Lately I've been noticing a number of organizations sending out special brand communications that shout, "It's our 21th Anniversary" or "We Announce Our 8th Year in Business." And these aren't even major anniversaries like the ones that end in a zero or a five. Yet some marketers think they warrant a special communication to potential clients. Would you read that e-mail or newsletter? Do you have time?
Join the W.I.F.M. It's the most important radio station that I know of for smart marketers. And it stands for "What's In It For Me?" That's what you must always consider as you think about the reasons for sending out brand communications. Waste your possible customers' time and you may not get another chance to have their attention when you really do have something relevant to say. The most welcome communications offer valuable information that help people do their jobs better, more efficiently or more happily. Offer one of those things as part of your message and you will be welcomed back with open arms next time you reach out with a brand communication.
Disney just opened their new movie, "Alice in Wonderland", in 3D, right on the heels of James Cameron's 3D phenomenon, Avatar. With the advent of high definition hyper-real computer animation, these created, dimensional environments all but have us walking through forests of neon blue floating sea anemones as we fall down a rabbithole in hyperspeed. And these entertainments aren't just intended for the bubblegum set: expect to see adults, teens, seniors, preteens and grade schoolers flocking to these cinematic wonders.
It's early days in 3D yet the trend is clear. We've come to expect not just viewing but experiencing. The use of color, sound, motion and now, dimension, bring us right into the story.
As you move through strategic marketing planning leading to brand communication tactics, consider ways to insert your brand's constituents into the experience rather than just communicating at them. Interactive technology allows a two-way engagement. Holographic images allow us to walk right into a scene. Multi-sensory theaters like those at Disney World allow audiences to feel their seats move in a thunderstorm and feel the moisture of rain on their faces. Many small brands cannot afford these high test luxuries. But are there less expensive ways (scratch and sniff, moving pieces, textural components like cut-outs, pop-ups or imbedded sound chips, to name a few). Well placed, these types of tactics can breathe new life into an otherwise tired piece of brand communication and are well worth considering.
Brand Development is one of Element Three’s business disciplines, and it’s always an exciting experience when one of our clients moves into the implementation phase of launching their brand. On March 1, Connext Financial unveiled their new brand identity to their customers. Formerly known as MTC Equipment Finance, Element Three worked with the company to rename and develop a new corporate identity, which included a new logo and tag line.
Clear identification of key audiences and messaging strategies to each of those audiences formed the foundation of the launch strategy. A series of key communications incorporating print, email, and person to person contact is currently underway. The company’s new website, www.connextfinancial.com is now on line. Take a look:
Nearly everyone who works at Element Three has a personal Facebook page, but it has never felt right to me to have a corporate page. And, I have never been able to articulate exactly why Element Three does not have a
Facebook page for our organization, until now.
I ran across this explanation that another agency had posted about their reason for not having a corporate Facebook presence - and thought it was perfect.
click here for the full article.
Here is what was posted by Agency Park & Co, a branding and marketing agency located in Phoenix, AZ.
Park&Co's Facebook effort is going dark. I know you rely on us for tons of compelling industry and agency news but I'm sorry to say you're going to have to wait awhile before you see us again.
Before panic sets in let me explain. It's not that we don't have time or we don't think the medium is valuable, it's that we're done posting underwhelming news and links you can find a number of other places. And let's be honest, you don't sign on to Facebook to see our next birthday celebration photo or snarky quip.
Facebook is a valuable medium and one that a bunch of us here at Park&Co love and use regularly. But we love it because it's a place to share and connect with friends, to see what's happening in their lives and to broadcast the highlights from ours.
So until we can come up with a really good reason to have a Facebook page for the agency (and we're working on it), we're going dark. Despite our Facebook darkness there are still a bunch of places you can connect with us starting with our website - http://parkandco.com/
What are your thoughts on corporate Facebook pages?
