Tool Box
Issue No. 10 - April/May 2003
Polishing the Corporate Image
What business are you in? It's surprising how often the answer changes, but Bridgehead Australia has been very consistent since its start in 1985. This is remarkable, because Bridgehead is in the business of producing business-to-business promotional material, a field very heavily impacted by IT during the past 20 years.
"Understanding of how corporations need to get their story across to trading partners and salespersons has remained the same-it's the technology that's different," says Dale Turner, who handles Bridgehead's business development.
"The business has progressed from companies using 'this thing with a light bulb in it', projecting slides, to productions delivered on DVD, CD-ROM and hard drives."
Bridgehead builds PowerPoint presentations-"at the low end"- to MacroMedia Director presentations using client-supplied digital resources, offering IP value such as logo design and Internet delivery as options. But during the latter half of the 90s, the less spectacular work of crunching thousands of digital image files has lifted the company to national prominence.
Ironically, as Dale tells it, this success stemmed from action taken to fix a 'mistake'. In 1995, persuaded by an excellent vendor, Bridgehead became the proud owner of a high-resolution image scanner. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that the expensive unit wasn't viable for its intended use. Intense competition reduced traffic and the machine simply couldn't perform as claimed.
As he worked to drum up business for his potential white elephant, Dale analysed his market and made a critical observation.
"What I learned was that often, the client corporations couldn't find their expensive photographic images and fell back on poor reproductions. They often prostituted their company image and weren't paying attention to the branding quality."
He hit upon the idea of creating Media Library, an on-line storage system for archiving promotional media asse...
