Around the time that I started working at Sesalos (PTY) LTD, Sesalos was a ‘complete media solution’ to their clients. Sesalos offered graphic design, websites, TV, corporate video’s, 3D visualisation, radio advertising and music recording to its client base. It’s client base was very broad and included corporate clients as well as musicians. My role in the company was to market Sesalos to advertising agenicies in Durban.
I quickly realised that even though Sesalos was a great tool for advertising agencies to use, it was seen as a competitor as most agencies did a fair amount of the design and production work in-house. This bought about the first big marketing challenge – I needed to reposition Sesalos in the mind of the advertising industry.
Analysing the Service Offering
The current service offering that Sesalos had was creating alot of misconceptions in the market place about who they were. Were the an advertising company, a marketing agency or a production house. In speaking with the MD I found out that it was the vision of Sesalos to be a backend to advertising agencies. Sesalos wanted to be a production company. So here we had our first clear directive on the marketing front. Sesalos needed to position itself as a media production company.
This meant a restructure in the product/service offering. We stopped advertising our graphic design department, closed the 3D visualisation department and made a key decision to focus all the marketing efforts towards the advertising industry and to move out of the music industry. The music industry wasn’t profitable enough to warrant the marketing expense where the corporate industry needed a more focused marketing effort to exponentially increase its return.
Positive Results
The end result of the exercise was the following:
- Sesalos changed its slogan to ‘Your Media Production Partner’ from ‘The Complete Media Solution’
- Sesalos marketed a more focused service offerring which included: Audio Production | TV & Video Production | Internet
- These three service offerings then had clear benefits to advertising agencies which we took the advertising agencies in the form of personal meetings and presentations.
- The marketing focus shifted from closing deals to developing long term positive relationships.
The impact of the new focus turned out very positive with new long term business relationships with advertising agencies and product resellers. A general increase in monthly revenue and better project and adminstration control as Sesalos no longer took on arbitary work.
