Club Med: a 40% increase in web-generated sales

MONTREAL, February 17, 2010 — In the past year, Club Med North America (Canada, United States) has seen its web-generated sales jump by 40%. Plus its “click to book” ratio (the proportion of Internet users who buy a trip after having clicked on a link in an email) is 2.5 times higher than it used to be.

Behind this performance is Pheromone, which has been guiding Club Med in optimizing its relationship marketing for the past year. The agency’s implementation of a new customer relationship management system for Club Med North America’s contacts and prospects allows one of the largest brands in global tourism to communicate more effectively with its consumers and travel agents across the continent.

“Pheromone’s advice and guidance has allowed us to make the communication cycle with our customers more reliable,” says Jean Kerboul, director of Internet sales and marketing, North America, Club Med. “Strengthening our relationships with customers has already generated impressive sales results.”

Based on this success, Pheromone is currently building a platform that will reinforce the connections between Club Med and travel agents. This platform will be equipped with distance learning modules, new communication tools and more to support communication targeted to the market (United States, Canada).

The agency obtained the Club Med account for North America (Canada, United States) in the fall of 2008 in partnership with Winn Marketing.

“Our business relationship with Club Med reinforces our positioning in the tourism sector and expands our expertise in North America,” says Philippe Le Roux, president of Pheromone. “It also illustrates the importance of optimizing relationships between a brand, its players and its customers on the Internet.”

Club Med is constantly reinventing the alchemy of happiness. Today, that happiness is synonymous with enjoying elegance and luxury together. For more information visit : www.clubmed.com

Pheromone is an agency that helps organizations redefine their business model and marketing strategy around consumers and their interactions. Since it was founded in 1994, it has seen success after success for its customers (VIA Rail, RDS, ARTV, SÉPAQ, and others) and has put together a team of 60 experts whose passion is rivalled only by their professional maturity and experience. Website : www.pheromone.ca

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Information ::

Linda Lévesque
Communications, Phéromone
Tél : 514 393-3178 / 1 877 393-3178 ; cellulaire : 514 242-8909
llevesque@lcom.qc.ca

Smartphones: Blackberry and iPhone dominate
the Quebec market

Quebec market is essentially concentrated on three technology platforms: recent Blackberry models from RIM that support 3G, with 39% of the market, Apple’s iPhone, with 35% of the market, and smartphones based on the Google’s Android system, with 26%. The study shows that the owners of these smartphones use them overwhelmingly to access the web (69%) and for social networking (53%).

Over 11% of Quebeckers already have a smartphone, less than two years since the launch of the first iPhone in Canada. This rapid adoption is prompting more and more companies to invest to reach consumers in these new mobile interactive spaces. “Companies that are developing applications exclusively for the iPhone are reaching only 35% of their target market; the Blackberry and the Google Android represent the other 65%,” Philippe Le Roux, president of Pheromone, said. “We think it’s important to have an objective vision of the market to support our customers’ strategic decisions, which is why we commissioned the study.

Pheromone had market research firm MBA Recherche ask questions from March 23 to 25 as part of an OmniMax poll conducted with 1000 Quebec Internet users twice a month. Their answers showed the current place smartphones occupy as well as the behaviour of their owners.

The study revealed that 4.3% of respondents have Blackberry 3G phones, 4% have iPhones and 2.9% have 3G phones with the Android operating system. When asked about their use of these devices, slightly more than two thirds of respondents revealed that they use them to access the web. Of the smartphone owners interviewed, 53% use them for social networking applications such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. More than half of them (58%) do so daily.

“Quebeckers have adopted smartphones even faster than they adopted the Internet, which took a number of years before exceeding the 10% penetration mark,” Philippe Le Roux said. “Smartphones with GPS functionality that enable geopositioning are becoming a powerful marketing tool for brands to reach consumers anywhere, at any time, including when they are shopping.”

Pheromone (pheromone.ca/en) is a Montreal-based agency that helps organizations redefine their business models and marketing strategies around consumers’ interactions. For the past 15 years, it has been amassing successes for its national and international clients and has a team of 70 experts whose passion and innovation are equalled by their professional maturity and experience.

