We invited two passionate Cornishmen up with the best Cornish pasties they could find for the Royal Taste Challenge!

We secured considerable press exposure, highlighting the credentials of The Pembrokeshire Pasty against the established Cornish variety.

The advantage of using The Marketing Farm – creative ideas seamlessly integrated across all marketing disciplines.

Powerful Branding

We  developed a striking logo and consistent branding underlining the brand values we identified as part of our master marketing strategy plan. This is reflected across all packaging and design elements.

Distinct Design

We also designed the colour scheme and frontage of their very first shop, the first of a planned national roll. This opened in Tenby on 11 March with the Pembrokeshire flag proudly fluttering in the wind.

National Headlines

Our February media launch generated headline coverage across Wales, commanding interest from picture agencies, national and regional press, radio and TV. More here

Successful Event Management

Their Royal Highnesses visit to The Pembrokeshire Pasty & Pie Co. shop in Tenby on 30 June 2010. The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall met the Directors and the team, visited the shop and of course sampled some of the delicious pasties.

Media Hook

We arranged a real taste challenge outside the shop by tasting both, The Cornish and The Welsh pasty, to express the friendly rivalry between Cornish and Pembrokeshire pasties.

Effective Consultancy

After the success of the launch of the first store in Tenby and in the lead up to the opening of a flagship store in Cardiff, Pembrokeshire Pasty & Pie Co. have opened a new branch of the company, Pemby Foods, with the help of The Marketing Farm.

All of their delicious pasties and pies will be made fresh daily on a farm and distributed to supermarkets and wholesalers. We aim to bring a taste of Pembrokeshire across the country.

Market Growth

The Marketing Farm continues to direct and manage all the marketing, brand and design development for this ambitious company to help them develop a national network of pasty and pie stores across UK and enter the retail market.

Further information

Please read our latest blueprint.

An infection clamped beneath that molar with nowhere to go shakes the very foundations of your jaw and teeth. That innocent tooth, which has taken years to grow and countless tubes of toothpaste, will probably have to be removed. An infection at the core – at the nerve ending – can destroy all you have grown.

If your marketing strategy is infected with poor information, it will eventually destroy everything you proceed to develop. As any good dentist will say, prevention is better than cure. Although I believe my dentist, Malvern’s Chris Bocking, is the world’s best, I would not hesitate to agree!

Solid information provides sound roots from which a successful marketing campaign can grow. Without this, you risk infection and a costly extraction.

Decisions over potential opportunities, target market selection, market segmentation, planning and implementing marketing programmes, marketing performance, and control should all be underpinned by market research.

These decisions are complicated by interactions between the controllable marketing variables of product, pricing, promotion, and distribution. Further complications are added by uncontrollable environmental factors such as general economic conditions, technology, public policies, competitor activity, and social and cultural changes.

As if this does not provide enough headaches, we need to add to the mix the complexity of consumers. Relevant information can at least help us more reliably predict consumers’ response to marketing initiatives.

I am not arguing that marketing is a complete science. I would not be so passionate about marketing if it was. However, these are essential questions to ask before committing to any marketing campaign:

Your Customers
What are their locations, age, gender, buying behaviours and motivations?

Competitor information
Do you know their identities, marketing strategies and customer relationships?

Product information
How do your customers talk about your brand, products and service and likely impact of technology developments?

Industry information
What is the big picture? What are the future demand and supply trends and patterns?

Competitive opportunities
What are the under-served consumer segments and unmet consumer needs?

Qualitative research using depth interviews, focus groups, surveys, field tests and observations, supported by primary research yielding new, relevant and specific information will answer the above questions.

The Value of The Smile
I write this from a hotel near our Romanian office where the staff appear friendly and smiling. Last week I stayed at London’s Soho Hotel (a converted multi storey carpark!) where the staff were also exceptionally happy. It seems a rarity in hotels these days, but smile and world smiles with you.  It costs nothing and is a great marketing tool! And lest we forget, a good smile requires healthy teeth!

Matthew Rymer, Managing Director, The Marketing Farm Limited

A website’s success is dependent on the quality and levels of visiting traffic. However, too many businesses fail to have an ongoing online promotional strategy in place, and far too many have been stung by the false promises of so called ‘SEO specialists’ who promise big and achieve little. In this context, we have launched low cost and fully inclusive Search Engine Optimization packages to provide the necessary monthly maintenance, adjustments and assessments to increase online traffic to client sites.

We offer a choice of 12 month packages to ensure a website is successful across all major search engine and social networking sites. All our retained SEO accounts are reviewed by our full marketing team and supplementary recommendations provided free of charge. For smaller businesses that are mostly focused on a local geographical area we will create customised local SEO plans targeting a particular area (town, city, state, country) depending upon objectives. Please contact us for further information and explanations.

Package 1 On Page Optimization

This is executed within the website itself.

• Website Content Analysis

• HTML Code Optimization
• Competitors Analysis - assessing the website’s strengths and weaknesses through deep competition analysis
• Meta Tag Optimization – to identify keyword tags, key phrases and description tags necessary for placing websited at the best position with monthly and seasonal rotations
• Alt Tag Optimization – image word rotation
• Page Title Placements – monthly rotations
• Broken And External Link Report – to make sure website doesn’t have any “dead links” or “broken links”
• Keywords And Key Phrases Research
• Image Optimization And Anchor Tag Optimization
• Robot File Maintenance
• Google Sitemap Maintenance
• Statistical Traffic Reporting And Analysis

Package 2: On Page And Off Page Promotion

These additional services are executed outside of the website.

