Ding Dong Merrily on a PR & Marketing High!

In this season of Goodwill we bring you glad tidings of our latest employee Miss Rachel Thomas. Rachel has joined the team as an Account Executive and is already proving a valuable asset to the team. Welcome Rachel, we hope you will be very happy with us here in the Royal Crescent and we look forward to hearing more stories of your various phobias and foibles...but we have to be honest, we are struggling to understand how you find Wallace and Gromit scary!

Work continues apace despite the Christmas holidays rushing up on us at break neck speed.

December has been a big month for newsletters and magazines for our clients; we have produced Imagine for Interserve, Woodlands News for Memorial Woodlands and the Garrett Gazette for Garrett Ingredients. We thoroughly enjoy working on these projects for our clients and are very proud that they are so well received.

We have achieved features for Great Local Offers in The Cheltonian Magazine and have lined up a host of features for Water and Stone in publications such as Cotswold Preview, Utopia and Kitchens Bathrooms & Bedrooms, using photos taken by local photographer Nick Yarsley. We also took Alison Ebanks’ portfolio into the next generation by uploading all her designs onto an iPad, allowing her to show prospective clients her previous work in glorious digital high-resolution. It looked truly stunning and Alison was delighted. The only downside to the story is that now everyone in the office now wants an iPad for themselves and is about £350 away from being able to afford one. Grrr.

In a massively generous gesture to local charity The Pied Piper Appeal, Le Spa donated a luxury overnight stay for two including a host of treatments, all food and a basket of facial products to the Total Star Radio Christmas auction and helped to raise over £6,500 for sick children in Gloucestershire.

There is a wonderful, heart warming twist to this story; the winning bidder didn’t want the break for himself but to give as a ‘thank you’ gift to friends who stepped in to look after their little girl when their newborn son stopped breathing and had to be rushed to hospital. The good news is that the baby is now fully recovered and as we write the well deserving pair are enjoying their break at Le Spa. Don’t you love it when good things happen to good people?

Stadium Marketing Solutions had a massively successful trip to the Soccerex Exhibition in Brazil this month with all the fancy new marketing kit we produced for them. We re-skinned their stand and produced new pop up banners. We also sent them off with pre-loaded and branded USB sticks, new stationary and translated a new brochure into Portuguese. It was all go in the run up but the hard work and late evenings in the office paid off!

New business continues to roll in and we are delighted to have been appointed by Deborah Mitchell to do a research project. Rachel is spending more time than is good for her trawling the gossip sites for relevant information!

So as Christmas rolls into sight, the team are in varying degrees of panic regarding present buying and card sending. Colin gets Mrs Colin to do it all so is fairly relaxed. Natalie is nearly finished everything and looking rather smug, Chris is a single boy which he thinks absolves him of all festive responsibilities and will, as per many other single men, be making some rush purchases at 16:45 on Christmas Eve. Rachel is preparing herself for a strategic attach on Cheltenham’s shops during remaining lunch hours and Louise is like a rabbit stuck in the headlights, having not purchased one card or present and is in total meltdown over the whole event. Whatever we do, or don’t do, the day will arrive, food will be eaten, wine will be drunk, presents will be opened and receipts will be requested. It’s Christmas. Enjoy x

Merry Christmas to one and all from everybody at Colin Higgins and Associates.