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? Having been chosen by OKI Printing Solutions to handle its UK PR programme, these objectives were central to specialist technology PR agency Whiteoaks’ planning. At the same time, the consultancy realised that raising OKI’s share of voice in the media over a sustained period would be key to successfully accomplishing them.

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 period March-August 2007, with just 1.8 per cent of coverage compared to 39.1 per cent for HP.

Strategy

A high-impact, fast-return media relations campaign was needed to position OKI in the target media as one of the industry’s leading players and to build brand recognition with customers. The focus was on achieving rapid visibility with the media and building 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. A range of customer case studies were used to promote third-party endorsement of OKI’s printing solutions.

To build on this strong start, Whiteoaks broadened the 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 fixed-rate programme).

Strong marketing messages were used underlining how OKI offers all its customers 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.

The content captured the imagination of the media and so generated high levels of press interest.

Results

The campaign achieved immediate results in raising OKI’s share-of-voice. In the September-November 2007 period, share was up 2.4 per cent to 4.2 per cent 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.

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 per cent 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.