Dow originally developed STYROFOAM, the high performance, blue extruded polystyrene foam insulation, over 50 years ago, as a simple but effective flotation life raft material. Since those early beginnings, Styrofoam has become the most widely used extruded polystyrene foam insulation in the world, for residential, commercial and industrial buildings. In fact, it's the brand preferred by more architects, designers and contractors than any other. But achieving international brand recognition requires a dedicated strategy and it has taken Dow years of sustained technical development, hosts of clever new applications and intense international marketing effort for STYROFOAM to achieve its enviable position.

Working to maintain it

Many multi-national corporations use a dual agency arrangement for their regional advertising and Dow is no exception. A large specialist, pan - regional advertising agency establishes the overall message, whilst the broader based local consultancies retain responsibility for implementation and measurement of the campaign, in its various forms, within their allocated territories. This is true of STYROFOAM in Europe, where we work closely with the pan - European agency, but retains responsibility for the UK activity overall. A recent campaign is a good example, where the creative approach has been to develop a series of advertising messages that will add a new dimension to the way in which the Styrofoam brand is perceived. It concentrates on those aspects of improved quality, reliability and long - term performance that the product can bring to the built environment in which we all live, work and grow. Execution of the campaign had to be consistent across Europe.

At a local level

In the UK, we agreed the main thrust would be trade press advertising, but decided that further reinforcement would be achieved through the use of direct mail. The press campaign consisted of a series of five ads, each full page; four colour; and after careful analysis of all the candidate media, we selected Building Products; What's New in Building; HA Magazine; Architects Journal; AJ Focus; RIBA Journal; Architecture Today; Building; Building Homes and House Builder, as the titles to provide us with optimum coverage. The five ads were rotated over a twelve - month period to achieve maximum exposure and, wherever possible, those issues with relevant features were prioritised. We have a good reputation with the media in general and we were able to negotiate good positions and extremely competitive rates - including some free insertions to fill last minute cancellations.

Support from Direct Mail

A series of mailers were designed to emulate the advertising campaign, but incorporated a subtle change of headline, a reworking of the copy and the inclusion of a dedicated faxback to ensure maximum effectiveness. The targets were existing users and past enquirers on the Dow database.

Measuring the results

To measure the effectiveness of the campaign, we briefed a specialist market research company to carry out an extensive telephone survey and the results registered handsomely exceeded the clients expectations.

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