Marketing : Innovation + Job News

Grupo Xela is a marketing research agency that specializes in Hispanic demographics. Founded by Jose Cuesta in 2003, the company found success in Cincinnati by communicating an authentic and carefully researched Hispanic perspective to Procter & Gamble and QFact, among other locally owned businesses.

Originally from Colombia, Cuesta earned a BA in industrial engineering at Javeriana University. He came to Cincinnati in 1998, where he earned an MBA from Xavier University. Cuesta’s mother is originally from Cincinnati, and he was prompted by his family to move to the Queen City.

“You don’t go to Cincinnati unless you have a reason,” Cuesta says. “But there’s always a reason to go.”

After earning his degree from Xavier, Cuesta began working for Cincinnati Bell as a manager for various departments.

Cuesta founded what would eventually become Grupo Xela with his brother-in-law. Their first business attempt was as coffee distributors for regional restaurants, but their work in the city helped them realize the Hispanic community’s marketing potential. Prompted by the fact that Hispanics were the most rapidly growing minority in the country, Cuesta knew he could offer a very important perspective to P&G—Cincinnati’s powerhouse corporation.

By interacting with Hispanic panelists sourced from Cincinnati, Columbus, Louisville, Indianapolis, Chicago, Atlanta and Miami, Grupo Xela’s chief concern is gathering qualitative market research.

The company has since gone international, with a United States' headquarters in Cincinnati, and a Colombian office in Bogota, with plans to expand into more cities and countries soon. 

By Sean Peters

The Dayton Development Coalition (DDC), which serves 14 counties in west central Ohio, is the region’s economic development and advocacy organization supporting job creation.
 
When deciding where to locate, businesses consider a host of different factors, including a skilled workforce, transportation, logistics, taxes, incentives and educational institutions, when deciding where to locate. DDC relies on its internal data team to research and provide information on these and other important factors to help attract regional economic development.
 
The data team was recently tapped to present some of its best practices and strategies at the Economic Modeling Specialists International (EMSI) national conference.  According to its website, EMSI provides “high-quality employment data and economic analysis through web tools and custom reports.”
 
The team shared how it uses EMSI data to target economic development efforts, explains Kristy Rochon, director of DCC’s institutional research and strategic planning. Impressed by the team’s presentation, EMSI is featuring some highlights on its website.

“One of our best practices is how we use data to recruit businesses to the Dayton region,” Rochon says. “When businesses contact us about what they need for their business decision, we put together the most competitive and comprehensive package possible, using data from a host of different sources. Instead of just feeding them data, however, we try to gain as much insight into their company as possible, comparing the Dayton region to where they’re currently located. We consistently go beyond the parameters to give them what they need.”
 
A second best practice, Rochon explains, reflects how DDC’s data team uses EMSI data to analyze regional competitive strengths and opportunities. “We look at what we call ‘driver industries.’ These are high-skilled industries that carry high job multipliers,” she says. “High job multipliers mean that for every job in that ‘driver industry,’ it’s going to produce additional jobs in that industry.”
 
She cites aerospace systems, advanced materials manufacturing, biosciences and advanced data management as examples of “driver industries.”
 
“What we’re looking for here is projected growth or projected decline and trying to understand the factors behind it. The goal is to find ways to strengthen the industry or capitalize on that growth.”

Source:  Kristy Rochon, Dayton Development Coalition
Writer:  Lynne Meyer

 

Xavier University grad and entrepreneur Matt Dooley is giving back to the university. This time, he's not a student but an instructor.

Dooley, who in 2011 launched a social media agency called dooley media, now teaches a social media marketing course he developed for Xavier's MBA program. This fall will mark his third year teaching the course, which was recently accepted into the lineup of Xavier's MBA electives after an experimental period.

The course centers on the changing and emerging social media marketing space. It's a real-time, real-world course that teaches students to create, analyze and and adapt social media campaigns across platforms. Dooley approached the university about the class, hoping to contribute to an existing course. Instead, he was asked to develop one himself.

"I think the underlying motive was simply that so many people were talking about social media and trying to figure it out," Dooley says. "That prompted me to send that email, to see if there was an opportunity to build dialogue around social media's best (and worst) practices." He graduated from Xavier with a BSBA in finance and an MBA in marketing.

