Copier giant Ricoh wooed scores of tech execs with a personalized campaign designed to appear to their egos

Selling photocopiers isn’t exactly the sexiest game in town. For the marketing professional seeking glamour, copiers rank up there with refrigerators and plumbing supplies. But Hothead Studios, a six-person agency in Atlanta, managed to create such a glamorous and successful campaign for the products from copier maker Ricoh that the agency not only won a prestigious DMA ECHO Gold award, it won extra business from Ricoh as well. And it punched home an old marketing truth at the same time: Don’t sell the product; sell its benefits.

Before copiers became digital do-everything wonders, manufacturers sold them to office managers or COOs. Now, however, some of that responsibility has shifted to CIOs and IT directors — and they don’t necessarily want it, says Pat Berryhill, account manager at Hothead. Research showed that most IT professionals see copiers as pesky obligations rife with humdrum user connectivity issues. “It was a challenge to get in front of the CIO and the IT director,” Berryhill says.

Ricoh already had one campaign promoting its digital copiers return meager results. So Berryhill and her client, Ricoh marketing manager Linda Lindsey, decided to put less focus on the product. Instead, they thought about what makes a CIO tick.

The pair settled on a campaign designed to appeal to CIOs’ egos by depicting prospects as leaders who use Ricoh’s advanced technology to solve major problems for their companies. Using variable data printing technology, the creative team produced three mock book covers (segmenting their list based on occupation) and emblazoned them with titles like Still Doing Business in a Black & White World? The prospect’s name appeared, as the author, in a giant head-turning font at the bottom of the page. “Boy genius!” Berryhill says. “Partners with Ricoh!”

The company mailed the faux books to 1,984 CIOs and IT directors at Fortune 1000 companies. Inside the cover was a blank journal in which recipients could make notes. It was hoped that the pad of paper inside would give recipients a practical reason to keep the promotional piece on their desks, where colleagues would see it. A few weeks later, Ricoh sent fictional press clippings about prospects’ “book signings.” Finally, the company directed prospects to a Web site where visitors could download case studies and apply for a 10-percent rebate on high volume purchases.

But the creative wouldn’t get the job done without sales follow-up, says Berryhill. Copier purchases are typically a large financial commitment for a company. For a major expenditure like this, salespeople would have to follow up. “If you don’t involve the salespeople at the beginning, they won’t support your wonderful campaign. You might as well put your money in a hallway and set it on fire,” Berryhill says. So, to keep the 90-person sales team interested, the marketers also printed up book jackets with salespeople’s names on them.

Lindsey also pulled in the salespeople to provide the list. Ricoh scrubbed the list before printing the customized mailers, a move key to the program’s success, Lindsey says. Lindsey also got sales reps to spend a full day calling sales hubs around the country. By offering salespeople the chance to win prizes like flat-screen TVs, Lindsey provided them with incentives to make appointments.

Whether the experts who received the “books” considered themselves geniuses or not, Ricoh wound up thinking of Hothead that way. The campaign transformed recalcitrant prospects into converts at an unprecedented 18-percent response rate and an ROI of well over 100 times expenditures.

Mitchell Lieber is chair of the ECHO Awards and a direct marketing consultant in Chicago. While the campaign’s cleverness impressed him, he also gave Hothead and Ricoh points for its execution. They paid as much attention to the cleanliness of the list and to careful follow-up as they did to the creative, he says: “They carried the creative idea through; they made the responses trackable by who responded and who didn’t.”

Since then, Ricoh has turned to Hothead to do book- and magazine-cover campaigns for many of its divisions. And Hothead has used the technique to win several new clients.

Says Lieber: “A great creative idea very well executed can generate so many sales that it’s almost like you’ve created a printer that prints money.”

For Ricoh, nothing could be truer.