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Agency of Change

Technology distribution giant Ingram Micro Inc. has launched the latest addition to its portfolio of services—Agency Ingram Micro.

The in-house marketing agency provides branding, advertising and event services to more than 400 of Santa Ana-based Ingram Micro’s distribution clients.

It’s a two-pronged business strategy. The marketing services themselves bring a relatively high margin for Ingram Micro, while campaigns that help increase its customers’ sales means the company’s core distribution business will be in line for a boost.

“Marketing is one of the ways we get paid,” said Jennifer Anaya, Ingram’s vice president of marketing. “If we can be extremely effective in how we are using marketing, our partners will … want to hire us to do things that possibly they wouldn’t have hired us to do before we were organized as an agency. It’s a win-win situation all around.”

Wholesale distribution has been the company’s bread and butter for the past 35 years. The business pays the bills, but profit margins are razor-thin for Orange County’s biggest public company in terms of sales—it posted $37.8 billion in revenue and notched $305 million in net income last year.

Ingram Micro has been investing in higher-margin lines of business, a vision spearheaded by Chief Executive Alain Monie, who took over the reins in 2012.

Edict

Agency Ingram Micro is part of the plan. The in-house marketing department sold its services for years to the resellers and manufacturers that count on Ingram Micro as a key distributor. The idea to kick it up a notch and form a stand-alone marketing agency stemmed from an “edict” by Paul Bay, Ingram Micro’s president of North American operations.

“He knew we needed to do something different with marketing,” Anaya said. “We needed to be able to make marketing a more flexible, service-oriented organization, like a business unit.”

The agency has been in place since January, but an official announcement of its existence came only last month. “It was definitely an iterative process, and we are still learning how we can operate better,” Anaya said.

The agency opened its doors with big names such as Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. on its client roster and is already on track for double-digit growth, according to Anaya.

“And then, who knows?” she said. “There is so much potential in what we can do.”

Agency Ingram Micro has hired Ewan Pidgeon as creative director, tapping a veteran of big-time agencies with OC ties. He joined Ingram Micro in January, bringing what Anaya called “a lot of unique branding experience and knowledge” from prior stints with Saatchi & Saatchi, JWT and Irvine-based branding shop RiechesBaird.

“The most important ingredient in any agency’s success is focus, and ours is clear and unrivaled,” Pidgeon said. “No one else can match our experience in technology. By combining that with the attributes of our strong, diverse team, we developed our positioning—‘the tech world through creative eyes.’ ”

Pidgeon is part of a 250-strong marketing team serving clients out of four locations— Buffalo, N.Y; Scottsdale, Ariz.; Toronto; and its home base in Santa Ana.

Built-In Clients

Working inside the world’s largest distribution company has its perks.

The agency, instead of starting from scratch, is building on well-established business relationships with technology manufacturers like IBM or Apple Inc., and the plethora of resellers who bring technology to consumers.

Each side needs a slightly different marketing approach, Anaya said, and Agency Ingram Micro is poised to serve as a conduit between the two.

“We are helping our partners on either side brand better,” she said. “We’re helping manufacturers take their consumer message or their business-to-business message and have that mean something to the resellers. Manufacturers have a ton of agencies that support them, but they don’t necessarily understand how to really use marketing with reseller customers, and we’ve done it for years. Their marketing messages are more focused on (the end) consumer, so what we can do is take their messaging nuggets … and apply them to resellers.”

Anaya’s team last year tackled a quick-turnaround project for Western Digital Corp., a key distribution customer for Ingram Micro. The Irvine-based disk drive maker needed help launching its WD Red hard drive.

“The beautiful thing was, we could step in [because] we really understood their business,” she said. “We got a video done, the collateral and the creative demonstration, [all in two weeks]. We’re good at that, because it’s sort of standard practice, our normal business.”

The agency has also worked on marketing campaigns for manufacturers whose distribution business may not go to Ingram Micro.

“We understand marketing in the (sales) channel, so we can help them with that whole campaign and really articulate that well for them,” Anaya said.

Concierge

In other cases, the agency acts as a “marketing concierge” on behalf of big manufacturers—including Microsoft—that offer market development funds to resellers to help pay for training and other support.

The agency also works directly for resellers to help them brand themselves and showcase their strengths.

That was the challenge for Black Point, a Seattle-based provider of IT services that started out as Northwest Computing Services.

It was “an old, dated name,” Anaya said, and the company wanted to change the way their customers saw them.

“They needed a really compelling message about who they are, and what they can do,” Anaya said. “We helped them come up with a new name … a whole new look and feel, from their collateral, their websites, to messaging that they use. And that put them in a better light with their customers, and it actually opened them up a lot of manufacturers who saw them differently and thought of them as a great partner to go to market with in a different area. So it grew their business in both categories.”

Other Channels

The marketing message also has to resonate through IT sales channels, which is something Anaya’s marketing team has plenty of experience with.

“We have (the) advantage of being able to be very creative on the front end and be extremely involved in how that creativity gets played out from the sales standpoint,” she said. “Other marketing agencies are not in the middle of this, so you can come up with a madly creative campaign, but it’s very difficult sometimes to activate that campaign if you don’t have all the people understanding what is it you’re trying to accomplish as you move into the sales process of it.

“Ingram Micro has a better picture where a reseller fits in the business arena. We get to see what a lot of resellers do so we get to act as a consultant and help them understand where to spend their time and money and maybe things not to do.”

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