Case Study

Brief: Increasing market awareness, generating sales appointments

Company: Leeds Metropolitan University has been running the Knowledge Transfer Partnership and it preceding programmes for … years and in that time has helped companies in a wide range of industries to develop new products, enter new markets, and generally increase business. LMU has experience in numerous fields including Marketing, Engineering and Construction. With qualified graduates and academic support on hand companies benefit from the knowledge base at LMU and can apply research and training to real world industry. The partnership is also funded at 67-75% of costs by the Department of Trade and Industry, ensuring an affordable and effective partnership.

Industry: Education

Problem: The Knowledge Transfer Partnership provides benefits to a wide range of businesses but there can be limited awareness of the scheme throughout these diverse industries. Raising awareness of the scheme, and overcoming scepticism about this being too good to be true were challenges that needed to be addressed.

Solution: In order to produce useful results from this campaign is was important to target companies within industries where LMU has the experience and resources to provide significant support. The nature of the Partnership, and goodwill between academic institutions meant that opportunities could be shared with other universities, but Blueberry wanted to avoid this as the objective of the campaign was to benefit LMU specifically. This meant a sound understanding of which industries were more appropriate as well as targeting the call to focus on specific projects that suited the skills of LMU’s graduates and academic staff.

Key decision makers were identified depending on the size and structure of the company. While a range of benefits were presented to each contact it was necessary to use a different focus for each one. For example MDs tend to respond better to the business development and consultancy aspect of the partnerships, HR Managers appreciate qualified graduates working for them while remaining employees of the university, and financial directors are interested in the 67% government subsidy allowing them to take on a full time employee and a consultant for one third of the normal cost.

Two main objections were that the company didn’t have a suitable project that they could work on, or that the paperwork required to secure funding would be too difficult or time consuming to complete. Fortunately we were offering an appointment with an advisor to help with both of these, but in order to secure that appointment it was necessary to be able to provide advice over the phone, and help generate some ideas of how the partnership would fit in to their company’s development plans. Therefore an understanding of past KTP projects and their applications was essential, and the results reflected this.

Results: Results above expectations were possible due to Blueberry’s broad understanding of KTP and genuine belief in the benefits of the programme. Correctly targeting the most relevant companies and maintaining a comprehensive system of reporting and follow up were key factors in producing results in this campaign. By emailing information out to companies regarding the scheme great awareness was created still bearing fruits longer after the campaign has ended.