Recognizing Marketing’s Finest
FIFTY INDIVIDUAL MARKETING EFFORTS EARN AWARDS IN OUR 2020 CONTEST
Judging for tED magazine’s 2020 Best of the Best Marketing Awards Competition took place in late April and, for the first time in the competition’s history, over Zoom. Over the course of a week, our four judges weighed the entries submitted for the contest’s 11 categories. Ultimately, 50 entries were determined winners, with two companies—OneSource Distributors and Intermatic—taking home the honor of Best of the Best Overall Distributor and Best of the Best Overall Supplier, respectively. Here we present all of this year’s winning submissions, highlighting a different category each week.
PUBLIC RELATIONS—COMMUNITY OUTREACH /
Distributor $401 Million to $700 Million
Summit Electric Supply
DePelchin Toy Drive
To create a campaign in support of the annual DePelchin Holiday Toy Drive, Summit Electric Supply partnered with DePelchin and used its marketing platform and community to drive toy donations during the 2019 holiday season. The campaign included designing and distributing a flyer to counter customers, creating counter signage/posters, drafting an informational email about the drive for Summit account executives to send to customers, and targeted Facebook ads in participating markets.
FROM THE JUDGES: “They not only supported a good cause, but also—through photos of employees delivering the toys—leveraged the PR, which is good marketing.”
Distributor More Than $700 Million
Graybar
Empowering Our Communities
Graybar launched a company-wide program that gave employees a paid workday to volunteer and introduced
a matching gift program. Launched internally via email and the company portal, it was supported by several documents, including a program overview and detailed guidelines. PR was distributed announcing the program and throughout the year employee volunteer stories were featured on graybar150.com and highlighted on various social channels and internally through the employee portal.
FROM THE JUDGES: “‘Empowering our communities’ is a wonderful play on words. It really lifted the stature of the Graybar brand. I not only liked it—I loved it!”
PUBLIC RELATIONS—CORPORATE /
Distributor More Than $700 Million
OneSource Distributors
Bilingual Solar Training
OneSource worked with two of its solar manufacturer partners with bilingual trainers to identify and plan a training course that would be both informative and highly valuable. The same training was offered in the morning in Spanish and in the afternoon in English, giving customers the option to attend in the language they preferred. The training was promoted to solar installation customers and prospects in the San Diego area via email, social media, flyers at counters, and by the sales team.
FROM THE JUDGES: “Offering an inclusive training opportunity is a terrific PR strategy. Nicely promoted and attended.”
Supplier Less Than $250 Million
Service Wire
Storm Restoration Campaign
Service Wire designed a campaign to proactively promote its products and services in the utility market in preparation for storm season. Because the utility market is increasingly vulnerable to storm-related damage, content reinforced the company’s capacity to support restoration efforts with available inventory and 24-hour emergency service. Components of the campaign were: an ad and editorial coverage in a trade magazine, customer Q&A content adapted for social media, a digital flyer, and regionally-targeted emails.
FROM THE JUDGES: “This is a great example of how a campaign for creating product loyalty can also be an effective way to create really good PR. Nicely done!”
Supplier More Than $250 Million
Legrand North America
Understanding the Benefits of Digital Transactions
To help distributors increase their efficiency and competitiveness as they face increasing challenges from e-tailers, a white paper was created that demystified the various digital/e-commerce transaction terms and defined acronyms commonly used in the industry.
The white paper was shared with the entire Legrand electrical distribution sales organization and posted on myLegrand.us for use by the Legrand distributor network.
FROM THE JUDGES: “Pretty smart PR move. Very well presented and put together. An excellent example of corporate PR: positioning themselves as experts, building their brand, and getting information out there.”
Tagged with awards, Best of the Best, marketing