What services do you need to launch a product, service or brand?

Our position as launch marketing specialists often helps our prospective clients find us but quickly the conversation moves onto the types of services we provide under that umbrella.

Launching a new brand can entail a wide range of things and we talk to startups and large corporates at various stages of their new venture. At the very nasience of their business, we are involved in naming projects which turn into branding and visual identity tasks. It’s easy to spend a lot of money at this point in a startup’s journey but even easier to under-invest. Just this year, we’ve done new product naming for a global video game publisher and naming for a bootstrapped mapping application. That’s been accompanied by brand development work for a new luxury jewellery brand, a new spring water brand, a major industrial manufacturer and even a large camel dairy. In each case, there are proven methods to achieve a result which we adapt based on budget.

Startups forged the way, but corporate clients are increasingly adopting staged launches over extended periods to test and learn what works before they reveal to the mass market. Digital channels provide the ideal test bed during pre-launch phases because they are so discrete and measurable. Our services cover social media advertising and website development to ensure online activity results in a waitlist registration on an owned asset.

PR is a common requirement for a launch and that increasingly includes working with influencers as well as journalists. In our experience though, media coverage on TV is still the strongest driver of website visits. We’ve been helping ring.com with their new product launches for several years in Australia and making TV news is consistently the top-performing source of online transactions.

A lot of marketers view launches in terms of events. Brand experiences that put consumers hands-on with new products in engaging ways that drive earned media, are increasingly popular and our events for clients in skincare, esports and alcohol regularly exceed their KPIs. Consumers (and corporate event attendees) want Instagrammable moments and in an ever digital world, real-life experiences of a brand are often an important ingredient of a launch plan. Refer to our work on Dermalex, Kittensoft, Riot Games, Red Bull and Lenovo for examples of how that helps drive a launch.

Traditional advertising (TV, radio, outdoor, print) is rarely something a startup can afford but the larger brands we work with still find these channels effective as part of their mix. With the rise of addressable TV and initiatives like 9Voyager in Australia we expect to execute more ‘above the line’ advertising. Our digital production is driven by our own proven tech platform: Oceanview. It’s been developed over 10 years to deliver global campaigns featuring thousands of ad units.

We have strategic people in each of our locations and access to tools like VoxPopMe and Global Web Index to be able to generate research insights.

Selecting the right agency to launch your product, service or brand can be challenging. As an integrated agency, Five by Five can manage most components of a campaign apart from media planning and buying. We recommend searching the Clutch directory to find potential media buyers. You can also check out The Manifest, another industry research platform. We also hold several partnerships with various media buying providers in each of our markets. They share our values and independence so let us know if you’d like an introduction.

Image Credits

• Shutterstock

By Matt Lawton
Managing Director, Sydney