Innovative Marketing and Case Studies

PIONEERING, INNOVATIVE MARKETING
David Ganz's marketing has often been innovative and disruptive, transforming obsolete and traditional business models to efficient sales platforms. This is evident throughout David's career from Vice President Marketing, Sotheby's, to Vice President Marketing, Coach, to Founder/CEO of his marketing agency Relationship1. Here are a few notable case studies:

SOTHEBY'S
Next Month At Sotheby's (NMAS) is one of the best examples of David Ganz as both an "innovator", "disrupter" and "entrepreneurial manager." Upon hire, David's primary responsibility was to "fix" Sotheby's subscription's so that subscribers would receive their monthly book, magazine or periodical on time and well in advance of the auction to which they had subscribed. Within 18 months David had fixed all of these problems by hygiene and segmenting an inhouse relational database; establishing customer service standards; setting new rules for fulfillment; hiring, firing and reorganizing the subscription department; contracting with new outside letter-shops and mail delivery services; and establishing strong, cross-divisional and cross-departmental relationships within Sotheby's.

The next challenge was how to scale the business given the enormous new wealth being created world-wide during the 1980's. David understood that for the nouveau riche, Sotheby's auctions were intimidating- they required an understanding of one's own individual collecting interests; the auction terminology and rules were foreign; and art as a financial investment was an esoteric, remote marketplace. Over the course of a year NMAS permitted the nouveau riche in the comfort of their own homes and at their own pace to peruse 12 catalogs or books covering the diversity of Sotheby's most notable auctions. They could familiarize themselves with the auction categories, develop their own collecting interests, and educate themselves as to the auction process and art as a financial investment.

Critical to the success of NMAS was obtaining the postal address of consumer prospects from around the world. David also understood that affluence characteristics like net worth and income alone would NOT meet the economic threshold for a viable new customer acquisition rate. That breakthrough enabled David to pioneer a list exchange and/or rental with other cultural and luxury brands having an affinity with Sotheby's auctions. He was then able to solicit pre-qualified prospects worldwide through various data analytics and statistical modeling to subscribe successfully to a direct mail solicitation of $250 per year ($759 in 2024 dollars) for one Sotheby's periodical per month. From a modeled prospect database NMAS generated double digit conversion rates for new customer acquisition and transformed Subscriptions from a $3M expense to an $11M net profit center within one year.

David then piggybacked quarterly seminars led by art experts to further the education of these new customers. Many of these quarterly seminars were hosted at Sotheby's headquarters or some of the better restaurants in Manhattan at that time (e.g. Café des Artistes, JoJo's, La Caravelle and Petaluma). David then matched the NMAS subscribers to the bidder and buyer databases respectively. To the shock of executive management, approximately 60% of all new bidders in the auction room and 35% of all new buyers came from NMAS. A program that cost less than $1-Million was generating sales of approximately $350-Million and like a waterfall was spilling additional revenue to Sotheby's International Realty and Sotheby's Financial Services. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA now part of the Association of National Advertisers) gave NMAS it's highest award, The Diamond Echo, honoring NMAS as the best campaign amongst all industries and all media. Together with the Golden Mailbox (best direct mail campaign in a given year) and two other Gold Echo awards, David joined an elite group of marketers to have received all of the top direct marketing honors in the United States.

David then expanded upon his success with Next Month At Sotheby's to develop other seasonal books and periodicals tied to Sotheby's auction schedule. That success led to the development of posters, fashion merchandise, collectibles, and objects d'art. David had built a multi-million-dollar profit center by combining database analytics, product development and merchandise licensing with retail and DTC targeted marketing.

