A Pitch to Remember - MMHK August 2008

Project Director

Red Asia Communications Limited

Who was the client? A beauty salon with more than 20 years of experiences and over 16 outlets in HK

What was the brief? To re-brand the image of this beauty salon from a local and traditional "me-too" style of beauty salon commonly found in HK into a medium-priced, one-stop, caring and professional beauty service group.

What made the pitch so interesting? The client is a typical example of local beauty salons with little branding concepts. They spent considerable ad budget on sales promotion with little planning and poor execution, resulting in very low brand awareness. It's a challenge for us to reposition the brand and to persuade the client to abandon their traditional branding concepts and to adopt a more integrated brand management approach.

How did you pull off the event? We invested a lot of resources on intensive market research. Throughout the process, we helped our client to develop a more competitive and sustainable market communication plan by giving more emphasis on image building instead of sales promotion and by focusing our communication resources on more potential market segments.

Who was there? The founder and CEO judged our proposal.

What made the pitch succeed? Our intensive marketing research and our integrated marcom expertise are the key success factor. With a good understanding of our client, their competitors and customers, we are able to tailor an integrated marcom solutions which are relevant to their needs.

What were the clients metrics on success? The client judged our pitching effort based on our experiences in launching integrated marketing communications programs and the quality of our proposal re-branding solutions according to their needs.

What were the results? We won the pitch.

Is there anything you could have done better? More time for detailed pre-pitching research would improve the quality of our pitching efforts.

Why was this a pitch to remember? To a lot of HK people, the beauty and slimming salon brands in HK has a perceived inferior image as compared to brands in other industries. People usually associated these brands with hard-sell and poorly-executed ads with busy layout. By winning the pitch, we succeeded in educating our client about the importance of effective brand management.