Gathering and presenting best marketing case-studies proved to be a good pilot fish strategy for professional events company

Meeting professionals are able to carry out a wide range of tasks, starting from target group and content planning to organizing technical arrangements and catering. Such events professionals are very competent and competitive at home market but only few full service events companies are successful worldwide.

Entering new markets is challenging for both in-house and public events organizers. Best Marketing (BM) is a small firm who figured out how to take their key competence around the World. BM started up as a full service conference organizer for marketing professionals. They created content, marketed the events and handled all the technical aspects of an event. Going international was high on the agenda and after few years company entered Baltic Countries, Finland, Ukraine, Croatia and Shanghai markets. As predicted, they faced fierce competition from day one and growing on these markets demanded considerable investment both to personnel and marketing.

Recent recession was hard to event companies and so was it for BM. It soon realized, that few profitable markets that supported all the rest, will be in decline too. Survival at stake, CEO Hando Sinisalu analyzed current business model throughly. What he found out was shocking – although BM pursued to cover all marketing related hot topics, only marketing best-practice they had been gathering as one part of activities, truly mattered to it’s clients.

In recession, where events fast became “not mission critical”, marketing people graved for information and experience from the best. While analyzing personnel he discovered that only few people create a value clients were ready to pay for. With that knowledge Sinisalu cut down the personnel of his company by 80% and concentrated only on gathering and presenting marketing best-practice. He shut down all the branches and went Pilot Fish mode. Instead of being present at handful of markets with big teams and organizing high risk public events on many marketing topics he now organizes Best Marketing events in partnerships with biggest marketing publications at given market. That has enabled him to create a considerable international reach with very low risk level concentrating on what he and his small team knows the best – finding out and presenting the best marketing case-studies in the World.

Each event professional has something he or she is truly great at. While it might be difficult to go international with full service, this unique expertise might be very valuable to some of the major international players with similar target group. Be it a big events company, a media company or other. It also does not matter if you are a independent professional or a company, the Pilot Fish logic works in both  cases.

Croatian company Dok-Ing took the experience of building special military and rescue vehicles to create their own sexy EV in partnership with computer giant Lenovo

It seems Dok-Ing has made it in its niche and has little to gain. But CEO Vjekoslav Majetić has other ideas. Dok-Ing has taken years of it’s experience in automation and robotics and designed product to much bigger market – an electric car for rapidly growing EV-market. The first element of Pilot Fish Strategy – identifying unique strength – is there. Now, where to find a multinational company to partner with?

Initially, Dok-Ing had no such plans. It has tried to find funding to mass produce it’s XD model introduced at Geneva 2010 car show. Nevertheless mass production of a car is immensely expensive. Therefore Pilot Fish team is not surprised to find Dok-Ing partnering Lenovo, one of the World largest computer producer. Together they build topless XD that goes into production in 2012. So eventually, Dok-Ing has chosen a Pilot Fish strategy that is 1) Finding a unique competence 2) Finding a partner to scale up this competence 3) Growing value together. Last phase remains to be seen…

LunaTik is a module that makes your iPod Nano a groovy and practical wrist watch.

Scott Wilson, a former Global Creative Director for Nike Watches spotted the potential of iPod Nano as a wrist watch ever since Steve Jobs announced the 6th generation. Nevertheless industry leading watch brands were not excited about the idea. So Scott took his idea and experience from watch business to Kickstarter.com to use crowd-funding to rise the money for production. He aimed to raise $15K in 30 days but instead they ended up with nearly $1M. This gave him credibility and allowed to engage with Apple suppliers to manufacture the aluminum and with premium watch suppliers to produce the strap. In distribution LunaTik has partnered with Apple’s leading fulfillment and logistics partner. Scott is obsessed by the detail and pursued a more premium design, which he believed consumers desired. This was to keep the pace with the Apple image of design and quality.

This pilot fish story shows, that creating a totally new product based on a worldwide phenomenon, setting high quality standards for production and aligning the image according to the big partner provides a great platform to build a pilot fish company from the scratch. Find out more about LunaTik.

Wii appeals to old and young, men and women...