SKILLS: Direct Marketing; Relational Database and Data Analytics; New Business Development; New Product Creation; P&L Forecasting; Cross-Matrix Team Building

COACH
As Vice President Marketing at Coach, David's challenge was how to most efficiently leverage his marketing budget to grow this omni-channel, vertically-integrated, fashion brand including full price stores, outlet stores, direct-to-the-consumer (DTC), catalog sales and wholesale. He was able to generate maximum ROI from catalog and direct mail (later coupled with email) through several database driven techniques. The first technique was to establish at the block level Radial Trading Area boundaries (RTA) around Coach brick-and-mortar full-priced stores and then to rank blocks within those RTA's from highest to lowest propensity to purchase. The second technique was to create new, modeled segmentation within the Coach customer database consisting of both in-RTA and outside-RTA customers further segmented by retail buyers versus DTC buyers. The third technique was to rank customers by multivariate regression modeling as to their propensity to respond. The fourth technique was to create an efficient lead and prospect customer database through exchange/rental of affinity related fashion brands. The fifth technique was to accelerate highly efficient retail store expansion by reverse engineering from the DTC database and identifying the best new store locations. The result of all of these efforts was to maintain double-digit net conversion rates from existing DTC customers; net-acquisition rates of 2%+ for new DTC customer acquisition; lift brick-and-mortar store traffic by 10%+ from the same direct mail marketing spend; and all while rapidly rolling out new full-price and outlet brick-and-mortar retail stores. Last but not least David was able to demonstrate to wholesalers that Coach's direct marketing efforts were NOT cannibalizing department store and mall sales but driving incremental traffic and sales to those wholesalers by permitting them to match internally Coach's in-home mail dates and sample customer mail files.

SKILLS: Retail Store Mapping · Multi-channel Campaign Management · Multivariate Regression Modeling · Prospecting · Catalog Marketing

SKECHERS
David Ganz also managed multi-channel integrated marketing in behalf of another fashion brand at Relationship1, the marketing agency he founded. Most challenging in this case study was how to drive retail store traffic in the midst of the Covid pandemic while leveraging the ROI across all channels. In 2020 and 2021 stores were being shuttered and then reopened and then shuttered again across the USA due to the pandemic. For Skechers this mass market brand, as opposed to the Coach luxury brand, the key was to create integrated campaigns generating maximum multi-media impressions with statistically significant measurements of attribution. This included the newer mix of services such as social media (earned, paid, owned) combined with influencer marketing coordinated on top of email, direct mail (store radial trading area analysis-RTA and non-RTA) and statistically significant radio and television testing. The goal was to keep the stores open and profitable during the pandemic when many competitors were closed. Relationship1 measured the efficacy and efficiency of each of these techniques in all channels. Once the height of the pandemic passed and all of the brick-and-mortar stores were able to remain open and profitable, then direct mail was discontinued and all of the other media rolled out in a more efficient model. The combination of heavy broadcast advertising together with organic and owned social media, all tied together by coordinated influencers (Tony Romo and Snoop Dog) was able to generate the highest ROI and led to significant post-pandemic YOY revenue increases.

SKILLS: Social Media; Influencer Marketing; Integrated Marketing; A/B Test and Control; Google Analytics

FOOD N VINE and A VINE LIFE
FOOD N VINE and A VINE LIFE are experiential marketing agencies David Ganz founded in behalf of Relationship1's travel, food, wine and spirit clients. Food N Vine conducts themed, paired dining and travel related experiences in behalf of international and national brands; Fortune 500 companies; fundraisers; charities; and private individuals. Food N Vine transports its guests to other worlds, while promoting restaurants, chefs, pop-ups, wineries and distilleries. A Vine Life is the marketing arm of Food N Vine growing awareness, branding and engagement through integrated marketing to fill up restaurants, banquet halls and pop-up venues on "quiet" Wednesday and Thursday nights.

While successful, the challenge became how to prevent that business from collapsing due to closure of all restaurants and related venues due to the Covid pandemic. David's clients still clamored for a celebration to bring them out of their Covid isolation and to unite them once again with others in a festive atmosphere. Using his marketing skills including promotion, database, circulation, prospecting, email marketing, social media, and public relations, David created virtual online tastings via Zoom. The other skills were logistical- how to get everyone tasting the same vintage of the same wine while eating paired dishes simultaneously. The solution was to use the invitees zip code and postal code to email them links to retailers selling the selected wines in their geographic radius along with a themed menu for them to choose the dishes they wished to prepare.

