With around 200,000 visitors and over 2,500 exhibitors ISH is the world’s leading trade fair and international meeting place for the combined topic of water and energy. For Ideal Standard, a multinational bathroom, sanitary ware and plumbing fixture company, it’s the key event in their calendar to showcase new products and ranges to the industry.

The Challenge

We were approached to manage Ideal Standard’s social media channels at the event, as well as ensuring that during the event, social media channels were optimised with content that promoted the events taking place in Frankfurt such as press conferences and product launches.

Think

Our pre-event approach involved posts around the new brand pillars to create an emotion, countdown posts to build excitement about the event and a LinkedIn strategy to encourage the 15,000 followers on LinkedIN to also follow the brand on Instagram.

Create

Our team, comprising of social media managers and filming, editing and photography professionals landed in Frankfurt the day before the event and immediately set about capturing what Ideal Standard had to offer at ISH, with a posting strategy comprised of the following:

• Mix of reportage style shots from the stand and beautiful product shots all showcasing the range and the new brand positioning with a focus on the 3 defined brand pillars.
•  Instazines – Instagram is a great platform to showcase beautiful product shots, however in order to portray product innovation, a greater level of detail was required. We created a series of Instazines – Instagram posts specifically designed to be mini catalogues that gave a greater level of product detail
• Reactive Instagram stories and daily highlight reels were posted throughout the week of the conference building on the buzz surrounding the event and tapping into the audience attending

Deliver

At the end of the pre-event activity and in-event activity, we had grown Ideal Standard’s following from 50 followers to over 5,000, with numbers increasing all the time due to an ‘emotion’ based posting strategy.

“I would like to thank APS Group assisted for a successful ISH 2019. Their dedication, availability and efforts are appreciated. Our posts look great, they drive engagement and growth which is the key in social media.”

Global Digital Director, Ideal Standard

We’ve been working with Superdrug since 2008, building on the strong print management delivery to introduce intuitive creativity and super efficient project management through an onsite agency model.

Think

Superdrug is the UK’s second-largest beauty and health retailer, currently operating over 800 stores across the country.

We’ve created the perfect blend of technology, people and process. It means we can deliver over 1 million pieces of POS each week, all store-specific and 99.4% on-time. Technology continues to play a significant role in continuously improving our services to Superdrug. We have developed a number of online systems, including the Superdrug store profile database and image bank, shelf-edge label approval tool and workflow and task management system.

Create

Our marketing impact has included award-winning multichannel activity including a TV-led ABTL campaign and engaging digital content, delivered to store screens via our content hub.

Deliver

Over the course of our relationship with Superdrug we’ve delivered multi-million pounds worth of savings. Our involvement has also extended to the launch of category-transforming Beauty Studio and Wellbeing stores and ongoing development of a customer loyalty/reward scheme via the Superdrug app that our digital agency offering developed.

“We wanted a long-term partnership with a supplier that shared the same philosophy, was driven by the same values and would consistently challenge the status quo. From the outset it was clear there was a rapport with APS. We were impressed with the straight talking, the openness and honesty and the professional way in which APS conducted its business. There was a real passion about wanting to do things right – a true fit.”

Trading Director, Superdrug

Health insurance specialist Westfield Health had aspirations to lead the Health Cash Plans (HCP) market. Our mission was to reposition this long-established brand, making it relevant to today’s B2B and employee audiences, ultimately driving sales uplift and increasing brand share.

Think

Westfield Health has been championing access to healthcare for the working population since 1919, long before the creation of the NHS was top of the post-war government’s ‘to do’ list. For almost a century, their sole purpose has been to provide working people with affordable health cover, always striving to do more for businesses and employees. Leveraging their ethical, innovative and not for profit business model therefore became our primary focus.

Create

The creation of ‘Harder working health cover’ – a brand proposition that would create a new brand space and enable healthcare intermediaries and corporate clients to see Westfield Health as the dependable healthcare solution.

Deliver

The brand was launched at the Employee Benefits Live conference via an award-winning interactive exhibition stand. A new visual identity was deployed across all communication touch points, including web, digital comms, advertising, brochure collateral, sales decks and workplace marketing tool-kits to enable education, engagement and easy sign up.

“Through the rebrand project, the APS team not only provided first class creative work, but enabled us – and all our employees – in an inclusive process of brand development and rollout that has rallied everyone round our common cause, underpinned by our proud tradition.”

Head of Marketing, Westfield Health

Think

Albert Heijn is the largest Dutch supermarket chain. They came to us as they wanted to…

• Introduce technology and automation
• Have detailed reporting and MI
• Speed up the time to market and introduce a more efficient way of working
• A plan for continued savings
• Bring in global and multi-sector expertise

We led a 12 week discovery review engaging with various teams and analysing everything from process and goals to vendors and trial testing.

Create

We then created a tailor-made print management solution complete with a near-site account team. Together we put in place specific SLAs, defined a vendor network and standard set up products, scoped out a technology roadmap and rolled out the process to all of Albert Heijn’s stakeholders.

Deliver

Since discovery we have successfully implemented our print management solution across all 940 plus stores.

All processes are documented and captured using our Marketing Operations Suite. In fact, our technology has reduced lead times and given 3-4 days extra per campaign.

Albert Heijn has also been able to save 19% on the cost of their printed products.

“The automated and flexible way of working of APS ensures a seamless execution of our campaigns.”

European Sourcing Marketing Manager, Ahold Delhaize