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Information ::

Linda Lévesque
Communications, Phéromone
Tél : 514 393-3178 / 1 877 393-3178 ; cellulaire : 514 242-8909
llevesque@lcom.qc.ca

David Rollert joins Pheromone

Montreal, March 4, 2010 – With nearly 30 years of experience in managing creative and design teams in New York and Boston, David Rollert has joined Pheromone, the interactions agency as its vice president of interactive design. He will be heading up the agency’s key interactive sector that includes teams involved in concept development, design, creation, user experience, prototyping and user research.
Since the 1980s, David has lent his talent for building and managing design, creation and innovation teams to a number of major American companies such as Time Warner (then Time Inc.), Citibank, AT&T, Ziff Davis and Fidelity Management. He also spent many years in agencies, in particular at Digitas, where he managed the creative group and worked on American Express, Delta, Fedex, General Motors and Victoria’s Secret accounts.
“I love the creative energy in Montreal, and the vision of Pheromone’s leaders really resonated with me,” David Rollert says. “An agency that puts interactions at the core of its mission and that has built such a talented team has definite appeal. My mission has always been to create services with a user experience that exceeds expectations, and that’s one of the keys of Pheromone’s mission.”
“David Rollert’s joining Pheromone is an opportunity for us to move one step further in redefining the model of the marketing agency 2.0,” Philippe le Roux, president of Pheromone, says.
Pheromone is a Montreal-based agency that helps organizations redefine their business models and marketing strategies around consumers and their interactions. Since its foundation in 1994, it has amassed successes for its national and international customers and has attracted a team of 60 experts whose passion is surpassed only by their professional maturity and experience.

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Information:
Linda Lévesque
Communications, Pheromone
Tel.: 514 393-3178/1 877 393-3178; cell: 514 242-8909
llevesque@lcom.qc.ca

Two internationally renowned web experts

Montreal, October 22, 2009 – Karl Dubost and Olivier Théreaux, who spent a number of years working together in Japan for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), recently joined the web team at Pheromone (formerly VDL2). They will reinforce the web technology and culture expertise of the agency, which is already recognized as a Quebec leader in the field.
“I want to show that respecting web standards and its technological foundations is not a limitation, but rather reinforces the marketing efficacy, user experience and human dimension of the interactive space,” says Karl Dubost, who has taken on the management of Pheromone’s development team.
Olivier Théreaux is in charge of the agency’s product architecture. “Pheromone and I share a desire to create a more intelligent, collaborative and relevant web,” he says.
“The arrival of Karl and Olivier, whose talent is recognized throughout the international web community, confirms the aptness of Pheromone defining new marketing and agency models, just when the traditional model is being questioned every day,” says Yves Lapierre, vice president of finance and human resources. “They will also contribute to the new positioning of Pheromone, which no longer recognizes frontiers between interactive platforms or geographical frontiers.”
The W3C, where Karl and Olivier worked for almost ten years, was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, to supervise the development of norms and standards that ensure the compatibility of web technologies and usages.
Karl Dubost got involved in the web’s evolution in 1991, in the university context and in private enterprise. In 2000, he was recruited in France by the W3C as a conformance manager to organize quality assurance activities from start to finish: he put in place a validation process for web standards, with a lateral view of all technologies. In 2005, he joined the W3C’s Japanese team at Keio University. He then became an evangelist for W3C standards, publishing articles and documents, blogging for the organization, participating in conferences, conducting training, etc. He was a bridge between moderating discussions internally and managing conversations in the web ecosystem. In 2007, he took part in implementing a working group that defined the HTML5 standard, a group made up of over 400 players in the industry worldwide.
Olivier Théreaux, an engineer who graduated from the École Centrale Paris, joined the W3C in Japan in 2000. He quickly became a member of the quality assurance department. From 2004 to 2009, he was in charge of the W3C’s validation tools. Developed in open source, these services are used every day by millions of developers and designers.
In 2004, Olivier Théreaux founded the international network Art Beat in Japan, and its multilingual web sites today offer a primary source of information on the art and design scene from Tokyo to New York.

