“The reason for the change to Dialogue Solutions was to make the brands distinct. Howitt is thought of as medium- to high-volume print and direct mail and it was important to reflect the multi-channel nature of what we do at Dialogue Solutions in the name,” says Dixon.
He describes what the Edenbridge firm does as “marketing communications management” and says that encompasses contact by email, print, SMS, internet and telephone, backed up with systems to ensure that it is done as effectively as possible.
“Dialogue Solutions takes on the production and implementation so the client can focus on strategy,” he says.
The Excellence Award was for its trigger-marketing job for Everest. The 12pp A5 personalised Welcome Pack was a textbook example of delivering better results to the client by thinking about the process of meeting their needs, rather than simply their print production needs.
The pack fulfilled that brief through its use of data analysis and profiling to target Everest’s customers with relevant cross-selling offers and the use of clever composition software to deliver that in a customised document that was digitally printed and then mailed.
With clients’ marketing budgets and staff under pressure to deliver more for less in a more complicated market, Dialogue developed software tools Infrastream and MarketPower to streamline set-up and management of the marketing process.
MarketPower is a marketing collateral system for direct mail, brochures, point-of-sale, stationery, adverts and merchandise that allows centralised control of templates, brand guidelines and spend with localised set-up and customisation.
Infrastream is the multi-channel trigger-marketing platform that can fire out customised or personalised email, print, websites and text messages.
In developing these products the firm called on its core IT and data skills, bolstered by additional programming expertise, to develop the software in-house.
Those IT and data skills have played an increasingly important role in the business’s 27-year history. Starting as a trade platemaking house, Eden Lithographic Reproductions – as it was then – was an early adopter of electronic pre-press, which is where it started to pick up the core colour, data and IT skills. In the mid 1990s the company started to build on those roots by branching out into digital colour print.
Today, two years after Dixon acquired the firm, print is still central to what the firm does, but it’s not where the value comes from. That is the front end, which has received huge investment recently.
The importance of the front-end software, data and communications side of the firm can be seen in Dialogue’s new premises in Edenbridge. Dialogue has moved from two separate units to eight adjoined units and added a mezzanine floor. Where once it was on one level and production focused, now production is on the ground floor with an equal area dedicated to software development, sales, client services and a contact centre for clients to manage telephone and email communications.
“It’s about going to the next level,” says Dixon. “Anyone can get the equipment downstairs but they can’t do what we do on the upper level.”
Dialogue Solutions at a glance
Turnover £5m (2007)
Staff 37
Sector multi-channel direct marketing
Services email, print, SMS, web and telemarketing and collateral management
Clients include LA Fitness, Yell and Everest
