Egham, Surrey, UK, 16 December 2010:  It was a night for celebration, as OKI Europe Ltd won the Best Product Launch Campaign award for the launch of its MC860 multi-function printer, at the 2010 B2B Marketing Awards Gala Dinner attended by over 700 marketing practitioners and held at the Honourable Artillery Club, London.

“The B2B Marketing Awards have highlighted the importance of strategic marketing thinking, practical design and strong campaign execution in a pan-European business to business environment” says EMEA brand & marketing communications manager, Pamela Ghosal.   

“For those of us working in the industry, these awards have quickly become established as the most prestigious in the business.  To have the innovative work that the OKI Europe marketing and communications team and our creative agency, The Think Tank put into the MC860 launch recognised like this, is very exciting and a fantastic achievement.”

The integrated campaign was developed to focus on OKI Printing Solutions’ recognised strengths of robust yet innovative technologies, together with unrivalled value for money and service support.  As a result, it used powerful visual imagery, simple messaging and incentivised response across multiple marketing channels to generate excitement and contact across both channel partners and the end-user community.   

The MC860 launch also represented an important milestone for OKI Europe Ltd as it was the first centralised pan-European campaign developed by the central marketing and communications team.  As a result, it was essential that the campaign provided strong, consistent messaging that could be adapted to local linguistic and cultural demand, whilst delivering maximum impact and results across all geographies.

The resulting ‘A4 Price, A3 Output’ creative concept worked well across all geographies.  The multi-media campaign was designed to drive awareness and lead generation through various marketing channels to individual microsites for each of the 14 participating countries. 

It combined a high level of impact, capturing the attention of each audience, with the flexibility to support local activities and events in delivering the targeted return on investment.   “The key success factors were close collaboration with all participating countries, strong management and execution of the campaign centrally and locally and ensuring that the response to our  marketing messaging and activity was closely monitored and adapted to generate the maximum response through each marketing channel,” confirms Ghosal

The MC860 launch campaign has since proved highly successful in meeting the company’s challenging targets.  “At OKI Europe, the MC860 integrated marketing campaign formed a key part of our EMEA marketing and communications programme,” concludes Ghosal,  “and the success of the campaign has without doubt set the benchmark for future strategic product launches.”