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I worked with Jeremy and Clive at Howard / Baines last year to build a strategy for their business development.  At the time they had a unique positioning being equally comfortable working on Mac and PC.  I thought this was worth exploiting – a rare talent and track record to prove it.

Building their strategy depended on  a couple of insights

1. Bridging the divide from opensource freeware and paid-for software is a challenge for software houses
2. Being early adopters for new software tools can bring rapid publicity

 Howard / Baines had all the tools in their toolkit to build up their company profile and reputation.  I helped them to put the right pitch to the right people at Microsoft and later Adobe which has led to their establishement as the Mitchell and Webb (Mac / PC) of the web apps world.

Here's how.

Many software houses release beta versions of their software to developers free of charge before they launch.  

Howard / Baines identifies MS desire to woo the opensource community and Meet with Approval was the app they wrote using a mix of free and paid-for software.  Adobe wanted example apps written in Air  at launch and the team delivered them AlertThingy .  Read the whole story about their case studies.

Since that time they've become a founding Microsoft BizSpark partner  and are now on retainer with a couple of software houses as lead developers for apps written in new software.

A nice touch on their website – you can subscribe to the blog by twitter – each new post is linked.  Smart. 

Postscript: from email: "I would also suggest that anyone interested hearing our news before it is public  can follow my personal rants on twitter – @jeremybaines 

  The "Shout"" interview series with agencies

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Indirect and oblique marketing opportunities.
One fantastic marketing tool that is often used by technology companies (but is available to most types of business) is to write a case study about your business. This details a particular product or service that you use and why you chose a particular supplier and the net outcomes of using the product.
This is a great marketing tool because it talks about YOU, but the hard work of promotion and message delivery is being done by someone else!
At an Earl’s Court show for marketing and technology, I picked up a case study one page flier written by Concrete (never heard of them before….) because it featured the logo of a company that I do know, Loewy the design and advertising group headed by Charlie Hoult. I read the case study – it is about them installing an advertising management system that delivers print artwork for clients to the media owners in a trackable, real-time web environment.
The benefits to Loewy are of course being picked as a case study that the software company is promoting (presumably to Loewy’s clients and competitors!) and also the fact that they are probably an early adopter of the software. The risk that Loewy took in buying from Concrete is being rewarded by the case study positioning them as a leading edge, innovative agency.
Neat.
On a smaller scale, I have been working with a web agency, Howard/Baines who are building a name for themselves as the ‘designers of choice’ for both large enterprises and web 2.0 start-ups. A broad church of customers. Their offering is also quirky – they take paid-for software and open source and use the best tool for the job, frequently combining and integrating both in order to produce the solution that is right for the client.
Howard/Baines needed to get a stronger presence in a highly crowded marketplace for web strategy, design and development and came up with the idea of writing a case study for Microsoft’s new Visual Studio 2008 suite.
They wrote an online meeting organiser tool "Meet with Approval" using both open source and MS tools, a commercial site where users pay for the tool and which has netted over 2000 users and 500+ meetings since launch in October 2007.
Approaching Microsoft, Clive Howard offered them the opportunity to use this as a case study to prove that it is possible to use both open source and paid-for software tools and that four key “myths” about open source were not always true: (speed, support, price and integration).
Microsoft has a business need to improve its relationships with the open source developer community. It is a huge potential market for MS products and is a place where many of the most vocal anti-Microsoft messages are promulgated. And so we hoped that MS would pick up on this opportunity and agree to write a joint case study.
They did and the outcomes have blown us away.
Microsoft has chosen Howard/Baines to speak at the UK launch of Visual Studio 2008 to an audience of press, analysts and key MS users. Now that is a powerful group of people who MS is very keen to impress… and they have been very generous to Howard Baines, inviting them to the whole day including lunch with analysts and one-on-one press interviews with key technology journalists. This has enabled Clive Howard and Jeremy Baines to gain both great brand building opportunities with audiences that would have been beyond their reach (without Microsoft) but also to use the case study in their own media of choice for promotion as well.
Well done, lads!
[Update: Howard/Baines will be interviewed in Computing magazine and Marketing Week]

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