Citrin Cooperman is a fast-growing, creative, and entrepreneurial accounting firm in the northeast. The accounting profession had been consolidating nationwide, leaving the Big 4, then perhaps 100 second-tier, then countless very small firms. CC was just below the second tier and growing fast by acquisitions.
They needed to build awareness in Philadelphia to break into the market and support their new office. Marketing to middle-market business owners and CFOs, we selected print ads in the local business journal and talk-radio commercials.
Our message is that they’re not merely accountants and CPAs, they’re entrepreneurial business consultants. We really get inside our clients’ businesses and can help them grow and prosper. We go the extra mile to help businesses make more money. We wrote a “Whatever it takes” tag line to convey the lengths they truly go to help their clients.
Working closely with the savvy marketing director, Tracey Segarra, we built the campaign around a series of the firm’s outrageous client-service stories, showing the remarkable lengths Citrin Cooperman professionals go to serve their clients. With a limited budget, we needed to have the ads jump off the page, and actually used 3D images of objects that seemed to be sitting on top of the ads, including a slab of raw meat, fish, and a rat. Very powerful.
A couple of the remarkable stories we uncovered included:
“Accountants in grocery store freezer/meat locker, counting massive slabs of beef.”
It was hard keeping our hands warm while holding the clipboard. Wearing big heavy coats, our hands were still too cold to write what you’re counting, or sticking to the frosty metal spring-clips. Dodging meat things hanging on big ceiling hooks or sitting on huge metal racks. This is a good visual — it’s Philadelphia, remember “Rocky” training in a meat locker, hitting big slabs/sides of beef? We were the accountants in there with the butchers in their bloody white coats.
“Managing Partner hanging upside down in a garbage chute.”
Joel Cooperman represented a client that was looking to buy a patent that cleaned industrial garbage chutes. Typically, to clean the clog, stink, and rats out of them you had to flush an enormous amount of water through the chute, which flooded the buildings’ basements. There was a new technology that allegedly scrubbed the chute back to shiny stainless steel with much less water.
Our client owned a cleaning and air duct company and was looking for a related business. Of course we wouldn’t recommend that our client buy the patent if it didn’t work, so Joel went to investigate the process.
To ensure that it worked, the company strapped Joel, a pretty big guy, into a harness in a filthy building in Hackensack, NJ, and lowered/crammed him down, headfirst, into the chute with a flashlight. Joel hoped that there weren’t rats still climbing around inside there or rancid garbage still clinging to the walls. Fortunately, it worked, and they recommended that the client buy the technology, which they did, and made a lot of money on it.
Fishman Marketing Testimonial:
Ross Fishman is a truly visionary marketing consultant who instinctively knows how to help professional service firms differentiate themselves in unique and wonderful ways. His fearless approach helped my accounting firm put a new service offering on the map – blazing a trail for us in a crowded marketplace. Simply put, Ross rocks!
– Tracey Segarra, Marketing Director, Citrin Cooperman & Company
