Summary
Thomson Reuters, a B2B financial services company, borrowed a page from the B2C marketing playbook to reinvent its product launch approach by bringing the product directly to the end user.
In 2010, Thomson Reuters unveiled a global campaign to launch its new product, Eikon, a next generation desktop platform that aggregates real-time market data and historical information and enhances research for financial professionals.
The marketing objective was to deliver an integrated, global launch to create awareness for Eikon in 14 financial centres around the world: London, New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Paris, Milan, Madrid, Zurich, Moscow, Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Toronto and Mumbai.
We recognised that to understand the Eikon platform, customers had to experience it, so we sought unique ways to bring Eikon directly to financial professionals. The drive to increase sales began with engaging messaging and innovative product positioning.
About the Company
Thomson Reuters is a leading source of intelligent information in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, healthcare, science and media markets powered by the world’s most trusted news organisation. It operates in 100 countries, has over 55,000 employees and shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange.
Company Strategy
To target a new era of financial professionals in fresh and innovative ways, redefining the financial market and positioning Thomson Reuters as a vital resource in the new generation of finance.
To achieve this, we unveiled Thomson Reuters Eikon, a next-generation desktop platform. Years of focus groups and more than 210 customer interviews conducted at the inception of the Eikon launch which yielded two overlying themes:
1. A new era of finance in which people are born into technology
2. New tools that embrace collaboration, innovation and ease-of-use
Eikon was designed with these themes in mind. Our challenge was getting customers to use it.
Target Audience
Thomson Reuters Eikon was designed for our current and future customers; financial professionals who have weathered the storm of the economic downturn and are looking for tools to help them work smarter and faster. Our challenge was creating as many touch points as possible to engage these clients throughout their day where they work, live and play; from key financial hubs in 14 cities across the globe, to financial news websites and social networks.
Campaign Objectives
To offer an experience unlike anything else seen in our industry, targeting customers in new and different ways which reflected Thomson Reuters commitment to innovation
- Engage and excite our sales force to deliver outstanding customer service
- Redefine our customers’ perception of our company and our product offerings
- Raise awareness about Eikon and stimulate traffic
- Create opportunities to experience Eikon
Media Channels/ Techniques Used
The global launch campaign began more than a year in advance with the engagement of our sales force, we had to first ensure that the people liaising with our customers were educated and excited about Eikon. To do this, we:
- Held Power Sessions for our sales force
- Developed an internal sales portal hosting multilingual product roadmaps, online learning sessions, marketing tools, demos and fact sheets.
- Hosted internal launch celebrations and set up demo stations in global offices.
Making Eikon come to life for our customers was all about giving them opportunities to experience it, we:
- Replaced the typical text heavy, copy-focused B2B advertising with imagery and messaging that depicted our customers in situ.
- Integrated experiential elements that gave our customers themselves (not the data managers traditionally targeted in campaigns like this) a true experience of Eikon.
- Used social media, online gaming and a high-profile competition to deepen engagement.
- Developed a PR strategy that reached across 14 countries.
This campaign was all about raising awareness. To make a big splash, we:
- Secured advertising placements in transit hubs, financial districts, business publications and websites to target financial professionals throughout the day.
- Engaged our customers on the ground with ‘Street Teams’ who asked financial professionals to define what they’d like to see more or less of in the ‘new era of finance’ (responses were then used in the experiential elements of the campaign).
Taking inspiration from B2C campaigns, our experiential tactics gave the people who would be using Eikon every day first-hand experience of the product. To ensure Eikon was as tangible and accessible as possible, we:
- Hosted Go Live events in 14 cities, showcasing Eikon through product demos, executive speeches and a new era product exhibition.
- Installed an interactive ‘Digital Forest’ at the New York Stock Exchange and London’s Canary Wharf to deliver campaign messaging and more/less content.
- Built an LED Box, which acted as an outdoor ‘pop-up’ demo suite and out of home advertising space featuring campaign messages and more/less user content.
- Developed a campaign website which provided demos, games, user-generated content, adverts and messaging in eight different languages.
Timescale of the Campaign
Planning: January 2009 – April 2010
Pre-launch: May 2010 – August 2010
Launch: September – December 2010
Results
Benchmarks were set for each tactic to measure our success and from beginning to end our campaign over-achieved on its objectives:
- Hosting launch celebrations in 46 offices across 12 time zones.
- Supporting 1774 Training Sessions for Sales.
- Building demo rooms in 14 global offices.
- Attracting 9,020 monthly unique visitors to our internal portal.
- Securing 182+ articles about Eikon in 26 countries and 13 languages (target: 100 articles in 14 countries).
- Achieving more than 200 mentions on Twitter.
- Engaging with 9,714 active monthly users on Facebook (fourth highest referrer for the campaign website).
- Drawing 3,584 people to our online game.
- Accepting 4,203 entries to our South Pole completion.
- Driving 195,000+ unique visitors to our campaign site
- Gathering 3,106 video entries to the more/less ‘Street Team’ campaign (target: 3,000).
- Delivering 258,015 eDMs, with 18 per cent open rate and 27 per cent click through
- Fielding 1,601 “Contact Eikon” requests on our website (target: 500; total value of leads: $72M).
- Ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on October 4, 2010.
- Welcoming 1,345 visitors to our LED Box who took part in 604 product demos.
- Hosting more than 2,319 key clients (target: 2,100) at Go Live events in 14 cities globally
The campaign wasn’t designed to directly impact sales; instead we focused on our four objectives, all of which we achieved to make the campaign the largest and most successful in Thomson Reuters history and a key brand differentiator.
Client Testimonial
“The campaign surpassed its goals from beginning to end. Traffic to the campaign website tripled expectations; our global media coverage has been outstanding and our sales team has had nothing but positive feedback from current and potential clients. This was unlike anything we’d ever done as a company, and it really set us apart from our competitors.”
Lee Ann Daly, EVP and CMO, Thomson Reuters Markets