Throughout his course, Dooley shares his own experiences in the working world, managing and developing social media campaigns for small- and medium-size businesses. Dooley also writes about social media marketing for the online publication Cincinnati Profile.

The course has featured numerous experienced speakers, including social media marketing experts from companies and organizations like Caterpillar, Waste Management, Yelp!, Microsoft and Obama for America.

The course emphasises on meeting real-life challenges, and in one project, help solve a marketing challenge 3M presented to the class. The challenge related to helping the company better sell a new suite of computer privacy and protection products.

"It's a real-world course," Dooley says. "I think it's going against the nature of social media to be any other way. It's as interactive and fun and lively as possible."

By Feoshia H. Davis
Follow Feoshia on Twitter

Big, established brands can get stale, so in the fast-changing and hyper-competitive consumer products market, rapid, results-oriented market research is a real asset for large brands.

Olivetree Research in Hyde Park builds on founder Carol Shea's decades of experience in consumer marketing research to help brands shake things up a little. Olivetree helps find new answers to the perennial question: What do consumers REALLY want?

Shea started Olivetree Research about 11 years ago, not long after Sept. 11, 2001.

"It was the right time for me to make a split from my former company," she says. "I'd been in marketing research for 25 years, and had been thinking about starting my own business for a long time. Sept. 11 was a wake-up call for living every day the way you want."

Additionally, Shea served as adjunct faculty of the Williams College of Business at Xavier University as a former member of the Advisory Council to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Olivetree works with large and mid-size local firms that are looking to solve marketing and sales challenges that stunt growth.

"We're working with companies that are committed to positioning new product development that meets the needs of their consumers," Shea says. "We work with companies who want to spend time up-front on research, understand what positioning is and are willing to engage in that process."

Through her work, Shea has helped brand everything from pickles to neighborhoods, all by finding what customers want and what the company needs to do to market and meet those needs.

Companies often come to her when their marketing efforts are flagging, they have a decline in sales or a new competitor enters the market. With Olivetree, companies look to strengthen their brand, reinforce customer loyalty, expand into new markets or develop new products and services.

The market research process takes about three to six months, and can continue over years as a company evolves. In addition to consumer products, Shea often works with healthcare and financial services agencies.

This year, Shea is growing her own business by starting an online training company that will offer courses for new market researchers.

"It will help them understand what techniques work best in certain situations," she says. "The training will help them have confidence in their position. It can be very difficult for someone new in market research to speak with authority on how you should proceed based on the (research) results."

Shea plans to launch the new company sometime later this year.

By Feoshia H. Davis
Follow Feoshia on Twitter

This story was originally published in Soapbox, hiVelocity's sister publication in Cincinnati.

Phil Alexander and Mohit Ahluwalia realized something when they were earning their MBAs at CWRU: that people in all segments of businesses are charged with creating presentations at some point in their careers. However, not everyone has the talent -- or budget to hire an agency -- to create an eye-catching presentation.

“Thirty million PowerPoint presentations are made every day across America,” says Alexander.
 
So Alexander and Ahluwalia thought about starting a business that would help customers create their presentations.

“We wanted to do something with digital media,” recalls Alexander. “We were looking to figure out if we could automate the process and avoid paying the high rates of agencies.”
 
The two applied to LaunchHouse Accelerator last summer and developed Quick2Launch, a company that creates great visuals for any presentation. The company officially launched last week with its ConceptDrop technology.
 
With the company’s ConceptDrop, users login, upload their content outlines and fill out a creative brief questionnaire describing their presentation. They are then presented with a selection of pre-approved templates and themes, and Quick2Launch takes it from there and creates the visuals to go along with the content. The end result is a complete, professional presentation.
 
“We’re just trying to hold their hand throughout the creation of the presentation,” says Alexander. “We’ve tried to make it so it’s really simple.”
 
Quick2Launch partners with Reality Premedia Services, which provides access to 150 graphic designers. The company is about a month away from launching its business-to-business platform.
 
Alexander says they hope to hire a sales team and in-house designers soon. “The goal is to completely build our own entity,” he says. “We really want to be the all-in-one stop for presentations.”

