Mercedes Textiles Limited manufactures fire hose and pumps for the fire service industry. We are their augmented marketing arm, working alongside their director of marketing rather than in place of them.
The situation
One marketing director, a manufacturer’s worth of marketing.
Mercedes Textiles sells into the fire service industry: departments, dealers and distributors, with procurement cycles and long institutional memory. It is a market where the product is technical, the claims have to be right, and the people buying have been at it a long time.
They have a director of marketing who knows that market. What they did not have was the capacity underneath that role to run social, design, email, events and a product launch at the same time, which is what a manufacturer at this size actually needs.
What we do
The standing engagement.
Branding and awareness work that runs continuously, plus the concentrated push around a show or a launch.
Social media
Ongoing presence for an audience that is small, specific and well informed. In this industry the people watching are the people who use the equipment, which sets a higher bar for what is worth posting.
Event management
The planning, materials and coordination behind the events Mercedes shows up to, handled as a program rather than as a scramble in the weeks beforehand.
FDIC trade show coordination
FDIC, the Fire Department Instructors Conference, is the event the fire service calendar is built around. We coordinate the Mercedes presence there: what goes in the booth, what goes out before it, and what happens with everything that comes back.
Design
The brand carried consistently across print, digital, booth and sales material, so a dealer, a distributor and a department are all looking at the same company.
Product launch platform
A repeatable way to take a product to market rather than rebuilding the approach every time something new is ready.
Email marketing
The channel that reaches dealers and distributors directly, run on a schedule rather than when someone remembers.
The LPX launch
The biggest piece of it.
The launch of the LPX product was the largest project of the engagement, and it used most of what the standing relationship already had in place.
- Photography and video. Real product, shot properly. In this industry a stock image of a generic fire truck is worse than no image at all.
- Activations. Bringing the launch into the rooms where the fire service actually gathers, rather than announcing it and hoping.
- Sales enablement. Working directly with the sales team so the people having the conversations had the material they needed, in the form they needed it.
That is the pattern across this engagement: one substantial piece of production, broken up and spent across the channels that reach this market. It is Marketing Miles Per Gallon in an industry where a single well-shot asset outlasts a year of posts.
Where it stands
An ongoing engagement.
This is a standing relationship rather than a project with an end date. The proof of it is the cadence: social running continuously, email going out on schedule, design staying consistent, and the trade show calendar handled as a program.
Performance figures for this engagement are not published here. We would rather show you the work than a number we have not agreed with the client.
More on how we work in this market on the fire service and industrial page.
