Black seems to have always been in fashion and probably always will. The business equivalent of black is set to be corporate awards. It seems like we all want to become an award winner. It is the must have accessory for any smart business about town. But is this pure vanity or a canny business decision by the marketing and public relations team?
It seems that 74% of businesses believe that they would increase profit if they could more effectively demonstrate to potential clients that they offer a better product or service than their key competitors.
38% of businesses believe that their current marketing activity doesn’t clearly differentiate them from their key competitors.
But also 68% of businesses felt that winning corporate awards could help them to differentiate themselves and ultimately be more profitable.
These findings clearly demonstrate that companies are having difficulty in standing out from the crowd. They seem to recognise that winning corporate awards is a great way to achieve this and more and more firms are being proactive about it, but at the same time many great businesses are not practising what they preach and actually entering themselves for appropriate awards.
On top of that, it has been noticed that:
Award winning large companies enjoyed a 48% increase in operating income and a 37% growth in sales when compared to non-award winners. Award winning smaller companies were also shown to have experienced a 63% increase in operating income, and a 39% growth in sales when compared to non-winners. Source: British Quality Foundation based on experience in the USA.
A study compared the financial performance of 120 award winning companies across Europe that met specific criteria against comparison companies of a similar size and operating in the same industries. The financial performance was tracked over 11 years. The study found that the award winning companies showed improvements in financial performance after just a year of winning their first award. Source: University of Leicester for the British Quality Foundation and the European Foundation for Quality Management.
Three years after receiving an award, the 120 award winning companies outperformed the comparison companies by an average of 17% for sales and 36% for share value. During the final year that performance was tracked, the award winning companies experienced even greater increases as compared to comparison companies with sales growing by an average of 77% more and operating income by 18% more.
Entering awards is relatively cheap. A professional awards company will charge around £500 - £1,000 per award. Compare that to the cost of an advertisement or a typical PR company’s fees for ‘trying’ to get you in the nationals and it’s fantastic value.
The benefits of winning an award last a long time. They don’t end up as tomorrows chip paper like press coverage. A firm can leverage awards in many different ways: website, letterhead, newsletters, staff morale, new business pitches, and investor relations to name but a few.

In reality, becoming an award winner does not solely depend on being significantly better than your competition. It will not automatically occur naturally for those organisations that simply do a good job because, in reality, attractive organisations are often overlooked or never achieve their full potential because they are less well known. In short, becoming an award winner does not only depend on the quality of an organisations products or its customer service, processes etc but also on the priority given to self promotion. In other words, you must be in it to win it.