 
Source: Phil Alexander
Writer: Karin Connelly

This story was originally published in Fresh Water Cleveland, hiVelocity's sister publication in Northeast Ohio.

The branding firm Rocket Science now occupies a third-floor space in downtown Cincinnati’s Eighth Street Design District. The branding and design firm relocated from Mason at the beginning of December to be closer to major companies like P&G, Kroger and Macy’s, as well as other design firms.
 
“We really felt that being in the suburbs precluded us from being part of the local advertising and branding community,” says Chuck Tabri, director of business development and client strategy for Rocket Science, and one of the company’s three partners.
 
Greg Fehrenbach and Joel Warneke founded Rocket Science in 1999 under a different name. The company merged with one in Dayton, then de-merged, and in 2005, became Rocket Science in its current form. At the time of the merge, the firm was based in Mason; it then moved to a space in Deerfield Towne Center.
 
Rocket Science employs about 15 people, and it recently added in-house digital capabilities to its traditional print offerings to assist its clients' shift from print to digital. It made more sense for the company to develop its own digital branch rather than farm it out to another company, Tabri says.
 
Rocket Science had begun to outgrow its space in Mason, and after talks with 3CDC in the fall, the right space opened up. 

And from a talent standpoint, moving downtown gives Rocket Science greater access to young, fresh designers.
 
“Young designers want to be in a more urban environment,” says Tabri. “They get more inspiration from the creativity in a downtown environment than from a strip center in the suburbs.”
 
Because of Rocket Science's size, it can offer new thinking and capabilities that larger firms might not have, says Tabri. He adds that the move will help Rocket Science expand its consumer, business-to-business and healthcare verticals.
 
Originally published in Soapbox, our sister publication in Cincinnati.

By Caitlin Koenig
Follow Caitlin on Twitter

Jonathan Yale has always been socially conscious. As an athlete, he is also concerned about what foods he puts into his body. Those two principles came together when Yale and Phillip Williams founded HooftyMatch last August, an online marketplace for buying and selling locally produced meats.

“It started from a nutritional aspect,” says Yale. “I actually went to farms and bought some whole animals. I started educating myself on all the different factors of why it’s better meat.”

Yale and Williams came up with the idea for HooftyMatch after seeing a booming trend in farm-to-table eating and a strong desire to consume meat from humanely treated animals.
 
“We focus on farmers and the trend of beef without hormones or antibiotics,” says Yale. “We want to make that higher-quality product easier to get into the market. We want to have a consumer-friendly product where our customers can buy directly from our site and have it shipped to them or they can pick it up from a set location.”
 
A portfolio company in LaunchHouse Accelerator, HooftyMatch received a $25,000 investment. The company also won Startup Lakewood’s Ideation Challenge last summer.
 
Yale plans on starting a monthly Cleveland Meat Series with "localvore" restaurants to market HooftyMatch and educate people. “There are definitely people who want this and we want to say it’s out there,” he says. “It's good for farmers, it’s good for the restaurant business, and it’s good for people. It’s kind of like a win-win-win.”
 
HooftyMatch plans to officially launch its site next month.

This story originally appeared in Fresh Water Cleveland, our sister publication in Northeast Ohio.
 
Source: Jonathan Yale
Writer: Karin Connelly

The buy-local movement has transitioned from being merely a trend to a mainstream business model, benefitting local companies and communities.

Many local businesses use daily-deal websites to generate or enhance sales. Yet when Joshua Kibbey of Columbus talked to local merchants in his area, he kept hearing that such sites weren’t bringing long-term value to their businesses. 
 
“These types of sites are simply marketing for small businesses, like mailing coupons or putting them in the newspaper,” he explains. “It’s one way to market, but the business model only works if you have high volume, low-margin deals. Those types of deals aren’t conducive to growing a quality customer base.”
 
Believing there was a better way, Kibbey created BidSwan in 2011. The online marketplace allows companies to cost-effectively market their offerings to local consumers without having to offer drastic discounts or deal with the one-time crush of customers that often occurs with daily-deal site offerings.

