Our Parent Company, Ayala Corporation

For those of you who don’t know, our parent company is LiveIt Investments, the holding company for Ayala Corporation’s investments in the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector. Ayala Corp is one of the largest conglomerates in the Philippines. This association has many advantages for Affinity Express, not least being the stability and financial backing that they provide, allowing us to be a dynamic, versatile company.

The 2010 Ayala Corporation Annual Report was released recently and we were featured as a valued company in the portfolio of LiveIt Investments, Ltd.

Here are some highlights from the report.

Using Color in Ad Design

We have written before about the importance of design in marketing, and color is one of the most important elements of design. Designers have always used color to convey different moods and underline the messages. Let’s take a look at some colors and what emotions or attributes they often convey.

Blue

Blue is a very commonly used in B2B messaging, because it is a calm color that indicates respectability. Because blue conveys reliability, it is commonly used by brands in financial services, healthcare and other industries where trust is paramount.

5 Steps to Ensuring Quality Through Training

For an organization with a unique business model like ours, it’s not enough to hire designers who are knowledgeable about design; we also need our employees who can deliver on client requirements, whether that means simply following instructions or getting creative.

With clients being half the world away, as distant culturally as they are physically, this is a challenge we deal with every day:

How do we ensure that our people deliver quality designs, every single time?

When I asked one of our associate managers for training how she thinks quality becomes ingrained into organizational culture, she said:

“Training has to be taken very seriously. We have to bridge the resources we get and the expectations of the client with training. Not merely classroom training, but on-the-job training has to be handled sensitively, so that best practices are shared.”

Here’s how we do it.

2011 Global Services 100: We’re in Again!

The U.S. holiday was on July 4^th but there are fireworks going off in our offices around the world these days. Affinity Express was named to the 2011 Global Services 100—companies that define leadership in IT and business process outsourcing! Not only that, we were selected as one of the top 5 knowledge process outsourcing providers. Wow! This is the second year in a row we’ve been included but we are even more excited than we were in 2010.

As the person at our company who compiles the information and submits the application, I can tell you that the process is not easy. There are numerous financial, client, process, technology and human resources questions to answer. The reason is that Global Services 100 (GS100) companies are chosen through a detailed method that evaluates them across several quantitative and qualitative dimensions. I’m glad they liked what they saw in Affinity Express!

SMBs and Social Media Marketing

“Small and medium-sized businesses look for new customers on social media,” eMarketer says. The article quotes studies that say SMBs find social media effective and important for marketing.

The best part of that article, though, (in my completely biased opinion) is that they reference our survey on the use of online marketing and advertising by SMBs, and the fact that 50% of our respondents reported having used social media marketing.

Interestingly, another survey quoted by the article found that 83% SMBs planned to use social media marketing this year. Even more interesting, nearly two-thirds of SMBs in another survey said they used Facebook alone to promote their business.

All of this attests to the growing prevalence and effectiveness of social media marketing. This is in line with my own assessment as well. As a company, we’ve seen more orders for social media work in the past few months (designs for Facebook tabs or Twitter backgrounds, for example). We have trained and are training our people on the peculiarities of designing for social media. Our E-Marketing Manager Unmana Datta recently had an article on Facebook marketing published in Supplier Global Resource, a publication targeted at promotional products suppliers.

Core Values for the Affinity Express ELITE Club

A couple of years ago, we articulated the core values of Affinity Express:

• We are passionate about efficiency and measuring continuous improvement.
• We work hard and exceed expectations—our own and our clients.
• We harness our creativity, dynamism and innovativeness to make our clients look good.
• We are team players who are honest and transparent with each other.
• We conduct ourselves with the highest standard of ethics and integrity.

These are values our company stands on, and we wanted every employee of Affinity Express to live and work by them.

Award function in the India office (I’m in the center)

Designing Our Facebook Page Welcome Tab

I had been coveting the interesting welcome tabs other brand pages had on Facebook, so I asked Kelly if we could have one of our own. Never one to refuse a reasonable request, she asked Mel if he’d be interested in designing one.

Now Mel knows that if you give clients options to choose from, they’re more likely to approve your work. So he sent us three designs to choose from.

Happy Fourth of July

Hope our readers in the U.S. are enjoying the long weekend!