Paola Zuccaro-Marketing Specialist

I am a Happy and Positive Venezuelan living in Vancouver, passionate about life, crossfit, yoga, people and of course Marketing. I finished my University degree in Business and Marketing in 2004 and since then I worked in Customer Service, Client Management and Marketing. This work experience helped not only to  understand the importance of delivering top quality service to customers;but also how to include them when Designing and Implementing Marketing Programs that they will find valuable.

I moved to Vancouver 3 years ago and completed a Marketing Diploma in 2013, since graduation I have independently study more about Digital Marketing, SEO and Social Media, which  made me start  blogging.

This space allows me to  share the knowledge I have gain from every aspect of my life: profession, love, family and health, furthermore it permits me to learn more about the digital world.

At the moment I am looking for new opportunities in Marketing and/or Client Management. As a professional I will offer extended knowledge in those areas, a loyal group member/leader and overall hardworking individual who is a fan of getting things done effectively and on time.

Please see my profile and a printable copy of  my resume at  ca.linkedin.com/in/paolazuccaroberto/

Contact Info:

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Paola Zuccaro
Marketing & Customer Service Specialist.
E-Mail: paolazuccaro@gmail.com
Mobile: 778-708-3410

Vancouver. BC Canada

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New Branding - Armonia - Harmony

Paints are normally categorized according to its quality. In the case of Venezuela Class A is the best quality, and among this quality could exists different types and special characteristics (Exteriors, Interiors,egg shell, low odour, no odour, low VOC and others)

Flamuko paints launched their first Class A paint in 1997. Thanks to this launch "Flamuko Paints" was among the 3 most recognized brands in the market within a year. "Armonia" or "Harmony" became the successful link that the company was missing to start their growth in the paint market

In 2001 through 2003 the company  had financial difficulties that made the company almost close their operations. However either the employees nor the owners stopped believing that they could regain the position in the market and worked very hard to recover their financial position.

In 2005 the company gave me the opportunity to build the customer service, and after a year of demonstrating to our clients that we were back in business offering our services and gaining their trust (see http://paolazb.blogspot.ca/2014/03/a-new-customer-service-department.html) we decided that if we wanted to grow we needed to update the look of our products. Our first task "Armonia" our pride!

I remember we were invited to the opening of one of the retailers "La Tienda del Pintor" or "The painter Store" owned by the same group of companies. Being there I could see our products compared to competitors, and reality stroked hard. Not only did we had a big printing problem (you could see different tones of colour for a same label) but we just looked "blah" compared to others. That was a reality we had to confront.


These are the results, after doing marketing research and trials. Enjoy!!!

• Product Line: Architectural Paint. 
• Product Witdh: Harmony, First class Paint. 
• Product Depths: Exterior, Interior, Egg Shell, Oil based. 

****Disclaimer: I worked with designers and guide them in the creation of these designs. I am not a designer my self. I created the standards, that will support the brand strategy****

So, these are some things we took under consideration in order to develop these designs:

Humans: before, the pictures on the labels only showed a basic structure. We wanted to add an emotional appeal to support the name of the product "Harmony". Therefore we added "humans" in those scenes, showing emotions, happy memories, we wanted show the after experience of using our products.

The pictures were chose based on the application of the products, Exterior has a kid with a bike "outside". Interior (my personal favourite) has a happy family "inside" a bedroom. Egg Shell also with a picture of an inside showing a little more "luxurious" ambience. Finally Oil Based we chose an exterior to show they were resistant to exteriors and a fence, because fences in Venezuela are typically made with metal, and this kind of paints is specifically for that.

Target Market: home owners, architects, professional painters, construction sector.

Everybody was worried that construction sector would not find any appeal with this labels. Do not worry I had a plan for that and you will see it in future posts.

Umbrella Brand: As you can see in the before pics the logo was incomplete, it basically only include letters. We decided to ADD the entire Logo, Why? Because we wanted to make sure the people knew who was behind this line of product. We wanted to promote our brand!!!


Back of the labels: I am very proud of this, because before (I do not have the pic at the moment) it was so confusing wording and not very understandable technical information.

Therefore this is what we did:

Mini Pics: We added mini pics showing different sections:

• Product mini pic, the text shows a concise description of the products and it special characteristics.
• Surface preparation mini pic: showing how to prepare the surface so the application is super more easy and recommended products to do so.

And so on/

The important thing here was that we really tried hard to make this information look more friendly and understandable, because it is important and we wanted people to read it.

You can also appreciate a bunch of small pics at the bottom, well those are other products from the same "depth". Awesome and Smart! that way if anyone saw any of our products laying around they would know that there are also other products available for other purposes.

In a different post I will show other labels we work with and also some merchandising material. Moreover I will write a post explaining the research we undertook in order to deliver these results.


I would love to have your comments, thoughts or whatever you want to share!

Paola***

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A New Customer Service Department.

The discussion started one day when the company just completed a circle of payments to all creditors after a very difficult financial situation, We were celebrating. This financial situation had caused many problems, lay offs, unhappy employees and board of director. More importantly we lost the trust of our customers and consequently they were buying from our competitors. Above all, the company thrived and finished paying their obligations.

