Hitachi Consulting launched a compelling customer magazine to strengthen the support of their ambitious growth plans, combining the best of online and offline worlds with impressive results, writes Andrew Rogerson.
Hitachi Consulting, the global business and IT consulting of Hitachi Ltd, is an undoubtedly ambitious company. Established in 2000, it has grown rapidly – both organicallymost recent Impact Plus, a niche management consultancy focused on financial services and the public sector. However, with this growth in service offering came a particular problem: how best to communicate the breadth and depth of service now available?
“We already a small in-house, which was very effective, but we wanted a publication better reflected the greater capacity and richer blend of capabilities that the firm now offers,” explains Neil Whittaker, Vice President. “Sales-led messaging simply does not work for us and we believed the best way of delivering valued information on the issues our clients are struggling with was to create a magazine they could trust.”
The answer was Inspire, a 24-page, A4 publication, produced for Hitachi by Grist. The first issue covered topics of strategic interest to senior executives within the financial services industry, one of Hitachi’s core markets. Content included articles on how banks can use their branch networks to maximize sales effectiveness, how companies can derive the most value from their carbon management programmes and the challenge of creating stability while delivering change.
The magazine format enables Hitachi to explore these issues in depth, to offer a far richer mix of articles than in the previous newsletter and to use the kind of eye-catching and creative design that readers would expect to see in a high-quality business magazine. All of the editorial content, design and production is planned, commissioned and managed by Grist, working in close partnership with senior executives at Hitachi. Some articles are provided by Hitachi consultants, some ghost-written on their behalf and some written by recognised expert journalists.
| Print and electronic: The best of both worlds |
| Print | Online |
| Persuasive | Cost effective |
| Easy to read | Environmentally friendly |
| Portable | Supports rich media and linking |
| Intuitive | Searchable |
| Often format of choice | Enables wider distribution |
| Often kept and filed | Immediacy of response |
| Not dependent on technology | Statistical packages |
Online innovation
Hitachi’s key clients each received a full colour printed copy of the magazine, but with a highly technologically literate target readership, it was clear from the start of the project that
Inspire would need to be more than a paper-based publication. Hitachi wanted to do something bold and creative, partly to underline its wider belief in the benefits of innovation.
After reviewing the latest online publishing options, the company decided to produce an interactive version of the magazine. “We felt that a traditional website would need constant updating,” explains Whittaker. “That would have been a drain on our resources. The interactive magazine that Grist proposed perfectly harnessed the interactivity of the web with the engagement of a client magazine.”
The interactive format offers great deal of functionality. Next generation graphics including ‘sliding’ headlines draw the reader in and pages ‘turn’ as they would in a print publication. Readers can also navigate directly using links embedded within the document. There is an interactive contents page, for example and links to background information, such as white papers and research reports, take the reader directly to a download site.
It is also easy to integrate rich media into the interactive magazine. One of the articles was enhanced with embedded video – but there is no limit to the creative possibilities. Links to wikis, blogs and other social software are all under consideration for future issues. The technology makes interaction simple, too. There are email links for all the Hitachi executives mentioned in the magazine and easy “send-to-a-friend” functionality.
| Hitachi Consulting: Much more than consumer electronics |
The Hitachi brand is often associated with high-quality consumer electronics and computer hardware. Yet the Japanese company has a remarkably wide range of business activities contributing to its near £100 billion annual revenues, including a highly successful consultancy firm.
The group founded Hitachi Consulting in November 2000 when it bought Grant Thornton’s consulting unit in a deal worth $175 million. Two years later, it hired over 370 business consultants and 23 partners from the business consulting arm of Arthur Andersen. From that base, Hitachi Consulting has grown impressively. It now has more than 1,500 employees in 17 offices across the United States, Germany, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, India and – of course – Japan.
The firm now has nearly 30% of the Fortune 100 and many leading mid-market companies as its clients. It has been ranked in the top five consulting firms for the consumer goods industry, among the top six in the high-tech industry, and one of only ten firms in research house Gartner’s “magic quadrant” of consultants providing solutions in Customer Relationship Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, supply chain management and business intelligence and performance management. |
Impressive results
With
Inspire, rich media is blended with static content and rendered into text that is searchable both by readers of the magazine and search engines. This overcomes the downside of a static PDF, where content does not always appear in search engine results, marketing value of a publication.
The interactive magazine has all of the usage statistics that one would expect with a traditional website and more. Hitachi can see which articles are most popular, how readers arrived at the magazine, where they browse to next, which links they are clicking and how long they spend looking at the content. Interestingly, 10% of viewers of the interactive magazine clicked through to a Microsoft advert on the back page. Microsoft is a business partner of Hitachi Consulting and will no doubt be pleased with the increased traffic.
Based on the online analysis he has seen to date and direct feedback from clients, Whittaker says
Inspire – both the print and online versions – has been a great success. “So far this project has worked really well for us,” he says. “And working in partnership with a publishing agency that specialises in the professional services sector has given us the benefit of knowledge, skills and resources that we could not have accessed otherwise.”
Planning is now underway on the next issue of
Inspire which will include coverage of all Hitachi’s specialist sectors – the public sector, technology, communications & content. There is also the potential to expand the geographic coverage to highlight Hitachi’s global ambition. The new 40-page publication is due for launch in May.
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Andrew Rogerson is director and co founder of Grist, a customer publishing agency specialising in publishing for professional services firms. Current clients include: Ace Europe, British Standards Institution, Computer Sciences Corporation, EC Harris, Jardine Lloyd Thompson, Menzies and Watson Wyatt.
