PR: CBC (AMERICA) Corp.

If you’ve been in a medical, educational, retail or recreational facility in the past 20 years, you’ve probably walked on a TOLI® floor – the flagship brand of CBC Flooring and longtime standard in the industry. CBC brought Hart Associates on board to help reinvigorate its energy and heighten awareness among contractors, facility managers, architects and others responsible for specifying and purchasing commercial flooring. These audiences knew of TOLI, but knew little of parent company CBC and even less about the new products that CBC had recently introduced, including its CERES™ PVC-Free Flooring, Indelval Rubber and Salto Exceptional Flooring brands.

First stop, media interviews at various trade shows. What better place to make their mark (okay, so “mark” may be an awkward choice when talking flooring, but still)? Hart helped CBC make quite an impression at several highly respected trade shows – Surfaces, NeoCon, NeoCon East and Healthcare Design. At Greenbuild, another key show in the industry, Hart Associates successfully pitched an unprecedented amount of meetings with editors from 11 different flooring and architecture and design publications. Four stories appeared immediately in media outlets and the editor meetings eventually led to even more opportunities for feature stories.

In all, our media efforts in 2009 resulted in 44 placements in trade magazines reaching nearly 600,000 readers. In fact, CBC’s media coverage in 2009 surpassed the amount the company received in the previous eight years combined. As a result, CBC’s presence in the media has kept them top-of-mind with builders, prospects and even their competitors who, not surprisingly, are floored by CBC’s success.