Re-igniting the brand

Gareth Jones, managing director of Profine UK and Kömmerling, talks about what it has taken to re-ignite the brand after a particularly successful 2019, with a fully integrated campaign.

The Kömmerling brand has always had an unrivalled reputation for outstanding product engineering and unsurpassed quality, and that’s why so many of our window manufacturers won’t make anything else. Similarly, if you speak to those installers loyal to the brand, they’ll tell you that it’s the best window and door system to fit, so there’s no risk of remedials.

But when I came to the helm of the business nearly 18 months ago, there was a feeling that more could be done with the brand, and that we could better engage with the industry as a whole. There was a clear desire from everyone to help re-ignite the brand as a team and to make it part of a longer-term strategy to make the Kömmerling name a standout one in the sector.

Subsequently, we developed a marketing campaign with impact, which could be rolled out in the years to come and that harnessed a wide range of brand communication tools. The idea for the award-winning ‘Come Along’ campaign was to get people to re-assess what they thought of us and to engage with them through the FIT Show, promotions, advertising, PR and social media, and several of our videos went viral during the course of 2019.

It was also an opportunity for us to add a little humour and our persona to the brand, something that resonated with our customers, prospects and the industry as a whole. The result was that a significant number of fabricators made the change to Kömmerling, feeling that they were partnering with a truly progressive brand and the new business prospects for 2020 look good too.

We are now looking to build on the successful campaign of 2019, and our latest teaser video outlines our plans for a Come Along Challenge, which will involve driving a number of vehicles from our UK facility in Lichfield to the second of our German production facilities at Pirmasens, via the legendary Nürburgring, on May 16-18, 2020. This is one of the longest, most tradition-steeped, challenging and busiest racetracks in the world.

Those people who will be part of this will be required to buy a car for no more than £500 and take it there, before auctioning off to charity in the name of Children with Cancer UK, our charity beneficiaries for 2020. Later in the year, we have cemented the dates for Kömmerling’s first ever Golf Day, which will be held on September 17, 2020 at an exciting venue and, combined with the Come Along Challenge, we are continuing to find ways in which to engage the industry in a wider context than perhaps we have done.

In Q2, we will be formally announcing a new installer and trade counter initiative. This will be a formal branded vehicle in which they can connect with us and our manufacturing partners for better support, new marketing tools, and improved communications, when it comes to new products, initiatives and corporate news.

The challenge was, and is, to balance the international campaigns and marketing collateral of the group, with what best meets the needs of the local UK market. With a new group corporate and social responsibility programme under the mantra of ‘Your Window to a Better World’ we too will be using this as part of our strategic focus for the year ahead and already several international subsidiaries have picked up on this.

While the accolades, awards and number of new business accounts clearly show that the Kömmerling brand has been re-ignited, the challenge for us is to build on this, grow the brand for the long-term, and to better engage with the industry as a whole. We also want to enjoy doing it and so that’s why again we’ll be commissioning a number of videos throughout the year, which will be promoted on a number of social media channels.