Céline Semaan returns to Montreal and joins Pheromone

Montreal, December 10, 2009 – Céline Semaan, internationally renowned interactive designer for both web and mobile platforms, recently left New York to return to Montreal and join Pheromone.
“I’ve always wanted to design interactive spaces that inspire people with their utility and simplicity,” Céline Semaan says. “At Pheromone, I’m discovering an agency with a mission to create these interactive spaces and one that puts the user experience at the heart of its efforts.”
In New York, Céline Semaan worked with a team of interactive designers from the agency HUGE. Using a rigorous user-centred methodology, she worked on many major international projects, including the redesign of the Reuters website, British Airways’ OpenSkies, Nutrisystem, iVillage.com, Annarbor.com and Startcooking.com.
In just a few years, she has participated in many media art exhibitions and video installations, earning her international recognition. Her Teevx.com project won the first prize for a co-production at the Banff New Media Institute in 2006, was selected for MIPTV in Cannes and was chosen as a finalist in the category New IPTV concepts for the BBC.
Céline Semaan holds a bachelor’s degree in multimedia communication from the Université du Québec à Montréal, with a minor in intermedia and cyber arts from Concordia University. She started her career in digital video and has worked with the Vidéographe team in Montreal, co-directed videos for American rapper Spank Rock and the British group Coldcut (on the British label Ninja Tune) and taught Linux interfaces in digital image at StudioXX in Montreal.

Pheromone trains 17 hospital professionals

Montreal, December 3, 2009 – Pheromone recently received a mandate from Montreal’s three university health centres (CHU) to train members of its communication staff in best practices for Web 2.0 conversations.
Seventeen CHU professionals got the chance to learn about blogs, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and best practices for establishing effective social media communication strategies for the construction of their new facilities. They also went through exercises on listening to digital conversations about Montreal hospitals and related issues. After the training, the communications professionals were able to work hands-on in the ecosystem of social media.
“In the new world of marketing, an agency’s role is to guide its customers in conversations,” says Philippe Colling, Pheromone’s director of relationship marketing and social media. “This training provides marketing and communications managers a framework they can work with to increase their autonomy.”
This initiative is the result of concerted efforts on the part of the communications directorates of the CHU and the office of the Executive Director of the modernization of Montreal’s university health centres. A number of organizations have already benefited from this one-day course (which Pheromone adapts to the needs of each customer), including the organizing committee for the 375th anniversary of Trois-Rivières, television station ARTV and Tourisme Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean.
Find out more about the training (french only)

VDL2 becomes Pheromone

Montreal, August 27, 2009 – VDL2, founded 15 years ago by Internet pioneers and one of the 15 most influential advertising agencies in Quebec, is continuing its evolution with its new identity Pheromone, the interaction agency. This new positioning was unveiled during the World Film Festival, an event the agency sponsors.
Why an interaction agency?
Consumers have had it with one-way, institutional communication. They want a dialogue with organizations and their brands. At the same time, social networks, web 2.0, SMS, virtual worlds, smartphones and other interactive spaces are turning the world of marketing and communications on its head. To meet these challenges, VDL2 has become Pheromone, an interaction agency that helps customers harness the power of conversations and networks.
An Internet strategy pioneer recognized for the many successful initiatives of its customers (Via Rail, RDS, ARTV, Sépaq and others), Pheromone has extended its interactivity expertise to brand strategy and creation, advancing its vision of a society that revolves increasingly around human interactions, to offers its customers a full range of services to take advantage of this new world.
Why Pheromone?
Pheromones are the oldest and most subtle form of communication among living beings, including humans. Scientists have identified different families of pheromones, some of which act as a sort of biological GPS, some of which act as alert systems and others that influence attraction and seduction. All of them are indispensable to the functioning of a community. Similarly, Pheromone delivers different families of services to tackle the business and marketing challenges confronting businesses of today and tomorrow.
Pheromone has a multicultural team of 50 people who work in synergy in over 15 fields. It has honed a dynamic of close collaboration with customers to identify avenues for success, mobilize communities around brands, create spaces for intelligent interaction and inspire emotion, thought and participation.