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.

Traditional and New Media
Although not normally reliant on press releases to convey news, Grow Marketing found them a valuable media tactic in the Zafu campaign for disseminating news quickly and broadly. Grow prepared a compelling series of news releases to cross the wire throughout the year, keeping information fresh and relevant. 

Grow worked with and pitched to bloggers as media. The blogosphere served as a natural environment in which to spark conversation and awareness about Zafu. Grow stayed continually connected to--and engaged with--bloggers by reaching out to fashion/consumer blogs on a regular basis. To spread the word of Zafu and the solutions it provided to the challenges of fit and fashion, Grow joined many online conversations and chat rooms, and posted many comments.

Unprecedented Results
The press coverage resulting from Grow’s smart and strategic campaign was unprecedented.

Coverage in the Atlanta Journal Constitution in October 2006 increased traffic to the site by 400% on the day, and by 200% in the next two days.  An article in the New York Times in November 2006 produced an increase of 600% on the day, 300% the next day.

With the success of the jeans fit finder campaign, and significant brand awareness under its belt, Zafu was primed for a consumer exclusive touting its new bra fit finder.  Grow secured an exclusive with DailyCandy.com, the first of many outlets to report on Zafu’s bra service in a significant way.  Coverage in DailyCandy.com, O, The Oprah Magazine, InStyle, Woman’s Day, and USA Today during July and August of 2007 created a month-long increase in traffic of  200%.

Grow Marketing’s barrage on the media resulted in 88,744,410 media impressions. Since the campaign, Zafu.com has had more than 5 million visitors to date, with media coverage playing a key role in growing public awareness of the site.

About the Grow Marketing Team
Gabrey Means, Creative Director at Grow Marketing, possesses over fifteen years of nontraditional marketing expertise. Before launching Grow in 2001, she worked at Banana Republic as Experiential Marketing Director, the leader of the cross-functional team charged with revolutionizing the customer experience. She also worked at GQ as in-house creative on co-branded programs.

Cassie Hughes, Strategy Director at Grow Marketing, has over twenty years of marketing and publicity experience. Prior to co-founding Grow, she was Managing Director at Ammo Marketing. She has served as Vice President, Client Services for Convergence Media Group and has also created award-winning marketing and publicity programs during her days at Levi Strauss & Co.

About Grow Marketing
Grow Marketing crafts compelling brand experiences that forge emotional connections, fuel loyalty, and build communities of brand advocates. For more information go to www.grow-marketing.com

About Rob Holloway
Rob Holloway, a Brit and the CEO at Zafu, has worked in the apparel and retail space for over twenty years. Prior to founding Zafu he held a variety of senior management roles with Levi Strauss. Zafu is his second internet venture. "We started Zafu because shopping for clothes online is a nightmare for women," commented Holloway. "Our goal is to make it easy for women to find a garment that will fit them perfectly!"

About Zafu
Zafu was started in 2005 and is located in a converted bakery in Emeryville,
California, just across the bay from San Francisco. Their site launched in
August 2006 and has seen spectacular growth and results. Hundreds of thousands of women used the service in its first four months with overwhelmingly positive feedback. Learn more about how to find perfect jeans at www.zafu.com.

Zafu is a part of Archetype Solutions, a venture-backed company founded in 2000 and the industry leader in the area of fit. Learn more about Archetype at www.archetype-solutions.com.

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.

While LL&C’s PR strategy was to position the Panamanian Tax Bureau as a modern institution, with transparent processes and effective audits, the ultimate objectives were to increase the amount of taxes collected and to encourage voluntary tax payment for the first time in Panama.

The biggest challenge for the campaign was changing the average Panamanian’s attitude to income tax payment. Additional aims therefore included building up the taxpayers’ sense of responsibility by making Panamanians aware of the positive impact their taxes would have on their society, and showing what would be done with the taxes they paid.
 
Another challenge was improving the Tax Bureau’s image.  The Bureau had never carried out any form of communication with the Panamanian public during previous tax campaigns.  LL&C’s team worked with the Bureau’s director and staff to open up communication channels with journalists and the mass media. This effort led to positive media coverage in newspapers and weekly publications.

The LL&C team, working closely with the Tax Bureau press office, generated press releases, interviews with senior Tax Bureau staff, and town-hall-style meetings with Tax Bureau representatives, reporters, and the tax-paying public.  The campaign resulted in more than 180 articles in the printed media.

The response to these communications efforts was that the Tax Bureau increased its register with more than 7,000 new income tax payers. By the end of the campaign, the Tax Bureau had received 11,778 new tax filings, a big increase on the previous year; and the number of tax filings submitted on-line increased by 173.2 percent from 2005.

Death, Divorce, and …
The campaign that LL&C created succeeded in positioning the Tax Bureau as a modern, open, fair, technological institution, with a user-friendly Web site and on-line procedures; effective audits; and equal processing for everyone. The campaign also made it clear that—like death and divorce—taxpayers could not avoid their responsibility to pay up, no matter who they were.

About German Pariente         
Germán Pariente joined LL&C in Spain in 2005, where he specialized in crisis communication. Pariente provided strategic advice to the Tobacco Manufacturers Association during a crucial moment for that industry. In 2006, he joined LL&C Panama as Managing Director. Pariente has been involved in such projects as the acquisition of Grupo Financiero Uno by Citigroup, contracts between London Regional & Properties and the Panamanian Government, and the Income Tax Bureau Campaign. He recently moved to Beijing as Partner and Managing Director  in the newly-opened LL&C offices in China. His position in Panama is now covered by Javier Rosado, specialist in oil and gas communications, crisis and issues management.

About Llorente & Cuenca
Llorente & Cuenca is the leading Public Relations consultancy firm in Spain and Latin America, with ten wholly-owned offices, supplemented by affiliate relationships in seven countries. Founded in 1995 by Olga Cuenca and José Antonio Llorente, LL&C offers a comprehensive strategic consultancy service with more than 300 specialists in the different areas of communication. LL&C now has more than 250 professionals working at its ten offices in Spain, Panama, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and China. It also has affiliate companies in Portugal, Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and the United States. For more information go to www.llorenteycuenca.com.

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.