Specialist sales promotion agency Opia will be heading for Las Vegas in the second week of January. Where else would you find our new Head of New Business David Phillips than at CES – one of the premier events in the consumer electronics calendar that is attended by thousands of industry-insiders?
Run by the Consumer Technology Association, it is a massive expo that draws hundreds of exhibitors that range from high-profile names to bleeding-edge start-ups.
As part of his mission, David will be meeting with our own big name clients such as LG and Microsoft and lining up meetings with prospects, ready as ever to conclude more multi-million dollar deals. It is going to be an exciting and an exhausting time, but it is a natural place for Opia to be, given our immersion in the world of consumer technology.
Almost any company in the field is going to find our innovative risk managed sales promotions very attractive indeed. We know that in such a highly-competitive market there is increasing interest in cashback and fixed fee reward promotions. Innovations and product-launches come thick and fast and the more savvy companies want bold promotions that enable them to stand out from the crowd, but without the risk of costs getting out of control.
That’s where our expertise at Opia will make a real difference, underpinning each sales promotion with specialist insurance based on our skilled use of data analytics as well as our long experience and a track record that cannot be matched by anyone else. We come up with creative sales promotion strategies that deliver tangible bottom line benefits.
Creativity is important when devising eye-catching types of promotion. Incentives need to act as triggers for consumers and must be finessed when new products emerge. That is why we at Opia will spend time at CES learning more about the latest applications and devices using virtual and augmented reality technologies (VR and AR). These are the technologies that have such great potential in the consumer sector. We will also be taking a close look at the TV industry, especially in the US where many of the horizontal divisions are being blurred by mergers, business-expansion, technological overlap and the arrival of new applications.
Brian Krzanich, the CEO of Intel, one of our clients, is also opening proceedings at CES with a speech outlining how data-driven experiences are going to change our daily lives. It should be worth hearing.
Last year at a separate event he spoke to investors about the stagnating state of the personal computer market which he attributed to the proliferation of tablets and the growing length of refresh cycles as consumers wait five or six years before replacing their devices.
At Opia, our research in the UK and US pointed to one of the solutions to this problem. The majority (71 per cent) of consumers said they would upgrade within two years if retailers guaranteed them a 50 per cent rebate on the purchase price of the original device. This is our guaranteed future value (GFV) promotion and it is one of the amazing range of highly-effective sales promotions techniques that Opia will be discussing with all prospective clients at CES.
In today’s fiercely competitive global marketplace, innovative, risk-managed promotions should be part of every client’s marketing artillery. At Opia our campaign mechanics allow manufacturers and retailers access to disruptive, creative promotions that their P&L could not otherwise sustain. We craft sales promotions with real differentiation that compel customers to buy, whether for year-round activity or a tactical burst in response to a short-term challenge.
If you want to meet to discuss Opia’s creative sales promotions please email hello@www.opia-sp.com
