Establishing major industry recognition

We had been doing the marketing for a tech company on the East Coast called Inspex for about a year when Al received an unexpected invitation to go to Japan and meet with the CEO of Inspex’s parent company Hamamatsu Photonics.

CEO Teruo Hiruma, explained that although Hamamatsu had roots going back to 1948 and had developed much of the world’s most important photonics technology, their reputation and recognition in the industry as a whole were far short of what they merited.

Mr. Hiruma saw the marketing work we were doing for their Inspex division, and he asked if Al might be able to build a major level of recognition and respect for Hamamatsu across the global photonics industry…

Al accepted the challenge and put together a very aggressive campaign that began running in Scientific American magazine globally. Each new ad presented an important photonics breakthrough that Hamamatsu had made or was making, – across numerous industries and applications. All were tied together under the positioning headline “Hamamatsu is opening the new frontiers of light.“

And there was another part of this campaign – unrequested but very important… Because the objectives of this effort were totally intangible – to increase audience awareness and respect – Al knew that scientific measurement of campaign effectiveness would be critical if the ads were to continue running. Only this would allow us to measure and track in real numbers what was going on in people’s minds.

So before the ads began, Al set up a third-party program that sent out an objective attitudes-and-awareness survey every 4 months, ongoing. Each survey was sent to a fresh n-th name sampling of the global Scientific American audience. And the results were very gratifying. As Mr. Hiruma had suspected, the initial, pre-campaign levels of awareness and respect for Hamamatsu were low. But after the ads began, the numbers climbed strongly and continuously. And with Mr. Hiruma’s ongoing personal monitoring and approval, our campaign continued for over 13 straight years!

We know of no other technology marketing campaign anywhere with that length of run combined with ongoing scientific proof of performance.