traders, internationally, reinforcing the advantages of being at the heart of the world’s largest trading community.
Our creative had to also reflect the recently launched corporate guidelines, be unique to their FX business, and reposition Thomson Reuters as the freshest, most flexible facilitator of the FX markets.
Our Approach
Research is a powerful tool in the early stages of any project, it allows us to get to the heart of any business, understand how the business works and who exactly we are talking to. Being visual creatures, it always helps us to paint a picture in our minds of our audience, ensuring our messages will hit them straight between the eyes. It was through research that we discovered a unique language, a form of global shorthand used exclusively by FX traders. Similar to SMS abbreviations, we found that this language talked directly to the FX community but could be understood by, and created intrigue to those outside the FX markets.
HIHI FRD ‘Hi Friend’ is the introduction between anonymous counterparties, used when initiating a trade. By adopting this language, our typography-led campaign communicated instantly with our FX audience, and the HIHI FRDS campaign was born.
So we now had our ‘vehicle’ it was time to sit down with the FX business and formulate our communications strategy and messaging platform to ensure that we had consistency in our ‘script’ across the board – whether it be in spoken form, on our new printed collateral or online. These focused propositions became the backbone of all HIHI FRDS communications.
Working with Neil Patterson, a D&AD award-winning copywriter, we set to work writing and designing the sales toolkits. The spreadsheet of all spreadsheets contained all of the products and messages that would be woven into a simple kit of parts, that worked for both the internal and ultimately the external audiences.
The internal launch was huge, on a global scale. Each region held launch events where the HIHI FRDS campaign and strategy was explained by key business managers and introduced by the CEO of the Thomson Reuters FX markets. The sales toolkits were a resounding success along with the goodie bags containing the promotional HIHI FRDS mugs, pens and wafer-thin USBs.
The business had a new lease of life. It’s amazing what a simple but powerful idea can do.
The sales teams could now go out to customers, confident in their pitch and inspired by the energy of the campaign and its deliverables. It was now time to get shouting from the rooftops.
Our task was now to drive existing and potential clients to HIHIFRDS.com, our new and exciting online portal for the FX community. We designed the site and worked closely with the online team at Thomson Reuters on its build. To launch the site an HTML email was sent to 27,000 known FX traders. It was addressed HIHI (their name)
We produced a huge variety of HIHI FRDS promotional items including: golf umbrellas, 2,000 mini footballs, 3,000 Oyster card holders, 5,000 30 year trading calendars and 25,000 coffee cup sleeves. These items, all bearing the HIHIFRDS.com signature, were distributed to Thomson Reuters offices worldwide, from Lagos to Lebanon, Cairo to Cape Town and The Netherlands to New York. Managing the global distribution was all part of the service. Once at their destinations they were given out at exhibitions and client meetings.
Results
The impact of the HIHI FRDS campaign was reflected in the 6 months following its launch. The business’s revenue, from new product sales, increased considerably, at a time when no improvement had been anticipated. We can’t go into figures but we're talking in millions of dollars.
Our HIHIFRDS.com visitor target was 40,000. Since the June 2009 launch the site has received 60,000 unique visitors, and counting
And the client said
The creative talent of Pink Green has been crucial to what has been achieved so far.
Thomson Reuters, are the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses. They are the source of unique analytics, data and breaking news financial professionals all around the globe rely on. Our task was to work closely with the business managers to create a proposition, identity, and campaign to raise awareness of their Thomson Reuters Foreign Exchange Network amongst the 18,000 potential customers worldwide.