BidSwan originally started with a name-your-price format. “We came to the conclusion, however, that it was too restrictive and consumers didn’t embrace it as we had hoped,” Kibbey recalls. To re-tool, he and his partners created an alliance with Small Business Beanstalk (SBB), a shop-local organization with 500 merchant members, and then re-launched BidSwan in September 2012.

“We now offer a large variety of deals at any given time,” he explains.  “We count on good selection and variety – not deep discounts -- to keep customers coming back. We also don’t have a set schedule of deals. Businesses are free to choose the volume, price point and timing of their deal to maximize the benefit to them.”
 
Users can go to Bidswan’s website, obtain a free SBB Community Card, purchase  vouchers for about 20 to 30 percent off the face value of items and then use the vouchers at participating local businesses. There’s no cost for merchants to join SBB. “Businesses pay us a fee to cover credit card costs, and we get a percentage of each sale,” he explains.
 
BidSwan has more than 60 businesses signed up, and Kibbey anticipates working with other community outreach organizations to expand

 
Source:   Joshua Kibbey
Writer:  Lynne Meyer

Big River helps organizations get the most out of their online giving campaigns with a simple theory: Appeal to what the potential donors react to and they will donate. The theory apparently proves correct. The 18-month-old cloud-based online fundraising platform has won accolades from clients such as the Cleveland Museum of Art and Lorain County Metro Parks in Big River’s ability to increase online giving.
 
“It’s almost like the last 17 years of e-commerce hasn’t made itself accessible to nonprofits,” says Big River founder and CEO Ron Cass. “Nonprofits haven’t done more than PayPal. The Big River product puts the most effective appeal in front of the donor at the right time to maximize that donation.”
 
The key is telling donors what the impact of their donations will be. “They want to know what their money does,” explains Cass. “They want to know what impact their gift is going to have. We allow organizations to create donation products, and then target those asks based on the donor’s history with the organization.”
 
Big River has eight customers of varying sizes and is already generating revenue. The Cleveland Museum of Art is one fan of Big River, reporting that membership has doubled since they hired Big River.
 
One of the first companies to be a part of Bizdom’s Cleveland operation, Big River is expanding within the Bizdom offices. JumpStart announced on Tuesday, November 13th a $250,000 investment in Big River to further expand.
 
“Any time you get an investment it changes the slope of the company,” says Cass. “We are going to focus on sales, marketing and product development.”
 
In addition to adding some new tools and bringing some ideas to reality, Cass also hopes to expand his staff. “A big part of the investment is hiring -- rapidly,” he says. “Around the order of four people in marketing and development.”
 
In the meantime, Cass was impressed with the connections he made at JumpStart’s Entrepreneur Expo this week. “I spoke to a lot of people who said, ‘I know someone with this organization,’” he says. “I got about 20 leads. I was very impressed.”

 
Source: Ron Cass
Writer: Karin Connelly

“A digital spin on the traditional photo booth” is Kelley Andersen’s super-short explanation of Booth FX Photo Booth Company, which she launched with her partner, Allison Gates, last month. The pair built the idea for their company on a love of photo booths, two creative personalities and their vision for a photo booth that was more than a traditional, space-limited box.

“We first looked at the booths you can buy, and they were nice, but not what we were looking for," Andersen says. "We wanted something that was more digital. I love Instagram, and was trying to figure out how we could do that as a photo booth."

The booth they custom-built  – “with a lot of time and a lot of mistakes,” Andersen adds – measures 1.5 ft. by 1.5 ft., is 5.5 feet tall and incorporates software that allows photos to be viewed, edited and shared.

Rather than expecting participants to hop inside, the booth houses the photography equipment. Participants gather in the space around the booth to snap a photo in front of customized backdrops the women create for each event with input from hosts.

Features of the booth include a wireless remote and a touchscreen for viewing images on the back of the booth. That allows attendees to view photos, use filter effects (much in the same way as one would with Instagram) and upload images to social media immediately. The co-founders provide wireless internet with a mobile hotspot.

Booth FX launched last month, and both founders still have full-time day jobs, Gates as a designer and Andersen as an insurance analyst. So far, they’ve been commissioned for fundraising events and they plan to reach out to local brides- and grooms-to-be to expand their business into weddings.

