Strengthen the brand

Over the past few weeks the staff of the Sales & Marketing Department has been frantically revising the sales and advertising materials to adapt them to match the new CI. Together with the agency an advertising campaign was developed, in which handwriting takes on the central role rather than the product. ?Handwriting is something very individual and we have developed the appropriate writing instrument for each individual style of writing,? added Klaus Broghammer, who has been working at Schneider for 27 years and who has been responsible for the Promotional Products Sales division for the past eleven years. The aim to reinforce the Schneider brand is the result of a long-term strategic alignment by the company, which is active in three business areas: 65% of the turnover is achieved via retail, 25% via promotional products. The private label/OEM sector (currently 10%) is increasingly losing significance. ?Particularly over the past few years we have noticed that one can cope better with crisis situations with a stronger brand,? commented Gro?. The turnover only dropped by 3% in 2009 ? an exceptionally good result, when one considers the overall economic situation. And according to Broghammer, one also profits from the brand recognition on the promotional products market: ?Our customers stayed loyal to us in the crisis year 2009. The firms that implement our writing instruments as promotional messengers are mostly medium-sized companies. As such the volumes of the individual orders are not that high, but on the other hand we do have a broad customer base that is resistant to crises.? We exclusively sell our products via promotional products distributors on the promotional products market. The export rate is high: Around 100 countries rely on the renowned Schneider quality, almost two thirds of the turnover is achieved abroad.

?The refill with a clean slate?

That was not foreseeable in 1938 when Christian Schneider founded the company. Originally Schneider started off as a manufacturer of screws and turned parts, but it repositioned itself after the war. ?My grandfather saw that the American GIs used ballpoints to write with. Up until then they were more or less unheard of in Germany,? commented Christian Schneider. ?That gave him the idea to manufacture refills. He invested a lot of energy in the further development of smear-free ballpoint refills.? The breakthrough for the company came in 1950 when it was able to offer exchangeable refills and plastic ballpoints for the first time. Schneider evolved into the European pioneer for the development and production of writing instrument refills. The product was sold as the ?good Schneider refill with the clean slate?. Up until this very day the production of quality refills is one of the company?s special hallmarks. Exclusively quality refills with a long service life and a writing capacity of at least 1,500 m are implemented in the promotional products sector. The Visco-Glide? technology that was launched onto the market in 2005 and which unites the advantages of ballpoints and gel rollers is revolutionary. It ensures a particularly smooth writing feeling, but it has a similar service life to that of a ballpoint refill. Almost all ballpoint models from the promotion collection can also be optionally equipped with the ViscoGlide? refills ?Slider 755? and ?757?.