Oooh my goodness
5 March, 2008
We found an old flash drive today with some of our very early work on it. Oh how we laughed. When we’d stopped blushing.
I’m still trying to think why I thought that pitching an advert to a software house featuring a monitor with a keyboard smashed through it and the tag line ‘Software not Delivering?’ was a good idea. That’s not to say we didn’t laugh when we saw it, but in the years we’ve been running PD we’ve learned to judge our audience just a touch better. What’s more we’ve learned never ever to pitch for business unless we’ve been briefed properly. For this particular software house they’d mentioned that they might be interested in developing their brand, so whack – I went straight in with a sheet of ideas. And probably scared the living daylights out of them.
These days we do things very differently. Because when you take time to get to know your clients and understand their requirements, and they in turn get to know you, I reckon that it’s then that you deliver your best work.
For example when Celia and Dean started working on the beautiful old building that is becoming their top Aveda concept salon we agreed with them that a good approach would be to leverage people’s natural curiosity. Bill the builder was already telling us that rumours were flying around about what was happening at the building – that it was going to become a nightclub or a tanning salon – so we simply addressed people’s desire to know with a banner on the building and a website explaining what was happening.
Our lovely ladies at K2 Horizons never fail to leave us with a good idea after we’ve spoken to them, the same with our friends at Zynia – in fact every client we currently have, we seem to have developed a working relationship with that allows us to do fun things that really work.
So we’re getting over the cringes, and laughing at some of the pitches, but it’s made us realise just how much we enjoy our jobs now we’ve grown into working the way we like to.
Rachael posted this in Business, Random
Comments
#2 
It was actually all to do with putting together training materials for other trainers to deliver… I can’t say more – people may be watching…
#1
2 months ago Kay Potts said …
As one of the lovely ladies from K2Horizons, thanks for the nice comment, and I’d be delighted to know what the latest good idea was – I might be able to use it!