Background
Lonergan Corporate Gifts Ltd. is a Kildare-based rewards and recognition company that has been in business since 1998. In this time it has grown with its clients delivering bespoke corporate gift solutions to a host of blue chip organisations including Colliers, Savilles and Google. The business is comprised of two core segments – reward and recognition for employees and corporate gifting for clients. The experience of Louise Lonergan, CEO, and her team allows clients to use rewards and gifts to nurture staff wellbeing and workplace satisfaction as well as growing business connections through their end-to-end corporate gifting solutions.
Challenge
The Covid pandemic caused serious disruption to many markets, not least to corporate gifting. As many of the avenues traditionally associated with rewarding employees or loyal clients were suddenly removed, the role of corporate gifting was repositioned. Lonergan Corporate Gifts (LCG) was eager to carry out marketplace research to examine where the market had moved to, how the role of corporate gifting was changing for its client companies and how the impact of technology was changing the landscape amongst competitors. From an internal point of view LCG also wanted to examine how best to structure its own business model to keep pace with the changing marketplace.
Solution
An initial workshop engagement uncovered many core questions in relation to the external market – the size of the total market available, how competitors were positioning themselves through the use of language, value propositions and technology, and where LCG should best position itself as the market incumbent to maximise its own value propositions of reliable and personalised product offering. Throughout the course of the project these questions were examined by RIKON and it was found that the market could largely be broken into four categories with technology playing a varying role in each category. There was work done on positioning LCG within this spectrum to clarify its own core value propositions and by doing so creating clarity around matching these core offerings with the correct target markets. The digital offering of the company was also assessed to ensure that the online strategy was also in line with the positioning of the company, while maximising internal resources toward the correct channels.
Testimonial
‘The team at RIKON took time to understand the challenges the company was facing and their insights into the trends and competitors in my sector was very informative. I found the process provided me with a chance to step back and evaluate my business.’
Louise Lonergan, CEO, Lonergan Corporate Gifts Ltd.