We get humans, we do marketing

REACH was proud to be profiled in New Zealand Marketing Magazine recently, with our CEO Struan speaking to them about his passion for SMEs and the journey REACH has been on to offer a unique and tailored approach to marketing and media in New Zealand.

When Struan Abernethy took over as Chief Executive Officer of ReachMedia in 2019, the company had built a reputation for bringing together NZ businesses and their perfect customers, a success based on letterbox marketing. In the subsequent almost three years, Abernethy transformed the company by applying a scientific approach to marketing, using data insights to help mostly larger businesses make smarter marketing decisions and close the gap between businesses and buyers.
This year, Abernethy is moving forward based on a passion to help the majority of NZ businesses – the SME sector. He has evolved the company brand to REACH, increased staff with a robust team of marketers and data scientists, to be able to provide a gamut of marketing services, all under one convenient roof and underpinned by a unique drive to understand audiences.
This passion is an honourable pursuit to help small and medium sized New Zealand companies grow and flourish in an area which is often misunderstood, difficult to piece together and underinvested into. This is a move that will provide access to services and tools often perceived as “just for big business”.
REACH specialises in a range of areas, including marketing, data, insights, and branding, that businesses, grafting in this time of Covid, lockdowns and consumer hesitancy, are desperate for. Smaller companies, in particular, often struggle to find the marketing assistance they need to grow or even to keep their businesses afloat. By offering multi-channel solutions, like social media, website builds, print etc., REACH is using powerful insights to help understand customers and the best way to reach them, in the ways they want to be found.
This stems from more than 20 years of working with NZ neighbourhoods. And developing tools for the letterbox channel that can now also be leveraged to inform other marketing channels.
Abernethy has been busy putting together a team of experts that will provide clients with strategies to focus and amplify their marketing activities. The range of solutions on offer covers everything from marketing strategy and brand development to customer analytics, audience measurement, data management, media optimisation and more. The new REACH website is a good place to go to view the breadth of what is available.
The company already supplies the audience measurement solution for the out-of-home industry in New Zealand, having developed the tech system (Calibre), blending mobile location data with traffic counts, purchasing data and segmentation variables.
Basically, REACH is now a one-stop-shop for all marketing needs, filling a gap in the industry with easy packages designed for NZ business and focused on bang for buck. The thumbprint in their new logo signifies the ‘understanding of humans’ that is at the core of what REACH is providing – hence the new slogan: ‘REACH. We get humans, we do marketing’.
REACH have moved to a new, ‘industrial-vibe’ building in the heart of the CBD and have set up a co-working space, with dedicated space for freelancers in the marketing community to utilise, and Abernethy is very open to working with others if that will assist those in need.
“It’s so exciting, and I get quite passionate when I start talking about the SME market in New Zealand,” says Abernethy, “because it has been a pretty tough road for SMEs across this Covid patch. As a sector in New Zealand, they have been neglected. As a culture we tend to celebrate the big, while ignoring the small businesses that are really the backbone of New Zealand’s economy.”
Abernethy has recognised the gap in marketing capability and resource in SME NZ, and with REACH evolving into a full-monty marketing company, alongside their larger customers, smaller businesses now have the support many have been crying out for.