TRADITIONAL TO DIGITAL
My role: Brand and marketing strategy (traditional and digital), UX: research, visual designer, high fidelity wireframes, and graphic designer.
The team: one in-house developer, one marketing assistant, and one contract back-end developer.
Featured image: the Skunk2 project car featured in the Black Eyed Peas, Pump It music video.
Challenge
In the mid to 2000’s, I came back to Group-A to turn the company around from a massive decline in sales and a potential bankruptcy.
Solution
Traditional to Digital Marketing: one of the first things on my list was to shift from traditional marketing channels to digital which opened up the marketing budget that was primarily in print advertising. The additional budget went directly in to revamping the existing Flash based site.
Branding: the look and feel.
Development: the new site was developed on a proprietary CMS that utilized social media (unheard of at that time), a blog, knowledgebase, and an e-commerce platform. Luckily, the existing staff was a huge un-tapped well, and I made sure to utilize the talents of an in-house back-end web developer. The only outside contractor was to help build the front-end from the provided wireframes and hi-fidelity comps.
Digital Marketing: aside from social media integration, I had always been into computers and tech, so I was an early adopter of every predecessor to Facebook from Friendster, MySpace, SixDegrees, to AsianAvenue.
I had also utilized “brand ambassadors” (influencers) who were big on enthusiast forum boards, PPC, social media, to product sponsorships.
Looking back, one of the most ironic aspects of developing this site came from a co-worker who was an in upper management at AOL, and he had expressed to me how unprofessional I was being for using YouTube and MySpace on our website. If you know AOL, you’ll see the irony of somebody from AOL making that comment.
Results
This was just one of the projects that helped turn the company around from a looming bankruptcy to a company that is happily doing their thing.