Nintendo, the creator of video gaming was struggling hard on 2005. Although the videogame business grew into $30 billion industry worldwide, Nintendo was selling half less in US than 20 years earlier when they started their journey. It was losing market share to Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s XBox. Its GameCube had failed to regain market share lost by its predecessor and even successful handheld device DS could not build in the gap. The competition was taken to one battleground only – to build more and more powerful graphics chips that attracted sophisticated players with ever improving visualization but also made the gaming consoles and videogames more expensive. But Nintendo had something baking in their oven.

They had been working on a technology that breaks away from usual agenda of video gaming – the graphics – and provides gamers with all new experience – full body involvement. According to Nintendo’s game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, the concept involved focusing on a new form of player interaction. “The consensus was that power isn’t everything for a console. Too many powerful consoles can’t coexist. It’s like having only ferocious dinosaurs. They might fight and hasten their own extinction.”

In 2006 Nintendo launched seventh generation gaming console called the Wii. It established a new category where gamers could control the game with their hand movements. Wii didn’t even upgrade its graphics chip but borrowed it from the last generation console. It generated a machine that besides usual heavy users – the teenagers – appealed to a whole wider market: kids, adults and even grandmas. And it cost less as it was cheaper to build it. On top it came preloaded with a smash hit game Wii Sports that enabled gamers to play tennis, golf, bowling and other sports that made you stand up from couch, the usual gaming environment. Nintendo created a Blue Ocean, an un-competed category with wider market, improved customer experience and cheaper product. I also created a new business model. Sony and Microsoft were selling their consoles below costs hoping to earn with high-margin games but Wii was designed to sell for a profit. Wii outsold competition for years by far before their versions of motion sensing controls came along. Years after launch Nintendo is not rushing to introduce new generation of Wii console saying, that current version can offer gaming surprises for at least two years to come.

But what made Wii so special was the motion sensor in Wiimote, a game control. It is not widely known fact that motion sensing technology used in Wiimote was actually developed in Gyration – a leader of gyroscope sensor technology. Already back in 2001 Nintendo was licensed to use the technology after it acquired a stake in Gyration.  CEO Tom Quinn said “Partnering with the largest and most successful game console manufacturer in the world will give us an exciting opportunity to introduce our amazing technologies to Nintendo’s broad home video game market.” That it did helping Nintendo and Gyration to sell millions of consoles. Furthermore, co-operation with Nintendo and the success of Wii took Gyration into spotlight of motion sensor technology world and helped them to leverage their expertise into new products and partnerships. It has been rumoured that Gyration has worked together also with other major gaming console manufacturers. But for certain the co-operation has established Gyration as a leader of motions sensing technology and enabled to launch its own end user range of remotes (Gyration Ultra), computer mice (Air Mouse) and keyboards. It was acquired on 2008 by Movea Inc. and taking into account the success story of Wii, probably with favourable terms to Gyration. Motions sensing becoming THE thing in gaming, many other small and innovative companies are launching their versions of motion sensitive remotes (Motus Games with Darwin) too.

The thrill of the story is to have two disciplines combined. First Nintendo to use Blue Ocean strategy by developing a whole new category and dominating it for years. Secondly Gyration to enable this with its tiny but crucial and unique part of the end product.

Just Do It! is a simple yet effective line created by Wieden+Kennedy for its top client Nike in 1988.

University of Oregon track and field athlete Paul Knight and his coach Bill Bowerman founded Nike (then Blue Ribbon Sports) already back on 1964 trading Japanese Onitsuka Tiger running shoes to fellow athletes. The main marketing was done by just talking to athletes and these passing the word forward. This approach was named „word of foot“ by Phil Knight who dispised huge advertising campaigns and branding. Nevertheless they started to make their own shoes and founded their own brand Nike on 1971. The company was renamed Nike in 1978.

This is were the star of our story steps in. It was in 1982 when also in Portland a corporate PR-guy Dan Wieden and ad-guy David Kennedy established their own small ad-agency Wieden+Kennedy. Their only client at the time was Nike to whom they needed to provide marketing and advertising solutions that would take the company, alreade publicly traded and enjoying more than 50% domestic market share, to new frontiers. The task was tricky because of Phil Knight’s hate towards traditional advertising. That forced W+K to test the limits of creativity. With their unique expertise they build the brand of Nike. The Pilot Fish relationship between W+K has last for decades W+K being the main ad-agency for Nike to date. A great example of their simplistic yet extremely effective style is the legendary slogan „Just Do It!“ that W+K created for Nike’s 1988 ad-campaign. Just recently W+K and Nike surprised the audience again featuring Tiger Woods after his sex scandal in one of their ads. Although the ad has been described as the worst ad ever by some, only few ads throughout advertising history have created so much discussion about ethics, values and remorse. While the rest of the sponsors backed away from Tiger, Nike and W+K gave the whole situation a new creative angle.

