Posts Tagged ‘strategy’

First Impression helps Springfield Nursery Group develop an exciting marketing programme

Friday, November 26th, 2010

Springfield is a family-owned group of children’s day care nurseries across Derbyshire. They provide a fantastic service but felt they didn’t communicate this enough to existing and potential parents. They wanted to differentiate themselves and

become the nursery provider of choice in the High Peak.

First Impression carried out some strategy work with the directors at Springfield to develop a marketing plan of activities for 2011 as well as a child development programme. This programme has been brought to life in a vibrant new branding initiative which has got staff, children and parents very excited. A new website and colourful newsletter have also been launched to keep parents and prospective parents informed and updated.

Veronica Hargreaves, FD at Springfield said, “We have many years’ experience running nurseries in the area with an excellent reputation. What we weren’t good at however was shouting out about it and telling people. But that’s what First Impression is good at. We trusted them to develop our brand and introduce some innovative new concepts that underpin what we were doing already, but they have somehow managed to join everything up into a beautiful seamless programme. First Impression has invigorated our business and we are very excited about the future.”

www.springfield-nurseries.co.uk

Play a new game not the old game faster

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

Seth Godin’s blog yesterday (he’s a famous American bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change that popularised the topic of permission marketing), got me thinking. He said: “A car is not merely a faster horse. And email is not a faster fax. And online project management is not a bigger whiteboard. And Facebook is not an electronic rolodex. Play a new game, not the older game but faster”.

I realised that a lot of businesses are doing exactly this. Because the market is so fast-moving and fast-changing, most entrepreneurs are just trying to catch up with it. They don’t take the time to sit down and think about their strategy. They just see developments and think they have to react as soon as possible. The consequences are they make themselves so busy that they don’t have any chance to breathe or grow the business anymore. They are stuck. Stuck in a market which changes at the speed of light . If you try to keep up with it using your old methods just faster, you will lose. So we all need to take the time to think about our business strategy. To sit back and think. And to think how we can play a new game, rather than play the old game faster!