14 June 2005: Whitbread, the UK's leading leisure company, has been awarded the Marketing Society's Marketing Capability prize for its 'Winning Brands' campaign.

The campaign, which achieved a ten fold return in its first two years on an investment of £400,000, was singled out for significantly improving the commercial performance across Whitbread's complete brand portfolio which include: Premier Travel Inn, Costa Coffee, Brewers Fayre, David Lloyd, TGI Fridays and Beefeater.

Whitbread worked closely on 'Winning Brands' with OxfordSM who designed and helped implement a scaleable 'brand template' that provided consumer insight and 'touch-point guidelines' to Whitbread employees and their agencies.

19 June 2006: Oxford Strategic Marketing and Vodafone have won the Marketing Society’s Marketing Capability Award. The award was for their work on creating the ‘Differentiation Potential System’ (DPS) – a global model for testing the business potential of new Vodafone products. This is the second year in a row that OxfordSM have won this award, having topped the category last year for their work with Whitbread, the UK’s leading leisure company.

OxfordSM worked with Vodafone to develop a new approach for matching customer needs with product ideas which are profitable and deliverable. They conceived DPS as an end-to-end system embedded in the business. This has delivered real business impact – with a new global project team already set up to develop top performing DPS concepts, and six development initiatives already halted as a direct result of DPS output.

2007: Working with Oxford Strategic Marketing, SPA and CFI Group, Sky was awarded a Marketing Society Awards' Commendation for its development of the Sky Tracker, which has transformed the company's ability to focus its resources against what really makes the difference to the customer's experience.

In entertainment services a superior customer experience is crucial to acquiring and retaining customers. To win, Sky needs to know where to focus its efforts within the experience and how to respond rapidly to market changes. Existing tracking was unable to "join the dots" of the experience and help guide decision making.

The new Tracker that the team created and embedded in the business has step changed Sky's capability to interpret and act on customer insights, and is helping Sky to transform its service proposition.

2006: Oxford Strategic Marketing and Research International’s collaboration with Vodafone on their Differentiation Potential System (DPS) was recognised with MRS/AURA Insight Management Effectiveness Award. This award is given to the submission that best demonstrated a holistic approach to insight management.

Vodafone’s Differentiation Potential System (DPS) research has revolutionised the way that the company makes NPD decisions: DPS has become indispensable in helping it react to customers’ changing needs.

The judging panel viewed DPS as an impressive, innovative research programme, which effectively presents a re-usable process for measuring product concept performance and generating actionable results, pulling together different streams of research. It also puts research at the forefront of the organisation and on an international level.

2006: Homebase and Oxford Strategic Marketing have won a ‘Silver Clio’ Award for their work on Private Label Packaging. The Clio is the world’s most recognised international awards competition celebrating creative excellence and innovation. The same work has been highly commended in the Design Week Awards 2006, and been published in a number of leading design industry annuals.

We worked with Homebase in 2004 to conduct a strategic review of the their range offering and Own Label proposition. OxfordSM helped choose the right design agency and develop a design brief aligned with the new strategic guidelines. The resulting design system was commended for its clarity in communicating both the intended use for the product, and also its level of quality.