This past week, I was honored with an award for mentoring at a ceremony that included business and community leaders, students, other honorees and even the Lieutenant Governor. I walked in expecting to have fun and enjoy the honor of being a Finalist. Having my name called as one of the award Winners was quite unexpected. Because I had no expectation of winning, I was relaxed and I think I took in the appreciative congratulations completely and in the moment. Believe me, this has not always been my mode of operating in the past: I used to stress out over being competitive, comparing my winnings to others.
In brand communications, I'd compare this to thinking only about making the sale instead of enjoying the actual interaction or the followup. Building customer relationships, enjoying the experience with clients, getting to know what matters most to those you serve and taking the time to find out...these are all actually smart marketing integration tactics. One of the simplest ones is just saying "Thanks" to clients who have been loyal to you or who have just bought from you for the first time. If a customer has been a pleasure to work with, tell them. In the end, goodwill comes back in many forms.
If the answer to these two questions is yes, then this is your lucky day. Element Three is looking for a Creative Lead. What that means to us is someone who is both a talented designer and a strategic thinker. Someone who can mentor younger designers, present work to clients, integrate feedback into work and delegate when needed. If you think you have what it takes to inspire and implement great work and you are ready to join a close-knit team of people who do great work together, send your resume and recent work samples as a PDF to tiffany@discoverelementthree.com
Note to Reader: You may not be able to appreciate this post if you are a man or wear a size zero. All others, read on.I was shopping online at
Piperlime (something I do more often now that I have a little girl) checking out what the new styles and colors are for spring. Never one to resist a good sale, I clicked on this button:
When the page loaded and I saw a pair of skinny jeans, 60% off and FINAL SALE - I thought to myself - are you COMPLETELY CRAZY? What girl would buy a pair of skinny jeans online that were FINAL SALE? Finding a great-fitting pair of regular jeans is a 1:100,000 odds of winning, finding a great pair skinny jeans? 1:1 million - if you're lucky.
It made me think. What
would I feel comfortable buying at Final Sale and what makes that different from the jeans? And then I thought, when are the times when we make people feel like they are buying a pair of skinny jeans at final sale?
Most of the time, marketing is oriented towards aiding the sales process. It is about creating a connection with a strong brand, clearly articulating features and benefits of a product or service and making a complex story accessible and easy to understand. We must be aware; when doing marketing for ourselves at Element Three or working with one of our clients - that we don't present an offer that contains too much risk for the buyer. Clients and prospects will be turned off by the giant leap you are asking them to take. Offer a party shirt for $30 - something you can wear once, discard and not feel bad about it. To parallel business, it's like a free trial, a small project or an online demo.
I'm even fairly comfortable with risk - but Final Sale, Skinny Jeans? Are you crazy?
What about you, where in your business are you asking people to buy Final Sale, Skinny Jeans?
Pepsi decided NOT to run a Super Bowl ad this year. What a great idea! By not running an ad after doing so for more than two decades, they actually got more press than if they had run an ad.
The good news is that Pepsi instead is giving $20 million away in a social media project called
Pepsi Refresh. Some of my design students have already entered their project work for not local for profit agencies hoping to receive funding. It's a smart move on Pepsi's part. My students and their generation are among the most involved generation of socially conscious and engaged people in recent memory and they're more likely to align with a brand that actively supports their causes than one that throws big money at television conglomerates.
What have you done through your brand communications lately to make the world a better place AND align with your brand's constituents?
The past few weeks I have been 'lunching' with different people, reconnecting in the New Year. Undoubtedly, one of the early topics is how 2010 is starting off for our Indianapolis marketing firm, Element Three, and what we learned in 2009.
I want to be certain that I don't forget what 2009 taught me; so, I thought it would be a good idea to write it down. We're not always given the option of whether or not we go through a difficult time, but we do have the option of deciding to learn from it.
This is what I learned in 2009:
1) Cash really is King. It's not just an old business adage. It is the fundamental lifeblood to any organization. Without it you cannot get the resources you need to produce your product, to market, to sell - to do anything. Access to cash allows you to move forward.
2) There is no substitute for experience, no matter how smart you are. I thought I knew a lot about business. Having my own business from the age of 15 and growing up in a very entrepreneurial home - I have been around business for a long time. I've been told about lean times and hard seasons, and lived through them as the child of an entrepreneur - but never lived through it as a business owner. I will be more prudent as a result of 2009; in my spending and my decision-making. Both personally and professionally.