W+K has grown global together with Nike and serves today many of the greatest brands in the World. Their client list includes Coca-Cola, ESPN, Miller, Honda and Procter & Gamble. Still the most work and the most recognised work (Cannes and Emmy awards) has emerged from the partnership with Nike. Nike founders had the business spirit and they understood their clients but they lacked marketing creativity and strong brand. W+K gave that to Nike in a way that has made Nike one of the most valuable and special brands in the World.

Mobile positioning technology company Regio is innovative even with its annual report. 2008 version was designed as a map. This is a fragment of it.

Regio started up 20 years ago making road maps of the region. Since they start, map business was all about printing but Regio turned it around to be all about programming and computing. On 1999 mobile communications giant Ericsson invented mobile positioning technology and decided to launch it from Baltic States. As Regio was the only one who had both cartography and programming competence, they were Ericsson’s only choice and became the main vendor for launch.

Regio enhanced the technology they developed for Ericsson and saw the opportunity to sell it globally. Their strategy was to find very strong partners from telecom industry and never go into retail or branding. The connection to Ericsson remained strong and until today they are the main partner for Ericsson in mobile positioning business. And as Ericsson is the biggest player in the World, Regio is the biggest in its business.

The cooperation with Ericsson is based on a lot of mutual trust. Besides their daily business, Ericsson provides Regio with access to latest mobile technology developments of their own. In return Regio keeps eyes open and provides Ericsson with the info from other players at global markets.

There are several great learning points as far as Pilot Fish Strategy is concerned. First, you have to have a unique strength in order to be attractive partner for industry giants. Second, the relationships and also luck plays an important role. It wouldn’t have probably happened to Regio if Ericsson would have decided to launch elsewhere. Third, concentrating to narrow niche but with huge potential scale is a true Pilot Fish spirit. Fourth, hooking up with the biggest global player in the field provided the lift to scale up their competence. Fifth, this relationship can be kept alive and mutually lucrative by trusting each other and by constantly offering partner new value. And fifth, Pilot Fish Company acting in global waters can come from anywhere. More at http://regio.ee/

This "Husky" is not made by Hardwire LLC but Hardwire provides the most vital component of it - an armor.

It all started in 1999 when it was first developed by founder George Tunis in the true entrepreneurial spirit. After a decade building advanced infrastructure and large composites parts as the founder and CEO of Hardcore Composites and later Hardcore-DuPont, Tunis sought to develop the first high-tensile steel composite reinforcement solution for the broad composites industries – which is exactly what he did in the garage of his own home. He labelled the solution Hardwire® and subsequently formed Hardwire LLC to not only bring this product to market, but also develop high value-added applications for customers seeking both performance and economy.

Today, with just two patented armor solutions, Hardwire provides unique armor components to U.S. military, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. State Department, owners of critical infrastructures, and many composite industry clients. It all started with the dream of the founder that lighter, more versatile and cheaper armor can be created to protect lives and infrastructure. Focusing to single but vital technology and product but with large potential scale has enabled Hardwire LLC to grow from $5.3 million in 2005 to $124.0 million by the end of 2008. The growth has continued on 2009. More about the company at www.hardwirellc.com .

Johnny Depp has a unique talent to play eccentric and controversial roles. That talent is needed to bring director Tim Burton's fantasies live.

We are sure that the man in question, Johnny Depp was not considering any „strategy“ while hooking up with a co-operation partner Tim Burton for 8 films and counting.  That is because perfect Pilot Fish matches often have accidental and intuitive element involved.

