Ecay goes global in 2006

The Ecay Team

(L) Hilary McKenzie-Cahill – Managing Director Alfresco
Advertising and Cathy Williams – Global Sales Director
Alfresco Advertising

The Ecay sales team – (L to R) – Mike Craddock -
Jersey Sales Manager, Dave Jones – Cayman Sales
Executive, Nick Pitman - Cayman Sales Executive and
Michael Burbidge – Cayman Sales Executive

The Jersey Team – left to right – Mike Craddock Sales
Manager Jersey, Cathy Williams Global Sales Director,
and Sue Thomas Office Manager Jersey

Innovative marketing team – (L-r) Robert Robinson –
Marketing Assistant, Tony Ashmore - Marketing Guru
behind Ecay and Kathryn Roffey – Graphic Designer

Log on to www.ecayonline.com to win a trip around
the world

Monday,  February 7, 2006

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door” Ralph Waldo Emerson once famously wrote, penning a maxim the international business world has embraced for more than a century.

It’s advice that Alfresco Advertising Ltd, the founders and publishers of the Cayman Islands Business and Web Directory Ecay, carefully considered – and then promptly turned on its head. Less than a year after launching the wildly popular Ecay and its online search engine, www.ecayonline.com, the Alfresco team can say with assurance that Emerson had it wrong. “With Ecay, we’ve proved an interesting point,” states Alfresco Managing Director, Hilary McKenzie-Cahill. “That better mousetraps don’t mean much and the world won’t beat a path if they can’t find your door.”

It’s a lesson Alfresco is poised to take global. Fuelled by Ecay’s overwhelming success, the fledgling Caymanian enterprise will open its second office in February – this time in Jersey – less than 24 months after getting off the ground.

Alfresco has laid the groundwork to roll out local versions of its innovative Ecay print and online directories in an additional 12 jurisdictions over the next 24 – 36 months, working through a series of strategic alliances with leading media companies in those countries.

It’s an unqualified success that owes both it start – and inspiration – to the Cayman Islands, the Caymanian spirit, and Cayman’s business owners for having the foresight to embrace this product that has taken Cayman, technologically, to the next level.

Local firm makes good

Alfresco posits a good deal of its success to being in the right place at the right time and having a firm belief that if companies like Mercedes Benz or The Body Shop can take a good product global, then why can’t a small Caymanian company do it? Surely all you need is a great product, some vision, a can-do attitude, some good old fashioned hard work, some guts and a little luck! 

As seasoned marketing professionals, its executive team couldn’t help but notice that, as Caymanians and residents became increasingly Internet savvy, there was no one complete source that allowed them fast access to the web sites of leading local businesses. Owners of local companies too, were becoming disillusioned with the Internet’s potential to drive business to their websites. Local companies found themselves investing in websites designed to attract customers, then struggling to attract attention online because no-one could find their website address on international search engines like Google where they were lost amongst hundreds of thousands of other sites as over 3 million websites are being created every day globally.

As Cayman residents increasingly turned to the Internet to research products and make purchases, Alfresco saw an unparalleled opportunity to create a new information source aimed at better connecting the disparate elements of the wired world emerging around them. “Mousetraps Cayman had,” explains McKenzie-Cahill. “We realised that what we really needed was a way to make it easier to find local business information online. Build an online portal for island enterprise, we thought, and the world might, indeed, come knocking.”

Build it they did, meeting Cayman’s genuine informational need with excellent content, a fair pricing structure and top-tier content. Alfresco took pains to ensure that initial Ecay clients received real value for money and great results. 

Cathy Williams, Alfresco’s Sales & Marketing Director and co-producer of Ecay, also attributes Ecay’s successful journey to the extensive market research Alfresco undertook prior to formulating its product. Among their research efforts, Williams conducted focus groups with some top Cayman executives, learning firsthand that a carefully targeted mass distribution and price were top decision-making drivers when allocating their advertising budgets. “The research also stressed that residents lead fast-paced lives and, therefore, demand similarly fast access to information.”

Since its September 2005 launch, Ecay has taken the Cayman Islands by storm. “We knew we had a good idea, but we’re flattered at the way people have embraced Ecay,” asserted Michael Burbidge, Sales Executive. “Every day people tell us that they don’t know how they lived without it. Similarly our ecayonline.com search engine has exploded, receiving over 2.5 million hits in the last five months alone.” 

Riding the wave

Ecay has, by all accounts, revolutionized the local e-business and online communications environment. Widely hailed as Cayman’s most useful new business tool, Ecay and Ecayonline.com have become the unofficial gateway to the Islands, linking international tourism and offshore financial-services clients more directly to Cayman’s businesses. The company’s traffic analysis indicates that real estate, banking, financial services and tourism are the most popular topics researched through Ecayonline.com. And, while much of that traffic originates in the US and Cayman, visitors from locales as far-flung as Hong Kong, New Zealand, the UK and Gibraltar make up an increasing share of local-market web hits.

