Promoting products and services

It's a noisy world out there. Crowded, too. With myriad mutual fund companies, pastry shops, cultural destinations—and everything in between—promoting products and services to attract interest and dollars requires strategies and tactics that cut through the din.

But it's not enough to just attract interest and increase transactions. Ideally, your offerings should be promoted in a way that also serves wider strategic goals that also build brand and relationships.

Our approach

At Sametz Blackstone, we work with a wide range of clients, both for-profit and not-for-profit, to develop promotional strategies and communication programs that connect to target audiences, increase commerce, and reinforce desired brand image and positioning. We collaborate to identify potential customers and the drivers that inform their decision-making; we develop messages and materials that resonate.

We help clients think with more of an external perspective (it's not what you're selling; it's what they're buying); evolve branding strategies that position different offerings, relative to each other and to the parent organization, to their best advantage; and craft systems that encourage cross-selling.

We believe in selling from the top down (rather than from the bottom, up); that benefits come before features; that an organization's behavior has to reinforce its offerings and brand; that most purchases have the potential to affect how the customer feels about him/herself; that there's usually an "experience" that attends even the simplest offering; and that moving beyond transactions to build relationships and create loyal advocates is vitally important.

We structure communications to help move prospects through the all-important sales cycle:

…and to build trust, which decreases the time and energy required to introduce and promote new offerings, increasing margins.

In practice …

We collaborated with Direxion Funds, an alternative class mutual fund provider, to develop a new name, brand platform, and program of marketing and sales communications to promote its funds and demystify a sophisticated and often misunderstood class of funds. By employing a straight-talk approach that focuses on the benefits and appropriate use of leveraged index funds, we've helped to build trust in the company, move customers to see the organization as a valued resource with a range of investment products, and have substantially increased assets under management.

Finale Dessert Company sells high-end desserts, for sure, but it also sells an experience. We've helped support the growth of the company through an updated visual image and more coordinated points of interaction that, together, "sell" the ultimate dessert experience of a Finale restaurant.

Celebrity Series of Boston is the city's pre-eminent presenter of world-class performers from around the globe. To encourage both single-ticket sales and subscriptions, we worked with Celebrity Series to both build its brand and improve the quality and effectiveness of its sales and marketing materials. The more a prospect "trusts" that any performer or program "brought to you by Celebrity Series" is worth attending—that you will have a great night out—the easier (and more profitable) it is for the organization to promote exciting, but less well-known, performers.

Facilitating commerce—and more

By developing research-based programs, executed with a distinct voice and design, we help clients differentiate their organizations and offerings, connect to what prospects and customers want and value, and generate revenue while building brand value for the long term.