Dear Magnet friends,

It was great to meet many of you in Barcelona recently; it was an inspiring few days! It reminded me how invaluable it is to be connected to such a dynamic group who are open to new ideas, opportunities, and challenges.

I am pleased to report that CBC has had a fantastic comeback after the Covid downturn, with 2022 being our best for 20 years. While there has been a slower start to 2023, we’re now seeing things changing gears. Several old accounts are committing more marketing budget than last year, and we have been fortunate to onboard new accounts within the Energy & sustainability, MedTech, and Industrial engineering sectors.

After 40+ years in international B2B branding and marketing, we are well positioned in the Danish market and we’re increasingly attracting business from abroad within our specialist sectors: Marine & Logistics; Industrial engineering; Process industry; Life science & MedTech; and IT & High-tech. The outlook is positive, and it seems the B2B market is less impacted than feared by unpredictable global events.

I look forward to seeing you online and, hopefully, at one of our upcoming Magnet summits.

With warm regards,

Ralph Krøyer

Managing Partner

Tel: +45 35 25 01 75

Email: rk@cbc.dk www.cbc.dk

CBC is a specialist B2B branding and marketing agency that takes global businesses from complexity to clarity to commercial impact.

For QUPAQ, CBC created an original company name and logo, implemented these across a new CVI, and aligned sales and marketing activities to support the launch.

Project highlights

For Huntsman Advanced Materials, CBC created the “Made Possible” platform, highlighting how the company is an enabler for innovation that brings its customers’ ideas, potential, and products to life.

Project highlights

For MAN Energy Solutions, CBC created a campaign to position MAN Energy Solutions as industry experts and increased sales by 288% on a key product line.

Project highlights

Hello Magnet friends,

We’ll get straight to it today. Here’s our go-to list of current initiatives:

Go virtual.

Many of you have seen our office space. It’s beautiful—13th floor views, roof deck off the kitchen, glass walls, private editing suite, and lots of space for people to spread out. It’s also twice what we need, and we’re only using it one day a week. Our lease has become a giant, expensive noose around our neck. We’ve put our space on the sublet market and plan to move to a small footprint of co-working space if our real estate brokers can pull off a miracle. Downtown Portland isn’t that popular of a place these days, but at least we have that beautiful roof deck going for us along with sunny days ahead.

Go paperless.

We’ve talked about this being a goal in recent years, but moving to co-working space now makes it a necessity. Fortunately, we’re paperless in a lot of aspects already. But it’s the accounting side of the business that still has us buried in paper and rows of filing cabinets. We’ve assigned a small task force to develop the overall structure and processes that we feel are both fail-safe and in compliance with the requirements of our governmental contracts. From there, we’ll move on to training our entire staff. Whether it’s invoices, contracts, or some other random thing, it seems everyone touches something that eventually becomes part of the accounting system.

Go get more new business.

Granted getting new business is always a given, but we’re feeling it especially hard these days. We need to replace the gross income from the Oregon Department of Education, our second largest client these past two years. The contract ended when government funding ended along with the pandemic. Fortunately, we’ve got multiple opportunities we’re working on, but it’s going to take more than one to land to fill in the gap.

We always look forward to seeing our inspiring Magnet friends at the meetings. This time around, Steve will be our in-person CKer in Park City while Jeanie stays back to help drive the go-tos.

2021-2022

What we did

Coates Kokes is proud of its continued growth in B Corp activities, with the highlight being our renewed certification and new score of 89.5. As part of the recertification process, CK added new policies to the handbook including nursing parent, environmental and labor policies. We also added a Code of Ethics to the beginning of the employee handbook to articulate our existing values.