Affiliated Distributors

In electrical manufacturing, there are buying groups that help distributors get the best in what they need to sell to their customers. They support price balancing, quality assurance and customer service when working with large-scale companies and manufactures. 

An assignment came down the line to create an ad for the distributor to showcase the breadth of products that Southwire offers to their distributor customers. An traditional print ad is what was requested; and a traditional print ad is what they received. 

Once this ad was submitted by the designer, I immediately had a disgruntled account manager on my phone. As well as an equally disgruntled boss. This was seen as a project that was in and out, and initially, not much thought was put into it.

The AM briefed me on the project, who we were talking to, the purpose of the ad and what we were trying to sell. The complicated part was evident: Southwire has hundreds of thousands of SKUs available to our distributors. However, some of our distributors thought that we only carry a few wire and cable products. Due to the aforementioned vastness of the company, nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact was that most of our distributors only wanted the tip of the iceberg.

From there, my copywriter and I went to work. Instead of starting with what we offered the distributor, we reviewed our buyer personas to get a refresher on who our customer is and what they stand for.

We began to craft our message. We changed the tone. We focused more on speaking to them and not at them. Clear, concise and not a lot of fluff. 

After spending time thinking about art direction, we remembered that our customer remembers that we only sell wire. THHN, NM and XHHW. That's... about it. But we offer so much more and from there, the mosaic idea flourished.

But we didn't stop there.

We asked the AM if the customer was willing to pay a little more for the video that complements the ad. They agreed and the design team whipped up the below video to feature and push on our social channels, specifically targeting distributors that follow us on Facebook. Take a look at the video below.