3) The greatest gift someone can ever give you, is forgiveness. I made some bad decisions in 2009 that had an adverse impact on the Element Three team. To receive forgiveness from those I hurt was an incredibly humbling experience. I hope that I will have the grace to extend such forgiveness to others. For their forgiveness, I am eternally grateful.
4) Good companies go out of business. In my naivete, I thought only bad companies went out of business. That only crappy companies with crappy products and services were the ones that didn't make it. Not so. Many great companies cannot make it through seasons like 2009 because they're not capitalized well, they have big client pull back, inventory levels that are too high or just are not ready to throw their life savings into the company to get it through the rough patch. There were some great companies and great people who were casualties of 2009. We're immensely thankful we were not one of them.
5) In tough times, you have to Decide. You have to decide you want to survive. 2009 taught me that in tough times you cannot be ruled by your emotions, because emotions cannot be trusted. You have to decide you're going to get out of bed in the morning, because you're probably not going to feel like it. You have to decide you are going to make the tough phone calls and that you're going to be honest with yourself about the difficult decisions that have to be made to keep the organization alive. You're not going to feel like laying people off. You're not going to feel like making cold calls. You have to Decide you're going to.
In a crazy way, I'm thankful for 2009. It made me grow up in ways a better economy might not have and it made me more thankful for my family, my husband and my daughter.
I'm curious, what did 2009 teach you? Did you decide to learn from it?
The Indianapolis based company
, SGI, is looking to hire an additional Account Coordinator. Our Indianapolis Marketing firm, Element Three, has done work for SGI (we redesigned their logo and helped articulate their brand position). SGI is a stable company with strong leadership.
For more information on the position,
click here. Interested parties should forward their resume to Jack Burns, jburns@mysgi.com. This is an entry level position for someone a couple of years out of college. Experience is not necessary.
There are 173 entries in Wikipedia when you look up the list of Google products. The few that I have experienced are truly amazing. Check out the
whole list. You won't believe the breadth of innovative ideas that this one organization has developed and is developing.
How innovative is your organization? How might you nurture more new ideas and become a leader in your industry as Google has done in the world of online tools?
Element Three has developed Brand Chemistry, it's own deep dive tool to help brand managers and marketers to understand the true emotional connections between their brand and its constituents. This is just one of the innovative tools you will experience when you work with the Element Three team of marketing strategy, brand development and creative execution experts.
Many talented marketers wonder why the work they get from their design firms and ad agency partners doesn't stack up to their expectations, both creatively and strategically. One place to start if you want to build powerful, focused brand communications, is with your creative brief. At Element Three, we have developed a thorough creative brief format that assures that the fundamental questions of WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY and HOW get answered. It's true that most Indianapolis ad agencies have a creative job starter form of some kind. And the form alone won't assure that you get great work. The focus and finesse of the people who work with the form, however, will.
Some tips:
Demand focus in the objective for the communications.
Demand that a specific audience be outlined in the brief. You cannot speak effectively to everyone.
Expect to see specific, salient insights into that audience's lifestyle, values and demographics outlined in the brief.
Insist on a single-minded, unique main message. You cannot make great brand communications without it.
We like to agree on where and how the communications will show up. We also like to assure that there will be a specific call to action for the audience to make sure your brand communications get a real response. Contact Tiffany Sauder at tiffany@discoverelementthree if you'd like us to craft a powerful creative brief for your brand communications! It will make all the difference in the creative you hold in your hand in the end.
I just attended a seminar in which I sat in on a talk by an ex-CIA agent. The agent discussed the espionage stories she recalled in which creativity was at the core of each example's success. Core to the talk was the premise, repeated many times, that, "Of course, creativity cannot be learned. Either your mind works in quirky ways or it doesn't." The presenter went on to put down anyone who made money giving seminars on "how to be more creative, because as we all know, that's a bunch of bullcrap." (Her words, not mine.)
