When something is really difficult to achieve or requires great physical or economic effort, we say 'it’ll take blood, sweat and tears'. In order to highlight the benefit of individual ink cartridges, we associated the magenta ink cartridge with the blood, the yellow one with the sweat and the cyan one with the tears. And we associated the black ink cartridge with the future of SMEs not equipped with a Smart Base. The basic message of this action is 'Save yourself blood, sweat and tears with Smart Base. And, of course, time and money'. From a database of 500 SMES in Madrid, we arranged 250 interviews, via telemarketing, with SMEs that showed a medium or high interest in Smart Base. Sales agents from the Canon distributor network handled the visits with a folder containing a very educational product catalogue and a demo on CD-ROM. The other 250 SMEs in the database were sent a mailing with the same elements plus a letter.

117 Smart Base units were sold following the visits of the sales agents. 62 new interviews were arranged via the mailing to the other 250 SMEs, resulting in a further 24 Smart Base units sold. With this campaign, in only 22 days, 141 units were sold (28.2%).