As Kerrygold is owned by a cooperative of Irish dairy farmers, the company understands that by working together, great things can be achieved.  The Kerrygold Community Awards have been created to give away £1,000’s to local community projects.

The majority of winning projects are decided by the public who can visit the site, enter their Unique Reference Number (available on special packs and tubs of Kerrygold), and then cast their vote for the project they think deserves a share of the money.  Each time a consumer enters their unique reference number, 10p is added to the Kerrygold Community Fund.

Visit The Site
Our objective was to design and develop a fully interactive and searchable awards platform that is able to process entries and voting in real time, controlled with a full administration console. The site needed to be simple for the user to browse, search, vote and add entries and also easy to manage by administrators and the Kerrygold team. The site has three different phases according to which part of the competition is taking place and has been developed to accommodate an infinite number of entries and generate maximum search engine referrals.

The software build for such a site was complex, with key achievements from our team including:

• Successfully creating a voting system and a commenting system, allowing users to both vote and comment on any project
• Building a system for three different phases of the project, with each phase being activated according to set periods of time
• Designing a money pot counter which is added to each time someone enters a URN
• Ability to search projects based on various criteria
• Creating a powerful admin panel for projects management, comment management, cotes management, media library etc
• The site makes use of PHP, MySQL, Javascript/iQuery/AJAX and CSS

The whole team here at The Farm are very proud of the website so please purchase your pack or tub of Kerrygold butter, visit the website and add 10p to The Kerrygold Community Fund by entering your URN.  You can then cast your own vote for which project you feel deserves a share of The Kerrygold Community Fund!

As well as all this, Kerrygold are also giving away 5 prizes of £2,000 – just enter your URN to be in with the chance of instantly winning £2,000.

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