Background

Castle Building Centers provides lumber and building materials across Canada to builders, renovators and DIY’ers through member owned retail outlets. Its business model and plans called for increasing their Membership, particularly in the major geographic markets of Ontario and Quebec.

The traditional approach to building Membership had been to “court” individuals in like-organizations such as Rona, Home Hardware, TimberMart and smaller independent retailers.

However, the competition was chasing the same pool of prospects. At the same time, the number of prospects was also decreasing due to; retirements, stiffer competition from the big box stores and a slowing economy.

Recognizing that dichotomy, Castle felt that they needed to think outside their traditional methods and look at pitching the advantages of their business model to entrepreneurial minded people who had money to invest in new business ventures.

The Challenge

The objective for Whiting & Holmes was to develop an integrated Marketing, Sales and Communication program that would generate warm leads for Castle’s business managers to pursue.

The Solution

The 2 year plan that W&H developed called for Castle’s participation in major business franchise shows in key Ontario markets (Toronto, London, Hamilton and Ottawa) with the Quebec market being secondary, until the hiring of a bilingual Castle business manager for Quebec was completed.

To facilitate that plan, W&H developed a visually intriguing 10’x10’ tradeshow booth with graphics and a theme that were unique to their existing sales and promotional material.

For use at the tradeshow, and by the Business Managers, W&H also designed and produced bilingual brochures.

W&H were also responsible for:

• installing and dismantling the booth
• manning the booth at each 3-day show location
• developing a sales script to facilitate discussion with prospects at the tradeshow
• generate warm leads with detailed notes for the Castle Management Team
• next-steps for follow-ups

Over the course of the 2 year program over 30 warm-leads (per show) were generated for the Business Development Managers.

The theme and graphics developed for the tradeshow booth and promotional material were subsequently used in print-advertising and became part of Castle’s ongoing marketing mix.