By Robin Donovan
 

TWIST Creative had been adverse the word "agency" for many years, as the term represented something the Cleveland-based branding firm was not. That all changed eight months ago when TWIST shifted its strategy to target bigger clients, spurring a period of growth that has led to a flurry of new hires as well as new customers.

That's four new hires and about 20 new clients to be exact, says Michael Ozan, TWIST's president and chief creative officer, who in 2000 founded the firm with wife Connie. Add promotions and an overall company realignment to that list and TWIST has had a very busy 2012.

"We looked at our market position and decided to turn in the direction of being an agency," says Ozan. "We needed more people [on hand] to make that change."

In September, TWIST hired a new director of media relations, an art director and two designers. The agency also named marketing director Josh Taylor as its new director of strategy and development, while lead senior designer Chris Oldham is now director of design operations.

To its burgeoning client portfolio TWIST added 20 new brands, including big-name consumer product companies Hoover Vacuum and Hinkley Lighting; aerospace industry manufacturer Voss Industries; and multi-market restaurateur Paladar.

This was an exciting year, but one also full of difficult changes, says design director Connie Ozan. Although the former boutique is now a full-service brand agency, the challenge for TWIST looking ahead is to continue to grow its position within the market.

 "There's been lots of energy over the last eight months," she says. "It will take awhile for the new team to gel, but 2013 is going to be a great year."
 

SOURCE:  Michael Ozan, Connie Ozan
WRITER: Douglas J. Guth

Mike Stanek, president of Cleveland Cycle Tours, is offering the newest way to see Cleveland: A group bike tour. But unlike most group bike tours, this one employs just one vehicle. Nearly the whole group gets behind powering this 15-person, 1,600-pound bike.

“We are a group party bike, a group cycling experience,” Stanek explains. “There’s no motor, there’s no other way to move it except to pedal it.”
 
Ten people pedal Stanek’s 15-person bike, whether it’s a site-seeing tour, a pub crawl, a corporate team-building event or a wedding. Stanek can also haul the bike out to any location a customer chooses. A driver steers and operates the brake. The bike goes four to five miles per hour, and Stanek designs the routes to be mostly flat.
 
Cleveland Cycle Tours has hosted three or four tours since launching in September. Although Stanek applied for the license in July, some red tape kept him from officially launching. For now he is focusing on a successful spring tour season. He’s received a lot of support so far. “We’re building nice relationships with the taverns downtown and in Ohio City,” he says.
 
Stanek got the idea from a group in Minneapolis who brought a similar bike there from the Netherlands. Today that company has seven bikes operating in Minneapolis. Stanek hopes to grow his company in Cleveland similarly.
 
“The ultimate goal is to purchase a second or third cycle for Ohio City and Lakewood,” Stanek says. “The biggest challenge is finding a 10-foot high garage because the bikes are 9-feet, 4-inches tall.”
 
Right now, Stanek operates Cleveland Cycle Tours with his wife, who runs the daily operations, and oldest son, who drives the bike. Stanek hopes to hire and train three or four more drivers by spring.

 
Source: Mike Stanek
Writer: Karin Connelly

Two recent graduates of The Brandery shared how to pitch a startup idea to investors and potential employees at on of the Digital Non Conference’s breakout sessions last week. Hunter Hammonds and Freddie Pikovsky recently pitched their startup ideas at The Brandery’s Demo Day and are now in the process of procuring funds and building teams.

Hammonds is the CEO and co-founder of Impulcity, a city app that makes a night on the town a breeze. Users can buy tickets to shows and view the specials at bars all in one place. Originally from Louisville, Hammonds came to Cincinnati because of The Brandery.

While searching for employees, he realized Cincinnati has a lot of local talent—he hasn’t needed to hire anyone from outside Ohio yet because of the wealth of designers here.

Pikovsky, originally from Brooklyn, is the CEO and founder of Off Track Planet. His startup began as a travel blog three years ago and is now a travel site and mobile app geared toward people in their mid-20s and early 30s. Pikovsky was drawn to The Brandery like Hammonds was, and wanted to be part of the startup ecosystem.

“Right now is an amazing time to be part of The Brandery,” Pikovsky says.

