B.E.C. GROUP BRING LIFE TO CONCEPTS IN PLASTIC

BEC GROUP WEBSITE HOME PAGE, F/S ENABLED

- BRIEF -

The BEC Group is an internationally focused, plastic engineering company, based on the border of the New Forest National Park in southern England. They approached Deshok with quite a common problem. They had customers, but were beginning to see that existing methods of marketing were no longer as effective as they used to be. However great and long-lived a client relationship is not forever; historic customers were beginning to wane and new custom was not maturing quickly enough to take-up the slack.

- THE GOAL -

BEC Group wanted a clear and robust route to new customer acquisition for the purposes of attracting new clients and building/maintaining new relationships.  The secondary mission was to provide a real and more local alternative to China, with regard to product design, prototyping and tool making.

BEC Group had recognised the need for a shift in marketing strategy and had already decided on a well researched plan-of-action.

Rigorous T2T and T2C (trade-to-trade) / (trade-to-customer) advertising via internet based portals, to build up an initial momentum. Followed up with SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marking) to continue this momentum and eventually ease up on the T2T / T2C advertising, with the hope that organic search results will eventually takeover.

ASSETS REQUIRED:

BEC Group pointed out concerns that the existing BEC Group identity was dated and in need of a refresh. This included:

• Brand and company ID refresh 
• New factory signage 
• Company stationary 
• Off the page assets, such as company brochures, folders and technical information templates

This was to all be kicked off with a brand new website design and implementation, with a style template that could be easily reimaged as identity and multiple format advertising assets for trade-to-trade marketing portals. 

- THE CONCEPT -

"We just want to bring life to plastic"!

BEC Group had done their research and had already come to the conclusion that they liked the Deshok style and so requested that we come up with concepts.

In this case (as with most), the personal meeting with the Board of Directors was paramount. The concept that was decided upon was based on a throw-away comment made by the MD: "We just want to bring life to plastic".

We were provided with the following wish list:

1. Dynamic
2. Multimedia
3. Animation
4. Different
5. Stand-out
6. Better than our competition
7. Industry specific and general appeal
8. To appeal to designers who want a partner for prototyping
9. To inspire a strong alternative to China 

- THE BRAND -

The BEC Group brand had almost 30 years of history and was well known to customers and the plastics industry around the world. Therefore a complete rebrand was not recommended.

BEC BRAND IN PROCESS OF BEING RE-DRAWN

In short we were instructed to: improve it, modernise it, but not to change it.

It was established that the new colour scheme for the brand would be black, steel and neon green, then it was a case of tidying up the logo, giving it a little nip and tuck, applying the new colour ways and giving the logo some form i.e. making look like it could be made from steel as opposed to a photocopy.

BEC GROUP REBRAND - NEGATIVE / FULL COLOUR TREATMENT

BEC GROUP POSITIVE / BLACK &WHITE

The steel of the BEC Group represents the steel of a mould tool; the neon green represents the injection of plastic into the mould and the black that the whole operation is undertaken with precision and care. These logo devices were already there, but applying the new colours in this way gave what was already established meaning and a story.

- CONCEPT / THE CREATIVE SITE -

How to bring life to plastic? That was the question - obviously not possible in real life, but on a computer with CG 3D animation? We can do something with that.

We came up with the idea of a multimedia website that could include animation, sound effects and music etc. We thought how great would it be if we had a Toy Story Buzz Lightyear character who could walk around the site and present pages and items. But was a robot / spaceman right? We kept thinking... a spaceman became an action man; this then became a Barbie doll who then became BECy. BECy would be the BEC Group’s very own mascot; she would be designed just for them, incorporating their brand identity and of course practical for CG 3D animation.

This concept was to have a first stage presentation in the form of broad features, key phrases and pages of the site i.e. the Home page, About us etc. these were mocked up as stills keeping cost to a minimum. Bearing in mind the client had no idea what were where to present or if they would even like the idea, we didn't waste time creating the BECy character just yet. Instead we used an off-the-shelf action figure to illustrate the concept.

MENU SYSTEM X3 STATES. DORMANT, ABOUT US SELECTED & CONTACT US SELECTED

The meeting was a success the client loved it, but we weren't to get things all our own way. The MD asked “can I have a menu system that looks like an Engine Start button?” So a circular menu system then! This took us about a week to develop, eventually hitting the idea of having the website page categories arranged around the Contact Us button in a ring of 4, with a ring of 8 on the outside. Having the buttons arranged in a ring presented their own problems, but we opted to build the menu graphics in an illustration program before converting them to .png images with transparent backgrounds in Photoshop, before dropping them in to yet another program to apply animation and effects. 

In the end the BECy character was dropped for the purposes of diverting the budget needed to develop it thorough to digital channels of advertising. Ironically this notion was Deshok inspired after research demonstrated that dropping BECy would have minimal effect on click-through rates, whereas increasing the advertising budget would benefit this. In short, the website was just fine without her.

ABOUT US PAGE

CONTACT US PAGE FEATURING A WEBFORM

- THE RESULTS -

Momentum for the new project was pretty quick to pick-up. Within four months of the launch BEC were confident to say that on average they had 4 new enquiries per week, of which 1.5 projects would convert per month. The average spend per enquiry was £23,000 - the initial budget for the project was £10,000 split 50/50 between website design and other marketing assets such as digital channel adverting. So BEC were projecting to achieve £276,000 of extra revenue for the initial outlay of £10,000! 

Recently while discussing a new project with the MD he suggested that it was this work that we did back early 2007 that helped BEC to work through the 2008 /2013 recession in good order. It also should be mentioned that during the height of the campaign BEC consistently achieved high rankings with digital advertising and excellent page 1 results for search terms using Google.