I just had a good talk with one of my great clients- George Eakett at GTEquipment (www.hobartasheville.com). He just acquired a new line of Kinetico Water Systems. This time around, he’s marketing Kinetico mainly to residential customers. George has been in business for over 20 years selling mostly equipment for commercial kitchens- Hobart, Hojizaki, Vulcan to name just a few brands.

So now he has a problem: Kinetico doesn’t have any sort of presence in the area and George doesn’t want to start over with the GTE brand. How do we market his new venture and lean on the brand he’s developed by being a local business operating in Western North Carolina for the last 20 years?

Additionally, in the current economic climate, we’re finding that consumers in the Asheville area are continuing to move away from larger, “corporate” businesses and are more interested in buying from Local companies instead. If we market “Kinetico” by itself, then we’re looking like a “corporate” business and not “local.”

So we came up with this idea: build a new website, for now entirely separate from his other site (www.hobartasheville.com). This new website will be mostly an online ”brochure” geared around the company, GTE. We’ll brand the company to show off its local appeal and that it’s a long-standing, stable company you can trust. For the products themselves, since sales mostly rely on a personal contact with one of GTE’s sales reps, we’ll have a couple of pages of product information, but quite frankly, clients will be more concerned with finding the phone number than reading all about the products. When people buy, they want to buy from George, so they’ll pick up the phone and call him directly, so long as they know they can trust him. The products don’t matter- what matters is the company behind it.

What we’re doing here is really achieving a baseline of information for the company.  The company will then be able to lean on the website and other marketing materials as it develops more of a presence for its Kinetico line in the WNC area.

Tags: asheville website, gte, hobart asheville, jaymunda, kinetico

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.