Delivering "Unique Value Proposition"

Each of us in some way has felt the effects of the recent great recession. These effects have been brutal on small businesses and their staff. As we begin to emerge, yes, eventually you hit rock bottom and have to go up, we are looking at our various Brands and assessing how they suffered.

One of the key questions is how do our brand's look-and-feel? Do they still deliver their UVP [Unique Value Proposition]? PPi Technologies GROUP has two main divisions, PGS selling StandUp pouch machinery and BPG marketing our four beverage products. PGS's new machinery and services are the majority of our sales.

Our strategy is to try and ensure our marketing is consistent across all market segments. We are also changing our business plan based on the industries we sell to. This new plan is to ensure our customers better understand our brands. We hope our new UVP's will create increased brand equity with the customer.

Our big change is that each machine performs a certain task and each beverage is for a certain lifestyle. For example; our new BPG SN HYBRID machinery handles form-fill-seal, premade pouches and several zipper types of pouches with spouts. The UVP is if you need different types of StandUp pouches we have a single machine that will do the job. We believe this will change the way customers look at our machine group.

We also have a UVP and a strategy for our beverage brand's evolution. This will highlight our beverage brand identities, which is to provide "Customer Ready Packaging". We know our ShotPak® pouches stand out from the crowd. They are ready for action, anywhere any time! We promote the fact that the pouch is all about being popular and is a sustainable, zero landfill modern package. We monitor what customers think about our beverage brands and the message is clear. The StandUp pouch is a preferred "Customer Ready Package".

To get the brand message out we communicate our two UVP's via viral marketing. We have to be careful because there is some confusion that social media marketing and social networking is the same, not true. Social media is a way to share information with a broad audience and uses social networking tools such as e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social networking is truly an active engagement with similar thinking individuals communicating together.

Social media is a system that disseminates information electronically to an audience. On the other hand social networking is a process of communication where groups of like-minded people join together to share experiences in a conversational style at meeting places.

For sure we want to use both communication methods for our UVP's, but we feel that social media has huge value from an exponentially growing network of brand loyalists that started with social networking based on "Tell a friend and inform a Nation"