About Hammock.
Hammock was founded in 1991 as a specialized marketing services company focused exclusively on creating media that companies and organizations use to communicate directly with their customers or members. Hammock has pioneered the use of a wide variety of media formats, approaches and channels (print magazines, websites, online communities, social media, mobile-enabled content, to name a few). For over two decades, the goal of Hammock has consistently been to help our clients create deeper and longer-lasting, mutually-beneficial relationships with customers and members.
As you will learn as you scroll deeper on this page, we believe customers love companies that go beyond selling them products -- they love companies that deliver them value in the form of data, information, knowledge and wisdom related to using those products to achieve or accomplish something personally or professionally. To help companies deliver such value to customers, we provide the strategic, creative, editorial, design, management, sales and technical services necessary to develop and deploy all forms of print and digital media, from magazines to mobile device apps to online communities and social media.
People don't pay attention to marketing that brings attention to itself -- that's filled with hype and promise and sounds like it was created to please a company's CEO. However, people love having a relationship with a company that helps them become better at something. That helps them succeed at their jobs or achieve a goal or fulfill a passion. We work with companies who are replacing traditional ideas about marketing with the kind of marketing people want.
Apple introduced the iPad 3 with this statement, "We believe technology is at its very best when it's invisible. When you're conscious only of what you're doing, not the device you're doing it with."
The same can be said about most products, not just technology. Too often, marketers focus all their efforts on promoting their product or service by investing the majority of their budgets on making the product sound and look awesome. But what the customer wants is for the product to be invisible. They just want to be conscious of how the product helps them become or accomplish something.
We believe the goal of great marketing is to make the customer smarter, stronger, happier, or whatever the customer wants when they purchase a product or join an association or subscribe to a service.
Hammock assists companies in their efforts to deliver such value to their customers. From two decades of experience, we know that customers don't even consider this kind of marketing as marketing. They view it as vital informmation and assistance in helping them do something better or be something they want to be.
We help companies add value to their products and services by working with them to develop more effective customer media and customer content that teaches, mentors, encourages collaboration, informs and inspires. (See accompanying list.) We support clients with an experienced team of creators, developers, artists, analysts, producers and project managers who follow a tried and proven development approach called the Content Alignment Process.
As a company, our goal is to help our clients become great at establishing long-term relationships with customers. In that way, our goal is to become invisible.
Customer Media, Content & Services
- Research, Insight & Strategy
- Creative, Editorial & Design
- Magazine Publishing for Print & Screens
- Book Publishing for Print & Screens
- Technology (Integration, Development, Apps)
- Video, Photography and Illustration
- Sales & Launch Presentation Systems
- Advertising Sales & Management
- Production & Distribution
Channels and Networks
- Print (USPS and place-based)
- eMail (Various platforms)
- The Big Web (WebSites, MicoSites, Wikis)
- The Small Web (i.e., Twitter)
- The Social Web
- The Channeled Web (Intranets, Amazon Kindle Store, RSS, Apps)
- Live Events (Conferences, Shows, Conventions)
Our clients include large companies and member-based organizations. While we have experience in nearly every industry, consumer or business-to-business, today our clients fall primarily into three categories. (Stay tuned, we're working on a fourth):
Healthcare
National Associations
Marketers to Small Business Decision Makers
Hammock has four groups of in-house specialists who collaborate and jointly-create media products and programs, tools and content with our clients and our network of creative and technical partners.
Hammock Analytics
Our research and strategy group who ensure that the media and content you invest in is aligned with the needs of your customers -- and the objectives of your business.
Hammock Studio
Our creative, design, editorial, video and interactive digital media group.
Hammock Labs
Our technology development and content integration team. They work to ensure that everything that can go wrong, doesn't.
Hammock Media Management
Our outsource media and marketing services group, who provide services to our clients that range from third-party advertising and sponsorship sales to vendor sourcing.Refined over the past 21 years, our approach to assisting clients starts with a simple step: listening.
We call it the "Content Alignment Process," and it involves both formal and informal research and analysis. Our goal is to understand how our clients' objectives align with their current customer media and content efforts. Is it doing what it is intended to do? If not, why? If not, what is a better way? While each client has a unique objective, we benefit from two decades of working with wide variety of organizations who market to businesses and individual customers. No matter what your objective, our process will help you discover what works best to achieve bottomline results.
Steps in the Content Alignment Process:
Research
Research
Strategy
Strategy
Collaboration
Collaboration
Reporting
Reporting
Research
Strategy
Collaboration
Reporting
We live in an era when a company enjoying any competitive advantage in its marketplace can suddenly discover that advantage disappear due to the appearance of disruptive technologies or unanticipated competition (Amazon or Google show up in their market, for example), or any other factor that may cause the commoditization of products and services. In this era of rapid change and endless choices, companies are discovering that traditional foundations of success (superior products, competitive pricing, quality and service) are not enough to attract new customers or retain the current ones.
In this era, the companies who flourish are those adding another layer of value to what they provide customers. They are discovering the need to stop being in the business of selling products and services, and to start being in the business of helping their customers do something better, or to be something better -- They help their customers achieve some desired outcome. Companies ranging from Apple to Williams-Sonoma to Lowes to LL Bean have evolved their retail space (their physical, print and digital retail space) from places to display products into spaces where customers take classes, get advice from gurus, witness demos, create communities. All of these activities and new approaches to "selling" are focused on enabling customers to become better at something that, no surprise, can be accomplished with products and services purchased by those companies.
Becoming this kind of company -- and enjoying the rewards of having customers view them as vital partners in their accomplishing some objective -- requires a new way of thinking about marketing and customer communication that is enabled by both traditional and new forms of media.
These companies are savvy users of customer media -- they develop, commission, utilize and manage all types of content and channels that enable them to communicate directly with their customers, and not through the traditional intermediaries of advertising and old models of marketing. These companies are not focused on creating more hype that targets their customers, but are focused on new ways of listening to, learning from, teaching and helping their customers. Anticipating needs of their customers and helping them solve problems are also the cornerstones of this new approach to marketing.
Hammock is different because our entire organization and processes are built to serve these kinds of companies.
At Hammock, we don't just "do content." We don't just create and manage media. We help companies who understand that to be great, they must make their customers great. We provide our clients the insight, the services and the development and management of customer media, content and creative products that assist clients become the kinds of companies that take advantage of the opportunities now available to turn customers into partners and transactions into relationships.
Our goal is to help our clients enable their customers to be awesome.