Client: Farnell

Objectives: Farnell wanted to build its reputation as a leading supplier of embedded products, and asked Napier for ideas. We suggested interviewing leading figures within the microcontroller vendors to generate insight and predictions about the embedded market that could be distributed at embedded world as a book.

Activities: Napier researched the key topics in the embedded industry to create a set of thought-provoking questions, covering topics such as tools, predictions for the future of the embedded market and security.

Napier secured interviews with 7 of the most influential experts at Farnell’s top embedded semiconductor suppliers. The pre-defined questions enabled us to create themes that ran throughout the ‘The Embedded Interviews 2018’ book, which we designed, typeset and reviewed with the interview subjects to ensure that the project further strengthened relationships with Farnell’s suppliers.

The book was printed for the event and proved very popular with the engineers at the show. Napier also generated an eBook version that enabled the content to be used for lead generation. We also realised that the content could be used as articles, and we generated five separate articles, covering the key themes of the interviews, that have been placed widely in key electronics publications.

Results:

In addition to creating some compelling content for the show, we extended the project into a multichannel campaign that improved Farnell’s PR and marketing from awareness to lead generation. The campaign also provided the opportunity for Farnell to strengthen its relationships with seven of the most important suppliers to the business.

The print version is particularly popular. Farnell uses the Embedded Interviews book in a variety of other settings: as display material in their offices, a promotional sales tool, and at other trade shows including electronica.

Two of the articles created from the interviews were in a ‘virtual round table’ style, with the other three written as thought leadership opinion pieces. Within a few weeks of the articles having been completed, they were placed in a range of European countries including Germany, France, Romania, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Romania. More placements will stem from these articles over the coming months.

Farnell was so pleased with the project that they are already considering similar sets of interviews for a range of events, including future embedded world shows.