Duhno Marketing won the 5th CCI France Chine investors club startup pitch in front of eighty carefully hand-picked guests comprised of angel investors, private investors, venture capital representatives, and an impressive range of talent from across the French-Chinese business community.
The outcome offers valuable insights for businesses aiming to accelerate their growth, and for marketing teams looking to help their clients expand into new markets and reach new audiences.
On November 27th 2018, four enterprising startups delivered their pitches, hoping to take home the prize; a one-year CCI FRANCE CHINE membership, which brings with it the opportunity to develop and enhance the winning company’s network within the Sino-French business community across Shanghai, Beijing, and South China.
Despite excellent presentations from some worthy opponents, the attendees found the case made by Duhno Marketing to claim victory the most compelling. A range of criteria were used to decide the ultimate victor, including the strength of the overall business plan, company financials, prospects for future growth, and the quality of the presentation itself.
Benoit Raoult founded Duhno Marketing with the goal of helping companies grow by adopting a powerful form of marketing; mascot conversational marketing. Following this approach, Duhno helps companies create uniquely engaging content, assisting them with the requisite skills and technology to grow client companies and make a profound impact among their target customers.
How does Duhno achievethis? By making mascots famous. After studying 526 majorinternational brands focussing on the grocery industry, Duhno found that at least seventeen percent of them had existing mascots. This is a remarkablefigure, and shows that there is already widespread appreciation for the rolemascots can play in marketing.
Of course, just because a mascot exists doesn’t mean it is well known, or being used to its full potential.
In fact, Duhno are able to grow the profile of at least three different kinds of identities (mascots, spokes-characters, and virtual KOL) by creating carefully crafted stories featuring these identities and combining them with excellent conversational abilities, making client brands highly accessible to their audience.
Considering that the human brain is wired to respond to stories, it’s not surprising pitch attendees responded so favorably to Duhno, who themselves have an exciting story to tell about their origins, and their plans for expansion.
The business case suggesting Duhno Marketing will continue to grow is also a strong one. While the Chinese market for illustrated content in 2016 was already impressive at $38 Billion, by 2020 that this will grow to an exciting $76 Billion.
Within a Chinese market receptive to both characters and their stories, Duhno offer their clients services that help them grow based on these strengths.The services are including both one-time services, such as strategic consulting or character and story design, and retainer-based services such as ongoing content creation or digital brand awareness and sales activation.
Indeed, recent developments in China are making clients eager to invest in building their intellectual property and leverage it in their marketing. In 2015, China introduced impressive new safeguards for copyrighted in material. In this new legal context, Duhno’s services appear even more attractive to companies looking to capitalize on the potential of mascots and quality storytelling.
The clear lesson from the event is this; mascots are not only appealing, but combined with creative storytelling that speaks to their audience, they can open up new markets to businesses and increase the value both of their associated businesses and intellectual property.