If I wanted to show who we are working with on a day to day basis, who we contact and whose calls we answer, I’d divide these people into three groups:
- 1.Company owners. There's nothing routine about these relations.
You never know what to expect. It might be providing us with complete influence over the image of a company or full integration of imposed solutions. There’s nothing wrong with the word “imposed”, after all without a long conversation about your dreams you will not be able to fulfil them. Sometimes, however, someone asks us to create a webpage and shows us a site from 10 years ago based on flash :) Then we know that the situation is a delicate one and we have to use suggestions to get our client on the right track. But a short distance between offering and acting on that offer is the biggest benefit when working directly with company owners. - 2.The second type are people designated by the owner to act on their behalf, who are not a part of the marketing department because there is no such department in the company.
Despite what you might think, working with such people is very often a pleasure. No marketing education will replace common sense and being open to new ideas. - 3.The third type are marketing directors/specialists.
Nabucco has been operating since January 2009 and during those 9 years we've attended to thousands of meetings in various locations.
We have visited nearly all Polish voivodeships, we managed projects at the European Parliament in Brussels. We’ve been to a slaughter house and on a ship. We drove a Class E Mercedes during its launch. We’ve been to a waste treatment facility and a concrete plant, only to attend a fashion show a couple of days later. But of all of these situations and places one particular stands out in my memory. In 2011 Marcin and I were recording seagulls and tourists at the Sopot pier in time lapse, basking in the last rays of a September sun. I asked:
- "This work is great, isn't it?"
- "It is".
In 2011 we made a video. Two years later the webpage for the “Pasjami...” restaurant. Then we developed the webpage for the Hotel Rezydent and integrated it with the hotel system.
We were recording scenes in Sopot for the film for the Hotel Rezydent.
Hotel Rezydent is a part of the Rezidor Group, which also includes the Radisson Blu. I don't remember how we got into contact with them. But I remember the task we were supposed to complete – a promotional video for the hotel. Our direct point of contact was Mrs Marzena Szawarska-Niczko, the Hotel’s Operational Director, who is also responsible for marketing.
In summer 2015 our co-operation, previously based on temporary assignments, transformed into a permanent contract, under which we are responsible for:
- Social media operations
- Further development of the hotel website
- Creation and sending of the newsletter
- Special requests :)
The last point, of course, is the most important one. We meet with Mrs Marzena once a month and discuss all the provided works and plan the tasks for the upcoming period.
We can be sure that one thing will happen during the meeting. We will hear:
- Tomek, tell me, what special event can we plan for this month... because I’ve seen something like this recently... What do you think ?
To me this meeting is not only a chance to do my duty and look at some Excel spreadsheets with number going up or down. It’s a chance to learn something, to understand a different point of view regarding innovations in the sector. It’s a chance to come up with something we couldn't possibly imagine separately.
This is the third client type, which initially I described as a marketing person.
Nabucco is not, has never been, and never will be a competition for marketing departments, even though some businesses treat us as if we are trying to steal their work. And toxic relations in co-operations imposed from the top can happen. We always say that we work together with marketing departments, not instead of them. The relation we have developed in the case of the Hotel Rezydent is a typical example of a mathematical anomaly: Here 2+2=5.