According to Cayman’s business leaders Ecay not only makes it easier for businesses and customers to connect, it keeps more CI dollars circulating in Cayman by making local products and services more readily accessible, thus undercutting overseas competition. Before Ecay, residents were forced to weed, hit or miss, through international search engines like Google for the information they needed. A typical online shopper seeking a new car might, for example, have visited a site like www.japanesevehicles.com before. Thanks to Ecay, shoppers in Cayman can now head to ecayonline.com, then easily click through to the websites of local car dealers such as www.sonysauto.com, www.carcity.ky, and www.autohauscayman.com. Or, if a user wants furniture, they can bypass Miami or international retailer sites like www.ikea.com, tapping Ecay to shop Cayman retailers such as www.IDGcayman.com or www.westindiantrading.com. These are reputable local, accountable businesses who offer on island after sales service. Businesses you can trust.

Shaking things up

From hand-delivering more than 60,000 copies of Ecay and distributing 10,000 free Ecay mousepads, it’s a success story that has broken new ground in island marketing practices at every turn. Such as Ecay’s latest contest where Cayman residents can win a trip around the world by answering five easy questions on ecayonline.com. “Innovation is the driving force behind both Alfresco and Ecay,” said Tony Ashmore, marketing brain behind Ecay. “Before we do anything, we analyse it from every possible angle, making sure that what we’re about to offer our clients and end-users is different and more effective than anything they’ve seen before.”

In the case of Ecay, that meant Alfresco spent as much time deciding what they didn’t want to be as they did formulating the direction, content and look of the sophisticated, new directory. “We knew going in that we wanted to be more than simply a phone-book-styled listing of all Island web addresses,” McKenzie-Cahill said. Ecay targeted only businesses that had had the foresight to develop a website which was indicative of the fact that they were technologically advanced, and therefore it was appropriate that these market leaders could only be depicted in full color, glossy print, rather than used newsprint. Size also mattered, Alfresco decided. “Phone books are big, bulky and unwieldy,” McKenzie-Cahill stated. “Small, elegant and sleek, Ecay is, by design, something of a polar opposite of a regular old phone book.”

Alfresco’s innovation extended beyond the product itself, touching every aspect of the Ecay marketing and distribution process. In fact, it was the physical distribution process that cemented many of the publisher’s initial deals with Cayman companies. “We did something that, in hindsight, was both as elegantly simple – and as complex – as putting our publications in the hands of almost every end-user in Cayman,” said Tony Ashmore. “We promised our members that we would hand-deliver our Ecay print directory to virtually every home, desk, government office, restaurant, school and church in the country. Then, we delivered. It may sound basic, but it had never been done here before.” 

The company then worked just as hard to create a springboard for Ecayonline’s success, investing in search-engine optimization and creating and distributing 10,000 Ecay mouse pads to ensure that its new portal quickly won over the most technologically capable islanders. Their efforts paid off, within a few months, Alfresco realised that it had an unqualified hit – and a terrific business model – on its hands.

Globalisation through localisation

Through its contacts in other offshore islands, Alfresco knew from experience that Cayman wasn’t alone in its lack of dedicated tools aimed at harnessing the power of the Internet for offshore e-commerce. Island communities and offshore financial jurisdictions from Jersey to Bermuda were experiencing similar challenges in ramping up localised respective e-commerce initiatives.

Buoyed by that knowledge and the early success of Ecay, Alfresco put in place a strategic plan to take their newfound expertise on the road. Its strategy started with identifying established alliances with top media companies in each of its initial target markets. “I once heard Bill Gates say in an interview that to become truly successful in business, one has to be prepared to take risks and to surround oneself with smart, successful people,” says McKenzie-Cahill. “At Alfresco, we’re doing just that, forming partnerships with companies that not only are successful leaders in their field, but are politically connected and have deep enough pockets, to support the product with intelligent marketing.”

Maximizing the “Mousetrap”

While Alfresco is understandably excited about its global expansion plans, its management team stresses that they have big plans for furthering Ecay’s offerings in the Cayman Islands over the next two years. “We’re thrilled with our achievements to date, of course, but we’ve still only scratched the surface of what the Cayman market needs,” asserts McKenzie-Cahill. “We are continually working behind the scenes to improve our product and meet Cayman’s changing market needs” she added.

In addition to maintaining the Ecayonline database and publishing annual updates to its Ecay print directory, Alfresco plans to expand its website consulting business, working with local companies to build new or maximize the impact of existing websites. Last year, Alfresco helped bring 40 Cayman companies online, providing services from website concept and design to web hosting to site traffic analysis.

“If you know any of us, you know we’re not happy if we’re not moving forward,” McKenzie-Cahill states. “James Bovell Owner/Broker of Remax Cayman Islands once said, ‘If you’re not online, you’re not in business,’ and we couldn’t agree more. This year, our plan is to bring the whole of the Cayman business community online.”

It’s a lofty goal, but one the Alfresco team stresses is well within their reach. “Research has proven time and again that businesses with an established, online presence do better than companies that aren’t wired,” said Williams. “That’s particularly true for companies seeking to attract off-island business.” 

The team stresses that helping local business is more than just a business objective, it’s a set-in-granite part of the Alfresco culture. “Ecay’s success is extremely gratifying, but it’s still early days,” McKenzie-Cahill said. “To prosper in business over the long haul, you have to be creative, be strategic, be honest, and be fair – and give back to your staff and the communities you’re trading in wherever possible.”

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recently said, “Globalisation operates on Internet time.” With the help of Alfresco Advertising Limited, the pace of globalisation may just quicken here in Cayman.

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