One of the country’s top experiential marketing and events businesses, Raw Marketing & Events has rolled out a new client offering following a very difficult year for the Irish events industry.
The company, which has worked on some of the biggest events in the country prior to the global pandemic, was particularly impacted during the recent lockdowns. The company also has a sister company called Artisan Events, which is headed up by Susie Melisson
While the events industry ground to a halt, Ward decided to retain the key staff and use the lockdown as an opportunity to review the business in its entirety.
“There are about 20 companies in Dublin providing various combinations of experiential services, event management and talent and we wanted to see how we could differentiate RAW from everybody else,” says Ward.
One of the first things he did was to engage the services of Ray Sheerin, the former MD and founder of creative agency Chemistry as a board adviser.
“I’d done some work with Ray and his team at Chemistry and have great respect for his strategic thinking” says Ward. “Ray brought us through a thorough process of looking at ourselves and every player in the market and examining how we were stronger or weaker. We redeveloped our vision, mission, values and positioning. We also did a huge amount of work on our proposition. The market analysis exercise showed us that many of the other events companies are claiming to offer a very wide range of services, putting them into competition with PR agencies and ad agencies. We also saw that there was surprisingly little differentiation between them. The exercise we went through gave us the confidence to focus firmly on what we do really well – and to steer clear of what we don’t,” Ward adds.
The major point of differentiation that Ward and his team arrived at was a ‘white label’ proposition.
“Raw has always worked directly with and through agencies. It’s why we called ourselves Raw – we put all the raw ingredients together to make a very successful event or activation for the agencies that we work with,” he says.
“Most agencies don’t really want to have to build their own capability in event management, activation and staffing. And they don’t need to – that’s what we do for them, when they need it: a total turnkey solution which they can white label as part of their offering,” Ward says.