Hammonds and Pikovsky know it’s important to sell their ideas, whether it’s to a potential investor or new hires. In both cases, they have to make sure the startup’s roadmap is clear and focused; otherwise, investors might not be interested and employees won’t know which way is up.

Off Track Planet recently launched its beta version, and in three months, Pikovsky and his team hope to have the full release out. Impulcity will be launching soon and focusing solely on Cincinnati to start with, but Hammonds’ goal is to have it be an app for those living outside of the Tri-State area too.

By Caitlin Koenig
Follow Caitlin on Twitter
Caitlin is an Associate Editor for Barefoot Proximity

At the Brandery's third Demo Day Oct. 3, a packed house at Great American Ball Park looked forward to a home run, but not from the field below. 

The stadium's Champions Club had been transformed into a space where founders of 11 startups paced, shook hands and smiled as they prepared to offer their practiced pitches that they knew could net them millions in investment dollars.

This year, there were more than twice as many applicants for the seed-stage startup accelerator in Over-the-Rhine as both of its earlier years, combined, according to Brandery General Manager Mike Bott. 

Only 10 percent of those applicants were local, Bott says. The companies selected for the intensive four-month session in Cincinnati hailed from Seattle and Brooklyn, from Cleveland and San Francisco. One local business, REPP, made the final cut.

As its name implies, The Brandery focuses mostly on consumer products and services. Its strength is in its location and its expertise: the branding giants of Cincinnati help make The Brandery attractive to entrepreneurs from around the world. The latest startup session included plenty of mobile and social applications. 

An example? The first startup to present on Demo Day: CrowdHall.

Crowdhall, a free social platform, collects questions and ideas from a single crowd and helps the members of an audience organize and prioritize them democratically. Matthew Dooley, founder and CEO of Cincinnati's dooley media, made a bold prediction about this startup, which has already created "crowd halls" with NYU prof and Earth Institute leader Jeffrey Sachs, Dhani Jones and PG Sittenfeld. 

Dooley's tweet: "Impressed with @crowdhall pitch at #brandery2012 #demoday. Will be bought out by Twitter within a year. #boldprediction @brandery @jbkropp."

You've read about this Brandery class in Soapbox for months now, from Sostock, which planted roots and intends to remain in Cincinnati, to REPP, the latest big idea from Cincinnatians Michael Bergman, his wife BreeAnna and David Volker, formerly of LPK (where Bergman also formerly worked).

Find a full list of startups here. And more coverage of The Brandery on Nibletz, "the voice of startups everywhere else."

By Elissa Yancey
Follow Elissa on Twitter.

When Josh Fendley and four tech-savvy friends left their digital agency to launch a smaller venture, they were looking for a business name that would convey their small staff’s concentrated experience. Ample fit the bill, and is still a point of pride because one of the firm’s selling points is its size.

"Clients realize that if I’m the one selling them on doing the work, they’re going to be working with me the entire time if they choose to engage us," Fendley says. "When we left our last agency, we were all directors of this and that, but decided we wanted to get back to doing work instead of just managing it."

Fendley says the trick of being small is to carefully select experienced employees, with an eye to maintaining company culture. “We have only one relatively young employee, and we belabored on whether or not we should do that,” he says.

Recently, Ample has been pivoting away from marketing to focus on building websites and developing strategic, creative digital projects, including video and websites that easily scale down desktop applications for mobile interfaces and apps. 

"All the sites we create automatically scale and reformat," Fendley says. "Not a lot of people are actually doing that." 

Ample also developed its own content management system.

Along with size and experience, Ample’s culture is shaped by its brainy core. "We love being presented with something we don’t know how to get through. We love to figure out how to do it," Fendley says. 

Ample is primarily a Ruby on Rails shop, but also offers help with strategic planning.

So, when Ample got a call from a New Jersey nonprofit seeking to outfit students with disabilities with human-read audio books, its developers created an iTunes-like app compatible with a variety of devices.

"A lot of our long-time clients pay us to think for them, and I think that’s where we’re most successful,” Fendley says, noting that new business largely comes from referrals, and the team is turning away prospective clients.“Clients are your best salespeople. If you do well by them, them will typically give you some good karma back."

By Robin Donovan