We had big decisions to make, not only because this meant a new "era" for the company but we needed to be smart to recover the market we had lost. From the top 2 paint factories we were down to the bottom and barely remembered. Did I already mentioned that most of the retailers that sold our brand were completely mad at us? We had to win that trust back. (Not easy)

I had been working for the company for the past year, and now I was humbly feeling it was my time to shine. The directors of the company asked me: what do you think it should be our first priority with the sales the department? An I said the name. I started explaining them what our customers had talked to me about this past year. An therefore they gave me the responsibility to form a new department.

I was so excited!!!! and at the same time I have to admit scared, my new title was Marketing and Customer Service Coordinator, and my responsibilities were:

1)Support the operations of marketing activities such as: merchandising purchasing, design and allocation; media purchasing, budget allocation among others.

2) Creation of customer service department: hire, train and supervise daily operations of the customer service department, making sure the clients have update information about products orders, product specifications, on-time delivery, order status and others.

Oh my, did I know how challenging this was going to be, I think I never slept for the first 6 months. Although I have to say I had a bunch of people supporting me, the Logistics Manager, Accounts Receivable, without them, things would had been harder to accomplish (I will write about this in a later post)

The process of building a New Customer Service Department (Can work for improving)

Wait! before you start making a big fancy plan you MUST PERFORM a Situation analysis: 

Some people find it unnecessary, sometimes costly, timely and so on. But the truth is that knowing the current situation is vital for future success. When I say situation analysis, is just learn about what is going on in the company and why. The what is as important as the why? Don't you hate when somebody just comes and criticize a process without even knowing why it is done that way. Never and I mean NEVER make that mistake, you will only win some enemies, trust me. So, my advise number one is: 

1) Learn the processes: you do not have to become an expert, but learn how things work. This is important because later you will be able to have an opinion and people will respect it, because they know you invested some time investigating and getting involved. Moreover in the process you can learn more about the past, what they did that did not work, what did work, be careful thought, always keep in mid that some of those seems might not how work as a result of bad policies or applications, so learn about that too. 

2) Talk to people: ask them why they do things the way they do it, what do they do, what makes the problem successful. I specifically remember one opportunity I was dealing with some Logistics problems and I went to talk to the Delivery Coordinator, he gave a class of how could things be done better, how we could improve and what do we needed. He had 20 years working in logistics! Of course his opinion is valuable!

3) Get Involved with other departments: Ok so we all know that any other department mistake it end up being the customer department mistake. That is why it is important that you know what is going on with other departments, therefore you will able to understand their threats and be able to help, support and so on, hey! I went to talk to the logistics coordinator for a reason. 

4)... Last but know least... Talk to your clients!!!! I know, this most be the most intricate, painful and difficult part, but somebody's got to do it. this is for the case of a B2B company. We had approximately 250 clients/stores. All the stores of course had district managers, 30 in total. I started speaking to them, when talking to them I asked them who from the stores I could talk and so on. It is important to have an objective when you make this call, in this case I wanted to know specifically what they lacked more from our services, therefore I wrote some questions down and as the conversation flowed we discussed them. I also told them what I was hoping from the conversation, and why I needed this information: to build as new department fit to your expectations, I made them part of the process. I also did a small survey, in order to able to measure results at the end of the year. 

Finally you have to write down your findings, study them, and take them into consideration to develop your plan.

The Plan

SMART Objective:  specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time, for example:

Create a Customer Service Department that will help the company to win back the trust showing a decrease of complaints of 50% and an increase of sales of 15% by the end of the year.

1) Start hiring Customer Service Representatives
The basic conclusions of the situation analysis to start where:

• They felt that our processes were not updated, old, from dinosaur era (as one client once said to me).
• The work is so routine  that they keep making the same mistake once and again. 
• Most of our clients saw us as unreliable, they felt that most of the time we were not saying the complete truth about order status.
• Didn't care for our service at all. 
• Long waits on the phone.

As they say in Venezuela: "Tenemos mas rayas que un tigre" "We have more lines than a tiger" referring that we had a lot of backlash. 

Based on this I decided the following

• Hire 4 people, this way we could cover all our clients, and be focused on serving them promptly as they expected. 
• Just graduating from a diploma, starting their career. New young faces would help us to show that we were a "new" department, starting to do things differently.
• No experience, this was a particular petition from the president. One day he explained me that it would be easier to hire people and trained them to do things our way. I agreed because it would also help with the routine problems. 

2) Training: 

My plan was to hire companies to help with the training. Unfortunately the budget was not big enough. Therefore I did it my self, always with help, (I do not want to make myself the star of the movie). Anyways, the first thing I told them and repeated every day was: we are here to resolve our clients concerns in a happy and diligent way, bring solutions!!! always!!!. It was almost like a anthem or something (hehehe). And why those words?, you may ask, that was the way I found to explain better what we needed to do in order to deliver the result we all wanted, and what our customers expected from us, solutions, solutions, solutions. 

On the order hand I made them sympathized with the client, I tried my best to make them understand their frustrations when we do not perform well, when we take to long to process an order or to find an information they need, pronto! Thats one thing about this job, clients (with good reason) normally "quieren cosas para ayer", want things for yesterday, meaning for now is already late. 

Well there are a million other things that what I would love to extend, but for the moment lets talk about the results, and in other posts we will talk about more deeply. 

Results: By the end of the year we achieved a reduction of complaints of 80% and incremented sales a total of 20%. I want to make clear that this was an effort done with clients that had already bought products to the company, no new customers, that came after. But yes! we did an excellent job for the first year and of course we needed to keep improving! 

Please share your comments, let me know if you need me to be more specific in a special subject, that way I will make sure to write about it. 

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