ECJ looks back on 20 years - Chris Klopper, Mulberry Marketing

12th of April 2013
ECJ looks back on 20 years - Chris Klopper, Mulberry Marketing

ECJ celebrates its 20th birthday this month. To celebrate our birthday we look back at the key trends affecting the industry over the last 20 years, with the help of some of the best-known names in the industry. Today, Chris Klopper of Mulberry Marketing.

One of the most notable changes has been the way that certainly the manufacturing and distributor communities in our industry have become much more marketing-savvy.

20 years ago many companies were engineering or production-led and consequently the power of marketing was often ignored with often it being a side or secondary function for either the sales director. With a lack of appreciation or support for marketing in those days we tended to see an industry stuck in a rather boring rut of poorly crafted, imprecisely targeted communications campaigns.

Nowadays virtually every company has a marketer at the top table and marketing dictates product innovations and price points. Communications campaigns have become massively more sophisticated and micro targeting is possible too. Additionally the range of communication channels available is wider than it has ever been and that trend will only increase in the years to come.

The launch of ECJ was also a seminal moment. Never before had manufacturers thought on a regional basis or even been particularly aware of what was happening outside their immediate national purview. ECJ crystalised such thinking and in many ways was a forerunner to, and a pioneer of, the move to global trading that has emerged in the industry over the past three or four years.

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