Listening to this discussion of creativity made me squirm in my chair. For over 20 years, I've essentially been teaching professionals and students to be more creative....successfully. In fact,
Jonathan Plucker, Educational Psychology professor at IU in Bloomington, teaches and studies creativity. He says that there are many myths about creativity and that there are a number of things we can all do to boost our creativity. In fact, his students DO learn to be more creative. Plucker says, "If you believe that creativity techniques will work for you, they probably will."
Quirky creativity? That's one way of looking at it. But for those of us who make our living being creative on budget, on time and on strategy, it's anything but quirky. The creative problem solving process can be tracked (and has been: see
Min Basadur's Simplex creative problem solving process chart).
Our brains, in this age of information, must be kept flexible, just like our bodies.
Tom Monahan, founder of Before and After, is a brain trainer. He regularly teaches methods for stretching your brain to be more flexible and creative. I teach some of his techniques to my students at Herron School of Art and Design and I see many wonderful results from students – who often amaze even themselves.
So no matter what you do, whether it involves creating brand communications or doing tax consulting, you CAN learn to be more creative!
This week we launched two new websites for Element Three clients.
The first is for GEMMS, a company that sells software exclusively to cardiologists. Element Three was responsible for the design, search engine optimized content and site-map. We partnered with
Hanapin Marketing to complete the programming of the site. Click
here to view the site.
The second site that went live this week functions as a landing page. This client, DeHart Benefit Solutions, is an independent strategic partner for AGIS. DeHart Benefit Solutions needed to link into the AGIS content - yet also have their own distinct brand. You will see the DeHart brand represented on the landing page, and then the AGIS brand is dominant on the subsequent pages. Click
here to view the site.
Element Three completed the design, content and layout of the landing page. We also were responsible for the design of the logo, company name and brand development with this client. We partnered with
Bitwise Solutions to complete the programming.
I recently developed a talk about advertising great Bill Bernbach, one of the founders of DDB (Doyle Dane Bernbach). According to
Branding Strategy Insider, Bernbach said, "You say something better if you have something to say (about your product)." And we always look for something to say. Now, whereas at the time we started (DDB) most agencies felt that once they'd found something to say they'd done their job, our point of difference was the belief that at this stage your work was only beginning."
Bernbach went on to develop advertising that started what became known as the Creative Revolution of the 60's and 70's by using insights into human nature, emotions that created the desire to purchase. His was not a scientific method but rather one based in artistry, creativity and brutal honesty. Brand communications that were developed as a result included the famous Volkswagen campaign in which the car was shown alone on a white background with headlines like, "Lemon" and "Think small." For 40 years, DDB built the brand with myriad simple, compelling messages. Other groundbreaking campaigns include those for Avis ("We try harder."), Alka Seltzer ("Thatsa spicy meatball.") and Levy's ("You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's.").
When I was a kid, I know that seeing these TV spots inspired me to later choose to work in advertising. My career started in Minneapolis during its creative heyday in the 80's (see Fallon McElligott, Carmichael Lynch) and I can attest to the legacy of Bernbach's creative approach there. It lives on still in work done in New York, London, LA, Minneapolis, Chicago and Indianapolis.
Element Three's Brand Chemistry Process, our unique deep dive discovery of the emotional core of your brand, is firmly based in the belief that, before we can create powerful brand communications, we must not only fully understand your brand's unique offering, we must also know your customer's intrinsic reasons to buy. Once we have this knowledge, we can develop advertising that I hope even Bill Bernbach would approve.
This week, President Obama gave his State of the Union message to a joint session of Congress. No matter what your political leanings, it was easy to see that one side of the chamber reacted to his message with raucous clapping and cheers. The other, silence.
[Unlike his last visit to Congress, when one member on the silent side chose to shout, "You lie!" in response.] This year, during one especially pointed comment toward the Supreme Court, one of the justices could be seen to mouth, "That's not true." Not the most effective exchange.
Just a few days later, the president took part in a gathering of Republican House members Friday in Baltimore that brought some conciliatory words from both sides, but also some pointed complaints and accusations. See more about this by clicking
here.