In March of 2021 David organized a Rioja themed paired dinner attended by over 500 people from around the world dining online at the same time (7:30PM in New York and 2:30AM for example in in Zurich and Rome). All guests voted on the best wine and meal of the night, received personalized merchandise and vouchers good for future purchases, events and travel. In addition, David arranged for 3rd parties to underwrite the event and generate affiliate advertising revenue.

SKILLS: Sales and Event Promotion · Email Marketing · Online Marketing · Customer Service Management · Prospecting

CORPORATE B2B and B2C PROMOTIONS (CIT Group and Tourneau)
David's innovative marketing also included B2B marketing for finance and luxury brands that had historically been anathema to promotional marketing. Relationship1 was able to transform these luxury brands, including high-end watch, jewelry and fashion brands to embrace customer, lead and prospect marketing from a segmented, modeled relational database. For the financial industry the change was to get them to adopt out-of-the-box promotion and public relations.

For the CIT Group, an asset-based lender (finance industry) the challenge was how to break into a category of capital lending dominated by older and bigger competitors. David help create the "3M's of Baseball" in coordination with Major League Baseball to solve this challenge. A faux-wood box containing 3 holders for baseballs was mailed to 2,000 Chief Financial Officers of heavy industrial Fortune 1,000 corporations. The box contained one baseball signed by Stan Musial along with an invitation to receive two additional baseballs signed by Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. Upon scheduling an appointment to meet with the CIT salesperson the CFO was mailed the baseball signed by Mickey Mantle and when they arrived for their sales meeting the baseball signed by Willie Mays. The 2K dimensional piece solicitation generated over 1,000 sales appointments and close to $200M in sales for CIT group including entrée to long coveted accounts. It revolutionized their approach to cold calling for new customers, moving them to qualified lead generation coupled with innovative offers.

For Tourneau (at the time the world's largest watch retailer; since acquired by Bucherer) David Ganz created one B2B campaign and three B2C integrated campaigns to meet the challenge of efficient multi-channel growth (corporate sales; full price retail; DTC; and pre-certified). For Tourneau's corporate watch division David created a watch strap promotion from the thousands of unused watch straps Tourneau had in inventory. David tested a 2,000-piece dimensional mailing with two watch straps attached to a faux luxury watch. The mailing offered pre-qualified executives a free no-strings Swiss watch if they scheduled an appointment to meet with Tourneau's corporate salesperson. The mailing generated a 78% lead generation rate and a 4.8% conversion rate.

For B2C David created a Birthday Card program to drive traffic to retail stores using sales promotion to capture the customer's birth month. The customer was mailed a Birthday Card thanking them for their patronage by offering a free inexpensive gift when they visited a store. The Birthday Card program peaked with a 12% YOY lift in traffic and a net 2.1% conversion rate. The Birthday Card was then tied into a three-tiered VIP Loyalty Program- (1) Diamond; (2) Platinum; and (3) Gold based upon RFM criteria. Keeping expense to a minimum David curated existing benefits under a promotional umbrella. Now previously hidden benefits like free battery replacement, watch cleaning, appraisal, gift wrapping and personalization, and concierge services would elevate customer upgrade of frequency and average dollar purchase.

Last but not least was to market pre-certified watches, The first and most important step was to solicit customers in the acquisition, consignment or trade-in of their previously purchased timepieces before marketing the watches subsequent resale. In addition to creating another channel of revenue, the pre-certified marketing reactivated lapsed or expired customers, aided customer retention and opened up wider audiences for purchase.

SKILLS: Relational Database and Data Analysis · Sales and Event Promotion · Direct Marketing · Loyalty Programs · Customer Relationship Management (CRM)