“Flintlock were excellent marketing partners. We loved the ideas they came up. They really helped us to put our Food and Drink sector on the map. Our goal for this key event was to maximise local connections and the local supply chain in the broadest sense and I believe, with Flintlock’s clear steer and delivery, we did that!”
Strategy
Building up a business appetite with Chichester District Council
Derek Irvine, Economic Development Officer, Chichester District Council
Building up a business appetite with Chichester District Council
A place for business
When Derek Irvine, the Economic Development Officer at Chichester District Council, asked us to help create an event to encourage food companies to consider the area as a location for business, it whetted our creative appetite.
The event was a key moment in their year. And a chance to engage with external stakeholders and local businesses. So, the Economic Development team wanted to establish a compelling theme and an interesting and inspiring way to bring it to life. Our role was to devise that creative idea and then to manage the production of all associated marketing output to support its promotion.
Adding flavour to the event
The challenge was what would that be? The team knew it would be hard to get busy businesses and CEOs to carve time out to attend. And the initiative was a new concept with a focus to bring people together. So, it would important to make an impact and be clear that the event would be collectively productive and individually constructive.
From our conversations with the team we set four objectives:
- To create a memorable headline name for the event
- to get local food businesses and stakeholders – large and small – involved early
- to develop an educational programme with an inspiring speaker line-up
- to produce impacting output that could also play a longer-term role in promoting the area
The Flintlock creative team got to work. We developed a plan and generated a creative route to underpin the storytelling: All The Ingredients For Success
Working alongside Derek and the team, we designed a programme and identified speakers who could offer a broad range of insights and would be helpful and useful to our audience. These included:
- An leading industry food analyst who reported on anticipated food trends for 2023
- A food-business case study walk-through with Flintlock x Andina Ingham on how to build a brand strategy
- A key note speech from local chef and food entrepreneur Founder of Pizza Rebellion about starting up a new chain of a automated take-away businesses serving Sourdough Pizzas across the UK
- A talk by the CEO of Montezuma’s, the well-known UK chocolate brand headquartered in Chichester, on their pioneering sustainability initiatives
We also knew that we needed to use the headline-thought behind the event to create impact in our marketing output. We agreed that showcasing local food businesses and brands was the best way to demonstrate how Chichester District really did have all the ingredients for success.
We set about identifying those businesses and who wanted to be involved. Our goal was to uncover how they had established their business, what was their ‘special ingredient for success’, why they chose to be located in Chichester and one bit of advice they’d give someone setting up a food or drink related company. Then we needed to communicate these insights in an engaging way to intrigue our target audience. So, over several weeks, our copywriters interviewed 26 businesses and converted them into individual, short-form stories.
That body of work created a rich and inspiring set of tales from big brand chocolatiers, emerging wine yards and gin distilleries, berry farmers and a food-industry-legend glassware supplier. We decided to fully capitalise on these stories by bringing them to visual life. This led to a creative initiative. A local artist was commissioned to produce a bespoke, illustrative map designed to outline the Chichester district area with individual icons that expressed the success at the heart of each story.
We then worked with our website designer to digitise the original artwork so that it could feature on an All The Ingredients For Success microsite. By creating an interactive and immersive online experience, visitors could explore the map and discover the stories of each business, plus engage with, learn about and book their seat for the event.
A great local recipe
The event was a great success – well-attended with positive feedback from participants, speakers and the local businesses whose stories we told. The map was featured on a large screen on the day, so that visitors could interact and explore it. Today, it remains a flexible tool that can be updated.
The headline, “All the ingredients for…” has also proven to be repeatable and relevant, and the Council have re-purposed it for other events to promote the District.
