WE GET HUMANS, WE DO MARKETING

SMES looking for marketing support in these troubled times are being offered assistance by a rebranded REACH and a CEO who’s passionate about helping this struggling sector.

When Struan Abernethy took over as Chief Executive Officer of Reachmedia in 2019, the company had built a reputation for bringing together New Zealand businesses and their ideal customers

— a success based on letterbox marketing. In the subsequent years, he’s transformed the company by applying a scientific approach to marketing, using data insights to help mostly larger businesses make smarter marketing decisions and close the gap between businesses and buyers.

This year, Struan is moving forward based on a passion to help the majority of New Zealand businesses — the SME sector. He’s evolved the company brand to become REACH, and increased staff with a robust team of marketers and data scientists that provide the gamut of marketing services, all conveniently under one roof and underpinned by a unique drive to understand audiences.

This passion is an honourable pursuit intended to help small and medium-sized companies grow and flourish in an area that’s often misunderstood, difficult to piece together and under-invested in. It’s a move that provides access to tools commonly perceived as the domain of big business.

REACH specialises in multiple areas — including marketing, data, insights and branding — that businesses grafting in this time of Covid, lockdowns and consumer hesitancy are desperate for. Smaller companies in particular often struggle to find the marketing assistance they need to grow or even to keep their businesses afloat. By offering multi-channel solutions such as social media, website building and print, REACH is using powerful insights to help understand customers and the best way to reach them in ways they want to be found.

This stems from more than 20 years of working in New Zealand neighbourhoods and developing tools for the letterbox channel that can now also be leveraged to inform other marketing channels.

Struan has been busy putting together a team of experts that will provide clients with strategies to help focus and amplify their marketing activities. The range of solutions on offer covers everything from marketing strategy and brand development to customer analytics, audience measurement, data management, media optimisation and more. The new REACH website is a good place to go to view the breadth of what’s available.

The company already supplies the audience-measurement solution for the out-of-home industry in New Zealand, having developed the tech system (Calibre), blending mobile location data with traffic counts, purchasing data and segmentation variables.

Essentially, REACH is now a one-stop shop for all marketing needs, filling a gap in the industry with easy packages designed for local business and focused on bang for buck. The thumbprint in their new logo signifies the ‘understanding of humans’ that’s at the core of what REACH provides — hence the new slogan: ‘We get humans, we do marketing’.

REACH has moved to a new building with an industrial aesthetic in the heart of Auckland’s CBD, and set up a co-working space that’s a dedicated zone for freelancers in the marketing community. Struan ’s also very open to working with others if it’ll assist those in need.

“It’s so exciting, and I get quite passionate when I start talking about the SME market in New Zealand because it has been a pretty tough road for SMES across this Covid patch,” he says. “As a sector in New Zealand, they’ve been neglected. As a culture, we tend to celebrate the big, while ignoring the small businesses that really are the backbone of New Zealand’s economy.”

Struan has recognised the gap in marketing capability and resources for SMES, and with REACH evolving into a full-monty marketing company, alongside their larger customers, SMES now have access to the support many have been crying out for.

For more information, visit reach.nz.

“I get quite passionate when I start talking about the SME market in New Zealand.” Struan Abernethy