According to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, this was the most meaningful exchange yet between the two parties and it was what could be the first real step in having Democrats and Republicans working together for the good of the nation.
What's the point in all of this? Communication is so much more meaningful when it's two way. Let's translate this discussion to your brand communications. Are you allowing your brand's constitutents to respond to your products and services? Social media allows dialogs to develop that can inform your product or service development, even your brand itself. Knowing where and when to have this two way conversation is key. As part of our and marketing and brand positioning strategy, we can recommend the most fruitful places for your brand's two way conversations to take place. So you get as much out of them as your customers.
Logo creation services are us. Yes, like many other creative service firms, Element Three offers identity design as part of its scope of services. Yet a logo does not equal a brand. The two words are so often interchanged that it's worth taking the time to stop and reflect on the differences.
A logo is like shorthand for the essence of your organization's offering. It's the flag at the top of the mountain that is your brand. Because of this, it's the most obvious thing that everyone (marketers and consumers) think of when they think of your brand. Your brand, on the other hand, lives and breathes in the minds of your customers, your strategic partners, your competition and your internal audiences. It is the promise your organization represents.
Your brand can be brought to life through a myriad of things including your logo, your communications, your employees' actions and attitudes, your physical structure, products, signage, vehicles, buildings, interiors, clothing, services and systems. Take this altogether and you have what Tom Peters calls "The Brand Experience". This is a more holistic way to think about your brand. Everything your brand does and says affects the brand in the mind of your constituents. So hire us to design your logo. We'll be happy to do it. We'll also ask you about what it actually stands for.
This has been a desperately tough time for many designers, writers, creative directors, photographers, art directors, music composers, and on and on. The convergence of electronic, automatic solutions to creative needs combined with the downward spiral of the economy has created a perfect storm. Marketers are opting to spend less, hire less and re-use more. And I'm all for being smart about strategic marketing planning and getting the highest possible return on marketing investment.
If you read Daniel Pink's book, A Whole New Mind, you already know his prediction that we are rapidly moving through the information age into the conceptual age. The best way to win in any kind of economy is to have bigger, better ideas in the face of sameness. That's something you won't be able to find for $150 on the internet because that's where millions of others are looking, too. So those of us creative folk who do have work, lucky as we are, have to work extra hard to get all the work done with fewer colleagues. And we have to keep proving the value of our original ideas, every day. The less we count on existing ideas, the more successful our clients will be, making more opportunities for more creative minds eventually. So it's a vicious or wonderful cycle, depending on which way we choose to go.
Originality rules.
Yesterday, a group from our Indianapolis marketing firm, Element Three, was at a client in northern Indiana. On their conference room wall was the following quote:
"You must have long-range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-term failures"
First of all, I'm a sucker for a good quote, but I liked this one for other reasons. I like it for what it told about what was valued and important in their organization.
- I learned they value long-range planning. Long range planning takes discipline, foresight and communication to maintain and implement. Clients with those attributes are successful in marketing.
- I learned this organization values risk. Any company that acknowledges there will be failure, is a company that embraces calculated risk. Successful marketing and brand development requires companies take on calculated risk.
- I learned this company understands there is not a straight line to success. Marketing is based on testing, testing, testing - and measuring response. There is not a straight line to lead generation, but rather a process of hypothesis, execution, evaluation, adjustment, execution, evaluation, and on and on.
I'm excited to work with this client. With these attributes so front and center in their culture - we're set up for a successful partnership.
Are these characteristics present in your organization?
How often have you been making a list of potential ideas or solutions to a problem and been stuck? Why does this happen? Most likely, you are saying to yourself, "Wow, that last idea was great! I don't need to keep going," or "Gee, these ideas are lousy. I'm no good at this. I better stop."
Generating ideas is a key skill for developing brand communications. So here's a simple tip: don't stop and judge too fast. Come up with lots of ideas first. Work fast. Let yourself come up with as many ideas as possible. Think quantity, not quality. Later, go back over your ideas and judge them. Most of your ideas may not work but you'll have more good ones to choose from, too.
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