• Social Networking and Bookmarking – creating and maintaining accounts on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Subscribe To Communities
• Business Directory Submission – subscribe to available business directories to help keep businesses at the top search positions
• Article Creation And Submission
• Blog Commenting –posting links to and from blogs, sharing links
• Forum Posting
• RSS Feed Directories – creating  RSS feeds (blog entries, news headlines, audio, video)
• CSS Submission
• Blog Creation – starting and maintaining blogs

Advertising

The Media Farm can also advise on concepts, media planning, design and production for:

• Banner and skyscraper advertising

• Contextual advertising

• Behaviourial targeting

• Semantic advertising

• Floating, expanding and wallpaper advertisements

• Pop-ups and pop-unders

• Video advertisements

• Map advertisements (Google maps)

• Mobile advertisements (SMS texting)

Our team comprises of cherry picked talent working as a highly motivated team in our Bucharest office. Our programmers possess considerable experience in web-based application development and the creation of scripts, programs and interfaces. The software talent in our Bucharest office, overseen by our Director, Dragos Perca, is underpinned by our creative and strategic resource in the UK. This means that we are able to understand and specify the perfect solution from the simplest of briefs.

We will brand and integrate solutions into a front end to meet client requirements and provide communications and support where necessary. Our server bases operate in the UK and the US with contingency systems in place in Romania. We are also able to provide global 24 hour technical support for the systems we develop, in which automated error messaging systems are embedded. All our systems are security audited to safeguard against all possible fraud scenarios.

Case Study

An example of our ability and success is highlighted by our Financial Portal Platform Software, developed in conjunction with New York based EMS Financial Services. This 18 month project was developed to budget and to schedule. It is the world’s most advanced and automated escrow system in operation and securely controls millions of dollars of trades every day across the world and around the clock.

Member Benefits

EMS members can easily setup, track and manage all of their telecom trading transactions in real-time from anywhere and anytime and in any currency.

Members set up a new project by inviting a buyer and/or a seller to transact telecom services. The details of the project are clearly defined (region, rate, increment, invoicing cycle and settlement period) and terms and conditions of agreement are all confirmed automatically.

Upon the acceptance of project terms and conditions by invitee, the buyer is able to allocate and lock funds from their general holding account to the specific project, thereby securing the transaction and activating the project. The buyer is able at any time to increase the amount of security, as may be required.

Once the agreed billing cycle has been reached, the provider simply selects the specific project they would like to invoice, enters the total amount of minutes used into the designated field and an automated invoice is issued to the client for review and approval. Upon acceptance, funds are released from the project holding account and are moved to the provider’s general account.

Members can easily and simply access to all their projects, financial and corporate data with the simple click of their mouse. From simple summary overviews to detailed downloadable reports, members have full control and complete visibility to all their activities, transaction and status.

In the event of a billing discrepancy, the client has the ability of issuing a dispute for a specific invoice, where the disputed amount is held and secured in lock box until a resolved while the remaining balance is released.

Administration benefits

The administration console role reduces administrator input, risk of human error and reduces administration and accountancy costs. It provides complete transparency over all realtime online statements, automatically flagging up unusual or suspect activity.

No activity is unrecorded and a virtual and easily accessible footprint archive of all user, project and fund activity is catalogued. Any account can be frozen and locked and user accounts and instant detailed activity analysis.

All contacts recorded online with the ability to contact customers easily at any time. All data can be downloaded into various user-friendly formats for offline purposes.

Ongoing Support and Upgrades

The Software Farm supports long term maintenance and support contracts. In this case we have released a series of upgrades:

• The administration and optimisation of a database of tens of tables, containing hundreds of thousands of records
• The optimization of modules and improvements of the user interface (quick access, new features), both within the user’s Portal and administrator’s Panel
• The creation of animated charts and reports, based on user input parameters (date range, etc). Export results to offline files.
• Incorporation of extensive use of Ajax, enabling results page content to load faster and ensure form validations are instant
• The use of new new javascript libraries and plugins (jQuery) for date picker widgets, form validation, and canvas manipulation
• The opimisation of the website for quick load, CSS and javascript caching
• The installation and renewal of SSL certificates
• The use of CPanel for daily server updates, security audits, and modules management

URN FMCG promotions

Open Up Your Business Online with  The RingLeader^. It leaves the flock standing!

There are a flock of online shopping systems available online. But we didn’t like any of them, so we challenged our software team to develop The RingLeader. The result? A very friendly total ecommerce solution we believe is easier to operate, more powerful, affordable, flexible, and customer friendly than the flock.

Our software team work hand in hand with our marketing team and we can provide you with all the marketing and design support you need in addition to ongoing software support and advice to grow your sales. We are able to consider joint ventures on a case by case basis.

Here are our four key points to help you select and protect your Trade Mark……

1). Make it original!

The best Trade Marks are invented and not descriptive of your goods and services (think Google®, Daz® or Kodak®). Remember – the more distinctive your Trade Mark, the stronger your registered protection will be.

2). Search!

As a first step, use the internet and the UK Intellectual Property Office website to search for Trade Marks that are identical or similar to your proposed Trade Mark.

3). Seek professional help and register it!

A Trade Mark Attorney will advise regarding more detailed searching and registration – it is not simply a question of filling in boxes. To obtain robust protection, careful consideration must be given to various factors, including the format of the Mark to be filed and the specification of goods/services.

4). Think of the future!

In the six-month ‘priority’ period after the filing date of your UK Trade Mark Application, corresponding Trade Mark Applications can be filed aboard, claiming the filing date of an earlier Application. Since most Trade Mark systems operate on a first-come-first-served basis, it is important to secure the earliest possible filing date.

Remember that a UK Trade Mark Registration is prima facie evidence of your ownership of the Trade Mark in this country. Although unregistered rights do exist (under the common law tort of Passing Off), these rights are not immediate and only arise after substantial use/advertising of the Trade Mark.

For more information or help and advice on protecting your brand, please contact us.