NEC Australia continues revamp, with new ad agency

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 08 July 2009 04:17

IT Industry - Strategy

NEC Australia has continued its push to boost its fortunes, appointing communications agency Loud as its advertising agency, describing the move as "part of a renewed focus on marketing aimed at raising [our] brand awareness amongst the business and ICT community." According to NEC, the objective is to help the company "regain [our] rightful position as one of the country's leading ICT innovators working across the private and public sector."

Craig Norton, general manager of marketing at NEC Australia, said: "Since I came on board at NEC about a year ago, I've heard the company continually referred to as one of Australia's biggest secrets. It's our intention to uncover that secret through a strategic, integrated marketing programme that will inform and excite the market about NEC and the breadth and depth of our product and service offerings...One of the key things that NEC has recognised is that to continue to be successful, we need to make a real commitment to marketing and the appointment of Loud is evidence of this shift."

The COO of Loud, Lorraine Jokovic, agreed that NEC had to lift its profile. "It is something of a 'sleeper' brand with so much potential and has many great stories to tell." She added: "The aim of the overarching strategy is for NEC's achievements to reverberate amongst target audiences."

NEC will continue to use n2n Communications as its PR agency and DWA as its media agency. Norton said he saw the integration and collaboration across marketing, advertising and PR as crucial to NEC's success.

Latest in a string of initiatives
The move is the latest in a series of initiatives in the past six months aimed at reviving the company's fortunes. Last month NEC Australia announced plans to revamp its partner programme in a bid to boost unified communications systems sales (ExD 25 June). A week earlier it had announced that it hoped to grow its service revenues from 50 percent to 70 percent of total business earnings in the next five years (ExD 18 June). Those announcements followed one in March of a restructure to focus on services, unified communications and display solutions, at a cost of more than 150 jobs.