Beakbane has a track record of 25 years of innovation and productive client relationships.

At our start in 1986, our vision was to use computers to deliver communications that were more effective and to do it more quickly and at a lower cost. It is hard to believe now, but at that time the notion that computers could play a part in the creation of graphics was outlandish. We invested in a mini-computer workstation, and in spite of the then-clumsy technology, we managed to deliver concepts and designs that increased our clients’ sales. We quickly built a robust business and became a trusted partner with many of Canada’s leading marketing-driven companies.

We opened our doors with a vision to innovate. We quickly built a blue-chip client list and through clear-eyed strategies, we helped build some of the world's most successful brands.

Our business relationships followed a pattern. We would be asked to execute a small project for a company. Without much fuss, we would over-deliver, and the activity would achieve the desired results. Then we would be asked to do another project for the same company – and then another – until we were their key marketing supplier and were relied upon as the trusted partner for innovative communications, including promotions, trade communications, direct marketing, packaging, and events – everything aside from broadcast advertising, which was handled by a multinational agency. In this way, we developed highly productive relations that lasted a decade or more with clients including Nabisco, Duracell, Alberto-Culver, Elmer’s, Pillsbury, Cadbury Beverages, Hershey, Labatt, GE Silicones, Scotiabank, and Cyanamid/Lederle.

These relationships came to an end only when the client was sold or when management changed. With hindsight, it is evident that in seven instances, the period when Beakbane was the key marketing supplier was notable in the company’s history as being the period when they were the most innovative, when their growth was fastest, and when they were the most profitable.

An example is Duracell. We started by helping them out with a small ad in 1988. Over the subsequent 12 years, we developed and ran 2,300 programs that took the brand from a share of 38% to 60% in the Canadian market. In this period of fierce competition, they managed to sustain a price premium of 13% over competitors. By the time Duracell was sold by KKR to Gillette, its value had increased over fourfold.

In a similar way, we worked with Labatt for 14 years on 700 projects, re-launching and promoting brands including Carlsberg, Labatt Genuine Draft and Wildcat. Before we re-launched Kokanee, it was a struggling brand confined to British Columbia. Through strategic programs and innovative design, we re-launched it to become successful nationally and internationally. One of our many innovations was to photograph the Kokanee Glacier from a helicopter and then print the image on the bottle labels and the cans, which was a first in the industry. This period in Labatt’s history was when the company was at its most innovative, and they were dominant in the market. In the subsequent period, after it was purchased by Interbrew, innovation slowed and their brands’ market share has slid.

We relish innovation of all sorts, from setting up online shopping portals to working for Apple Canada to demonstrate that their computers could be used to achieve colour pre-press digital separations with quality exceeding established technologies.

We have helped brands grow with all sorts of innovation. In the 1990s, we promoted Apple Macintosh as a means to achieve high quality digital separations. We also printed a photo on cans of beer – a technological first at the time.

Through the 1990s the marketing landscape changed and we began to see that the best way to achieve results was through integrated programs. During the early years most of our clients were large multinational companies with brands that are familiar to everyone and our services related to a single activity, such as a promotion. In order to achieve integration we started working with smaller companies where we could define a focus for the brand and then ensure that all the elements of the marketing mix were tightly integrated to work synergistically. We demonstrated time and time again that, through a combination of innovation and the expression of a clear brand focus communicated through tightly integrated programs, our clients could achieve extraordinary rates of return on their marketing investments. You can see some examples of the work in our case studies.

Over the last decade, one area of innovation that has proven to be particularly productive relates to brand optimization. As techniques for mass marketing become less efficient and audiences become more challenging to engage, it is beneficial to optimize the focus of a brand or message so that a lot of meaning, both logical and emotional, is communicated simply and instantly. We use a sophisticated approach to optimize brand focus through the use of buyer insights and multi-concept research.

Marketing techniques are constantly evolving, and we are continually energized by the power of new approaches. At the same time, we are careful to avoid the urge to jump on the latest bandwagon. For 25 years, through a combination of innovation and clarity of thinking, we have been successful in helping our clients turn their dreams into new companies and make their big brands more profitable, generating over $5 billion in incremental margin.