Sometimes an Award is Just the Icing on the Cake

Most people don’t start a project with the intention of winning an award. You come to work, do your job, and, if you’re lucky, enjoy what you do and make a positive impact. When all the pieces come together and your work is acknowledged outside of your client team, it’s like the icing on an already scrumptious cake.

Last year, The Hodges Partnership assembled a team to launch the Virginia Spirits Board Marketing office, tasked with developing and executing an integrated marketing and branding program for Virginia’s spirits industry. We believed we were doing good work and hoped to positively impact Virginia’s distilling industry. Earlier this year, the Richmond chapter of the Public Relations Society of America recognized our efforts with five Awards of Excellence, the highest level of award in each category we submitted.

There was nothing magical about what we did, but we relied on a few key elements: thorough research and documentation, collaboration and creativity and a commitment to quality.

Research and documentation

Admittedly, when we started no one on the team really knew all that much about distilled spirits, how they were made or who was making them in Virginia – much less what sort of marketing challenges the industry faced or how we were going to have an impact. So, we went on the road and talked to our new clients. We held regional “meet and greets” all around the state, asking a lot of questions and listening to the people in the trenches. We recorded and wrote down everything.

We partnered with Brand Federation to conduct a study to tell us what Virginians knew about the craft spirits industry in their own backyard and where our greatest opportunities existed. Everything we did and all the research we conducted was recorded and categorized, allowing us to create benchmarks as the starting points of our work and the basis of our success measuring stick.

Collaboration and creativity

Both at Hodges and within the VSBMO team, nothing gets done in a silo. We are constantly sharing ideas and information, fostering an environment where no idea is too wacky or outrageous, at least not at first. We celebrate the good and ultimately end up laughing about the not-so-good. The great thing about starting with an environment where people feel included and allowed to share their ideas and opinions is that it also frees up the team to share when an idea might be too outlandish, too expensive or just plain bad. Even if a project is not directly in someone’s “lane,” we’ve found that having everyone be part of the discussion brings new and frequently unexpected insight and creativity. Just because someone focuses on media relations, doesn’t mean they don’t have insight into what a good social media campaign might look like or if a printed map is too cumbersome for anyone to actually use it. Truly working as a team allows us to bring the very best ideas to life.

A commitment to quality

I’ve never been a fan of striving to be “the best.” What is “the best” anyway? Isn’t it all relative to available resources, time, skill and a whole litany of factors that may be outside of one’s control? We can, however, strive to do a really good job. The best we can muster on a particular day or during a specific period of time with what we have available.

Everything we do gets many sets of eyes on it. Articles, emails and blogs all get reviewed multiple times by different people. There are countless opportunities to catch the typo or slow the process down when something just doesn’t feel right or seem to be working as it should. And then, as we approach completion of a project, we can take a minute and ask ourselves, “Is this the best it can be? Are there tweaks we can make to get even a slightly better result?”

In the end, it’s those small tweaks that make our work just a little better and, in some cases, take us from a “really good” product to “outstanding”. However, we would not be able to make those tweaks (or add the icing to the cake, if you will) if we didn’t have the foundation of well-researched and documented background information brought to life by a creative and collaborative process.