According to Talk Talk Depp was struggling with his musician career in The Kids and even had to have a day job as a telemarketer selling ballpoint pens over the phone. It was then when his wife introduced him to her friend Nicolas Cage whose agent got him a side role in Nightmare on Elm Street. Or to be precise, he was chosen by the director Wes Craven’s daughter, who was at the audition with her dad and liked Depp the most. As his band split, Depp had nothing more to do than start taking acting seriously. The breakthrough came in TV series 21 Jump Street where Depp become an American teen idol. He was making handsomely money but realised, that this is not the role he wanted to be recognised with for the rest of his life.

The perfect escape from „nice guy“ image was offered by director Tim Burton who searched for a different kind of an actor to play an eccentric role of Edward Scissorshand. You understand the „difference“ in this context by comparing Depp with Tom Cruise, an original candidate to play Edward and highly recommended to Burton by the studio. For Depp the role of tragic Edward who expressed himself without words was the right direction to take. After that we have seen him   in many Burton’s roles that are beyond  „normal“. Whether it was Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow or Willie Wonka at Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Not to mention Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean and Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, the blockbuster that is currently sitting on fifth place ever in terms of box office revenue.

In Burton Depp found a „brother, a friend and a brave soul“ who constantly challenges Depp’s talent to introduce audience’s different kind of heroes. In Depp Burton has found a natural talent to play an eccentric roles that people come to see in a movie without these being a lead roles at all (Jack Sparrow and Mad Hatter e.g.). By hooking to Tim Burton, Depp has created a spectacular career praised by the critics and audiences. But it has also been a lucrative business endeavour as films featuring Depp have grossed over $5.7 billion worldwide.

There is a huge takeaway for any career in this story. First you need to recognise, what you are truly good at and then stick to it. Second, the chance might come unexpected and suddenly so keep your eyes open at all times. Third, look for a partner who not only has the need for your talent but who can build on that talent, who has the means to utilize your potential and with whom you can grow together. Forth, the great Pilot Fish relationship is a deep, emotional and friendly one. And sixth, it all takes time.

Golla started up as a sub-contractor to Nokia but is now selling accessories under its own brand in more than 100 countries.

Soon Golla became a subcontractor to Nokia benefiting from its vast growth in both terms of  geographical reach and sales volume. Although the co-operation with Nokia was mutually lucrative, management realized that this was the unique opportunity to establish its own brand. As Golla used the same retail channels than Nokia, breaking up did not hurt Golla too much. The brand was named Golla after the location of its first production facility, Kolla in Finland.

This story proves that successful Pilot Fish Strategy enables company to make it on its own if it chooses to launch its own brand. Golla did handsome EUR 28 million turnover in 2009 and this was generated only by personnel of 60. Golla sells its products through retailers in over 100 countries and has offices in Finland, Germany, France, Japan, China and United States.

But this case also shows two other aspects often present with Pilot Fish Companies. First is former experience on the field. Golla already was in consumer electronics accessory business before moving to portable device accessory business. So it did not started out from the blank sheet but was on a good position to see how its business sector is evolving. The second is closeness and relations to its Shark Company to be. Both Nokia and Golla are from Finland. It would have been probably considerably more difficult for Golla to approach Motorola, e.g.  So having an attractive partner in close range adds to the possibility for a great partnership. More about Golla http://www.golla.com .

Tolerans has 80% worldwide market share

The fact is that Tolerans is the No 1 provider of stitches and stitching technology in the World. Its client list includes all the major newspapers you can name: Svenska Dagbladet, Handelsblatt, Dagens Nyheter, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Metro…the list can go on and on because Tolerans has an amazing 80% worldwide market share!

And its business is growing further. Recession has been kind to Tolerans as newspapers around the world have got thinner because of declining advertising expenditure. But this has enabled publishers to stitch them together, a feature indeed graved by readers but overlooked by publishers at economic boom and thick, brick-like paper era. The third aspect is that stitched newspaper gives advertiser much better layouts to put their ads on. Instead of one double-page spread, stitched papers have tens or hundreds of them.

These three factors have made Tolerans a true survivor of the crisis. But it’s not just the little metal stitches, it is about technology and constant R&D. CEO Jan Melin is even not afraid of digital channels. As he puts in his recent interview in Monocle: ”Digital has shaken things up in a positive way, as publishers now have to really focus on the inherent strengths of print.”

This truly great Pilot Fish story proves that even the smallest thing can be a source for Global business. As long as it is World Class. To learn more about the company visit http://www.tolerans.se .