We talk to Andrew Wilkins, head of marketing at Winkhaus UK, who explains more about the hardware specialist’s award winning Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year.
Winkhaus UK received two awards at the 2024 National Fenestration Awards, including the Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year for its newest innovation, the AV4 multi-point AutoLocking solution.
Building on this, Winkhaus has now released a series of shorts that capture end user testimony of the benefits they have seen AV4 provide, content that has been created for fabricators and installers to use as part of their sales and marketing activity.
Marketing support
Andrew Wilkins, head of marketing at Winkhaus UK, said: “Our company vision is guaranteeing our customers success, so for marketing, our focus is to provide engaging content that customers can use in their own marketing and sales activities and provide them with a competitive edge. As a company and marketing team we were delighted with the recognition the AV4 campaign has received, but knew there was more to capture and share.
“Initial testing with AutoLock AV4 underlined the importance of low operational forces, from which we highlighted the benefits this has for fabricators and installers. For the next phase of the campaign, we set ourselves the challenge of understanding how AV4 would benefit end users, and any advantages low operational force would provide.”
Real world testing
Working with an independent research company, groups of end users were invited to test AutoLock AV4 against competitor’s solutions. Andrew continued: “The group included homeowners and landlords, individuals with arthritis and other disabilities across a wide age range to ensure we had a representative mix.
“Individually, everyone tested three identical doorsets, with packers installed at the top and bottom to simulate the increasing impact of thermal expansion. Other than door colours, the only variation between samples was the locking solutions installed. Each user was asked to unlock each door and to stop testing a doorset if it became difficult to operate.
“The results were conclusive, with everybody choosing AutoLock AV4, being able to operate it to double acceptable industry tolerances,” said Andrew.
“Following testing we captured the group’s feedback on the testing, their experiences with doors that are difficult to operate, the benefit AV4’s low force to operate gives them and any advantages this will provide them in the future.
Andrew continued: “The insight this research captures into the impact of thermal expansion and sticky locks, has been invaluable. Everyone involved shared negative firsthand experiences that will now be resolved by including AV4 in future specifications. Being able to provide this research and content to our customers will allow them to show their customers the importance of the correct locking solution, whilst helping them succeed in a competitive market.
“The completed videos can be viewed on our website and are available for our customers to download from the media downloads section of the Winkhaus Portal, along with all the other assets already available for AV4,” said Andrew.
He added: “The Winkhaus Portal is a real time productivity tool for our customers, allowing access to live transactional data, our full technical product catalogue, and our growing library of marketing collateral. It’s always up to date, with data drawn from our SAP system and can be accessed at any time. Having the information you require at your fingertips is such an advantage and it’s wonderful to see so many of our customers gaining benefit from its content.”
Designed to combat issues with thermal expansion, the AV4 AutoLock reduces the force needed to operate by 40% compared to the AV2 and up to 70% compared to competitors’ solutions, according to Winkhaus.
