OREANDA-NEWS. December 25, 2012. Ricoh, a global technology company specializing in office imaging equipment, production print solutions, document management systems and IT services, today announced that it has received top honors from the Association of Marketing and Communications Professionals through its annual MarCom Awards competition. Ricoh is a Platinum Award winner for its Graph Expo booth design, and is a Gold Award winner for its drupa 2012 Public Relations program.

These awards come quickly on the heels of the launch of Ricoh’s new brand tagline, imagine.change., and the Print and Beyond theme, which embodies the company’s services-led focus on helping customers extend business opportunities far beyond traditional printed output to various digital and other mediums.

“As a global company we strive to communicate effectively with our customers around the world developing go-to-market strategies that help our customers grow their businesses beyond traditional print services. This means that we must share a clear story to our customers, no matter where in the world they do business and illustrate to them that Ricoh is the right partner to help them move to the next-generation of services,” said Yasuhiko Hosoe, Associate Director and Deputy General Manager, Ricoh Production Printing Business Group, Ricoh Company, Ltd. “These awards are further proof that our Print and Beyond messages are resonating through our global PR, analyst relations, social media and marketing efforts.”

The MarCom Awards received more than 6,000 entries this year from corporate marketing and communication departments, advertising agencies, PR firms, design shops, production companies and freelancers. Winners were selected from more than 200 categories in six forms of media and communication efforts: marketing, publications, marketing/promotion, public service/pro bono, creativity and electronic/interactive.

For its Platinum Award win, Ricoh presented its booth design from the annual Graph Expo 2012 event, the largest graphic arts conference and exhibit in North America. Building off of the new corporate tagline, imagine.change., the team illustrated how Ricoh helps companies transform the way they work by harnessing the collective imagination of their employees, while balancing that with a comfortable booth experience wherein print professionals could relate to how applications and print samples could be developed. To do this, the team created a “Main Street” theme that included a collection of real-world applications of printing software and hardware solutions. This new concept delivered stronger traffic numbers than ever before, as well as a 13 percent increase in qualified leads from the show. The solutions showcased at Graph Expo were found at the intersection of Imagine Street and Change Avenue, and showcased for customers the Print and Beyond manifesto, bringing together both the Ricoh corporate messaging as well as the positioning for the company within the print industry.

For the Gold Award win, Ricoh developed a cohesive, integrated social media and public relations campaign that leveraged the once-every-four-years global printing event: drupa. This strategic campaign, aimed to help Ricoh stand out far beyond the competition – most of which have significantly larger marketing budgets – included a live, pre-drupa virtual media and analyst video press conference, press releases, social media activity leading up to, during and post show, and a tweet chat dubbed #printchat post-show to keep the conversation going. These strategic activities, aimed to promote Ricoh’s new themes, services and industry leadership, resulted in a 180 percent increase in re-tweets, a 100 percent increase in new followers year over year, nearly 50 attendees to the pre-show video conference and consistent, global media coverage resulting from Ricoh’s news at drupa.