Opening Event for Matfors Skor June 7, 2007

I’ve been working very fast to create a small opening event for Matfors Skors new clothing section. Up until now, the company has only been selling shoes and certain apparels. The whole event was my initiative because I believe that an opportunity like this should most definitely be used.

Note that there are many details that won’t be covered in this post so please let me know if you have any questions.

The primary goal of the event was NOT to increase the company’s short term sales but instead to increase the public awareness of the it’s new clothing section as well as to enhance the it’s image and reputation. Matfors Skor is a very friendly and service-minded company and that’s what I wanted to project to the customers throughout this event.

Of course, a short term boost in sales was also on my list of objectives but most important was the long term public relations goals. Still, this was a good opportunity to increase sales for a few days and that’s rarely a bad thing.

First thing to do is to figure out what we want to do and what we want to offer and to do that we need to understand the target audience. We are dealing with mostly regular small town people from the local area, of almost all ages. Teenagers are an exception because they generally prefer more expensive alternatives than what the client is offering.

I wanted to project to these ordinary small town people that Matfors Skor is a very kind and service-minded company that takes care of it’s customers and makes shopping a pleasant experience. What better way to do this than to sit down with our nice customers, talk, relax and have a good time?

That’s what we ended up doing. We sat down with the customers and offered them coffee, juice, cookies and candy, and had a great time doing so. The event lasted two full work-days, the second of which was on the monthly pay-day. So the timing was at least 50% perfect.

As for advertising the event, we had our two regular newspaper ads the same week as the event. We also put up A5-sized ‘posters’ in local areas and businesses, which used a merely informational approach. Last but not least we made use of interactive media when I created a banner for the company’s website.

Overall, it was a successful event. We got a lot of great feedback from customers and everyone was happy. The event promoted the company’s image as planned and sales went up more than 100% during the time of the event. All this without spending more than $100 more than the usual advertising cost.

Not only was this my very first event, it was also my own initiative and the first time that I ever touched Adobe InDesign. In fact, it is the first ad I have ever made and even the first ad the client has published that featured a human model.

Until next time, I’m planning to really get into Illustrator and InDesign because I believe that I’m lacking in the graphical area. I would also like to find ways to further integrate the marketing.