Triangle Business News

Bill Turner

919 Marketing Talks The Talk For The Rosetta Stone

HARRISONBURG, VA - 919 Marketing Company, a privately held Raleigh area marketing and public relations consulting firm, announced today that it has spearheaded the strategic planning and development of a global branding campaign for The Rosetta Stone, a leading developer and marketer of language learning software applications.

919 Marketing Company was created in 1996 by CEO David Chapman, a marketing thought leader with over 20 years of senior management experience with Fortune 500 corporations and entrepreneurial, emerging growth companies.

The Rosetta Stone is published by Fairfield Language Technologies, a profitable, privately held language learning software company headquartered in Harrisonburg, VA. The product line was launched in 1994, quickly becoming the preferred language learning software solution for language teachers in the domestic U.S. education market.

The company currently distributes 24 comprehensive language-learning products to the global education, business, retail government and online markets through a direct sales force, strategic partnerships and distributors.

The company’s client list includes NASA, the Peace Corps, the U.S. State Department and over 7,000 schools; to date over 4 million users in 55 countries have learned a new language using Rosetta Stone products.

“Renaissance put a framework in place to give us goals, incentives and priorities to take our company to the next level,” says Martin Violette, VP Sales for FLT. “The Link planning sessions held up a mirror on us that showed us who we really are, for good and for bad. We believe 919's branding approach is a sound response to what we confront in our work. It differentiates our product, it is easy to own, it is adaptable to different markets and to different sales propositions, and first and foremost it gets a warm reception from buyers.”

According to 919 Marketing CEO David Chapman, “The company was launched in the early ‘90’s by a small, entrepreneurial management team. Today it’s a multi-million dollar business with more than 60 employees and two-dozen products sold around the world. 919 Marketing has been charged with two parallel assignments - develop a systematic, focused business approach to reconcile objectives and resources with marketplace opportunities, and paint an overarching picture of how to represent its products globally with a consistent, compelling cross-channel brand.”

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