A campaign to launch Zafu.com, an online site to help women find the perfect fit in jeans and other apparel, won the San Francisco office of Grow Marketing a Stevie® Award for Best Communications or PR Campaign in the 2008 American Business Awards.  Here we look at how both new and traditional media made the launch such a success.

Zafu.com was launched in August 2006 to change the way women shop. Zafu.com’s groundbreaking jeans fit finder is essentially a “Match.com” for women and their jeans: women answer eleven simple questions online—with no measurements required—and Zafu identifies jeans available on the market that best suit their style, size, and fit preferences. 

In 2007, Zafu launched additional fit finders for products including plus jeans, bras, and casual and dress pants. 

Creating a Buzz
Grow Marketing partnered with Zafu from the time of launch through the summer of 2007 to help create awareness, interest, and buzz around this new, never-before-seen site and service—and the results were impressive.

Grow’s charge was to take an unknown brand and develop it into the go-to resource for women on issues of blending fit and fashion.  Grow’s objective was to make Zafu relevant and recognizable in the lives of consumers shopping for pants and intimate apparel.

Grow implemented a battery of innovative PR tactics and designed a robust and effective campaign that generated awareness, built brand caché, and created buzz around the revolutionary new service.

Influencing the Influencers
In order to ensure the site’s success, Grow first targeted key media mouthpieces for the entire fashion, retail, and online community. Weeks prior to the site’s official launch, Grow held briefings and meetings to engage industry analysts and ready them as possible references.

Grow secured an exclusive with the influential fashion industry publication WWD to time with the launch of the site.  Founder and CEO of Zafu Rob Holloway went to New York City on a whirlwind week-long media tour. He met with the key fashion, online-retail, and women’s interest reporters at top national long-lead publications, dailies, weeklies, and fashion-based Web sites–and with producers for nationally syndicated lifestyle programs.

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Llorente & Cuenca Panama, of Panama City, won a Stevie Award for Best Communications Campaign in South America in the 2008 International Business Awards.  We felt that April would be the best time for us to review how they managed a campaign for the Panamanian Tax Bureau.

In recent years, the Panamanian Income Tax Bureau has invested heavily in new technology, staff training, stricter controls, and improved on-line services.  Its objective was to improve tax collection, but despite all these enhancements, the Tax Bureau could not increase tax revenue or voluntary income tax payment. The problem lay in a culture in which most Panamanian taxpayers did as much as they could to avoid paying tax.
         
To make matters worse, the Tax Bureau in Panama was perceived as inefficient, obsolete, and nontransparent by the tax-paying public. Some thought that the system was unfair and discriminating; others believed they could evade paying tax without any serious consequences.
           
In 2007, Llorente & Cuenca (LL&C), a leading public relations consultancy firm in Spain and Latin America, was handed the challenging task of creating a campaign that would overcome these perceptions and somehow encourage people to pay their taxes.  

Creating a Sense of Social Responsibility
The LL&C team, headed by managing director Germán Pariente, divided their campaign into two phases. In Phase I, the objective was to position the Tax Bureau as a modern institution. In Phase II, the aim was to encourage taxpayers to fully declare their income taxes—and to raise the awareness of the efficiency of tax audits.

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McAfee is the world’s largest dedicated security technology company, delivering proactive and proven solutions and services that secure systems and networks globally.

McAfee has been honored several times in Stevie Awards programs, most recently in the 3rd annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service this past February. McAfee was recognized with a Stevie for Customer Service Department of the Year - IT & Telecommunications.

Barry McPherson is McAfee's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Technical Support and Customer Service. Barry is responsible for driving ever-evolving Corporate and
Consumer initiatives, such as expanding support contact options and improving self-assistance over the web. His leadership in these areas has led to increased customer satisfaction levels, higher self-assistance rates, and reduced business costs.

We recently spoke with Barry about how he got his start in business, the activities at McAfee that earned his department a Stevie, and his advice for delivering outstanding customer service in a do-more-with-less economic environment.

		Listen to the Podcast Interview...

		Read McAfee's Stevie Award-winning Nomination ...

Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs that we think might be of interest to you.

Inside Facebook: An independent blog focusing on Facebook and the Facebook Platform for developers and marketers.
Publish2: Seed links to your best content into Publish2's Newswire and get picked up by news organizations around the world. Discover links to unique news stories and sources to publish on your own site.
myopenbar.com: Art openings, events, screenings, and parties in NYC, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, and Honolulu.
Teleprompter President: We got some laughs out of President Bush, and this site provides material on the new U.S. President.