When it comes to marketing and advertising, for me the fun kicks in with the creation and development of the advertisements. These creations become the many faces of the brand. It’s what people see, hear and experience. We branders carry the ball and hope that our plays are executed with enough punch to help our clients score.
Of course, the fun of effective advertising doesn’t happen without all the front-end hard work of figuring out where to place the ads and to whom we want the ads aimed. That’s marketing. Advertising is a subset of marketing – the pointer finger next to the thumb – along with strategy, pricing, distribution, and products like signs, displays and graphics.
David Ogilvy is considered by many in the industry to be one of the founding fathers of modern advertising who preached the importance of creativity with communication within advertising. I am not as widely well-known or accepted by my branding peers as Ogilvy. In fact, they might innocently mistake any recognition of my name as being associated with a popular brand of many years past contained in a can of Franco-American Spaghetti with Meatballs.
But a little-known fact is that David and I share something in common; the codfish. Specifically, there’s a little anonymous poem that he and I have both used from time to time to help illustrate the importance and value of advertising to boost brand awareness, increase sales, and grow a business. And it goes like this …
“The codfish lays ten thousand eggs. The homely hen lays one. The codfish never cackles to tell what she’s done. And so we scorn the codfish, while the humble hen we prize. Which only goes to show you that it pays to advertise!”
Although most would agree that marketing and advertising, or cackling, have their places, and they are necessary to building a brand, I still find many instances where an organization doesn’t do them for one reason or another, or doesn’t do them enough, or well enough, or at all. This presents opportunity, and why I’m still in business. And its common-fortunately for me.
I can understand why a business outside of the sign and graphics industry can use our help to create branding for them that build impressions. I don’t understand why so many shops in the industry that understand the value of branding do not apply the time, effort, and resources to their own operations. Then years later wonder why they are not growing or have to continue to work so hard to attract the sorts of jobs and project opportunities that best fit the products and services they want to provide.
In other words, many times in business you find a sweet spot. The sweet spot is the thing you do that you like, others pay for it, everybody is happy, and you find it be most rewarding financially. The sweet spot is where your strengths and passions intersect.
You might make all kinds of signs, for instance, but then a certain job comes along and has you making a special sort of sign not done before with unique materials or methods. The result is stunning and profitable. You then decide boy, wouldn’t it be cool if we did one or two of these each month?
If so, it most likely won’t happen on accident. You need to bring attention to it. You need to cackle. What you want in your business has to come about from vision, a plan, and the carrying out of that plan. Part of that plan should include branding.
I did this with my own shop. I wanted to grow and diversify. So I began a process of applying the very same branding principles that I was using with my clients that included some cackling. Allow me now to share ten of them in brief. Perhaps they will inspire some ideas for you and your business.
The Tag Line
Most people and organizations focus on a name and a logo as their primary pieces of branding. I would add a good tag line to the list. All three contribute to how well a business, service, or brand is perceived, received, and experienced in the marketplace. The tag line provides the platform to be creative and expand the breadth of the brand. Keep it simple. Make it fun. Like GEICO; Even a caveman can do it.
The Logo
A logo can be more memorable than a name. That’s because often things visual can be more powerful or have more impact than just words read or heard. A lot goes into creating an effective logo including the right choices of colors and shapes that help define and properly portray the brand.
Divisions
To help grow our business, we branded all our services separately but under one common theme and tag line; More Than Signs, We Build Impressions. Each segment of our business became its own unique brand with an individual name and logo; one for signs, one for custom fabrication, and one for printed graphics. By doing this, you get more purposeful in the market, and the market gets to know your specialties, which in turn leads to growing sales.
Associations
Networking and connecting to develop your contacts and clients is important. I fully believe and endorse getting involved with your trade associations. But think about others that provide you a channel into niche or targeted markets. An example would be the AIA, the Architect’s Institute of America. Because we had an architectural fabrication division, becoming involved with AIA helped us gain access to architects and the construction trades that would buy our products.
Clientele
We all want and need clients. Our customers become conduits to ongoing projects and jobs. Not all clients are good ones, though. It helps when in the mood to capture more clients that you take time to figure out the type or specific client you want, then tailor your efforts so they are aimed right at them. At one time, I wanted some multi family housing accounts. By focusing time and resources, I found the means and processes that allowed us to enter into that particular industry, then get the work we wanted.
Exhibiting
Trade shows, events, seminars and conferences are great places to meet people and cultivate opportunities. It’s one thing to attend them. It’s another to sponsor them. But by exhibiting, you get to the heart of developing new relationships or strengthening them. Again, the practice of premeditating and planning can pay off by picking unique places to exhibit where you have less to no competition in the room. We repeatedly setup to showcase our company to school administrators and managers of facilities and properties, who all buy signs.
Presenting
Even better than exhibiting is presenting. Why? As the presenter, you become the expert. But this takes experience and practice to pull it off. It often requires a bit of aggressiveness and assertiveness because you might have to out and sell yourself in order to land these opportunities. Invitations to present don’t just land in your lap. But once you do one, and do it well, word and reputation travels, thus making the next one easier. Presenting lets you share what you know or want others to know to a captive audience. With enough planning, it can fun and rewarding while bringing new leads to your company.
Hosting
Hosting an event has a similar effect on growth as presenting but elevates the status of your entire organization up a few more notches. Not only are people attending an event, but its your event. Whenever technology was on the verge of significantly impacting the sign and graphics industry, we would proactively put together open events or events by invite where attendees would be entertained, enlightened, and educated. We would co host these events with chosen vendors who would expertly show and tell about LEDs, EMCs, substrates, techniques and products. We would then position ourselves as the resources and means of obtaining those things, and we’d make you want those things. Why? Because they built impressions.
Communicating
Communication builds impressions. How you communicate, what you communicate, where you communicate, to whom you communicate-all these must be considered when you cackle and bring attention to your business. I’m a firm advocate of communication in all its forms. In our twenty five years in the signs and graphics business, we’ve been on TV, on radio, in printed ads and submitted stories to the local papers. We developed a blog, a quarterly news letter, email campaigns and published books. As you see, I still write articles, too.
Awards
Sometimes, and its nice when it happens, you or your business get recognized or receive a well deserved award of some kind. But most of the time, from at least my experience, the time silently flies right by and takes any sort of award with it. Years of hard work can go unnoticed. That might be acceptable for the codfish, but not for the homely hen. She creates a reason to make herself prized. She takes matters into her own hands (if she had them). I’ve learned from her. Our company has received several awards over the years that have come about because we took initiative to nominate ourselves or allowed us to become involved in something meaningful that resulted in recognition.
I once wrote our success story to find it selected as a company of the year where I was able to take our staff to a nice dinner and stand on a stage as the sponsoring entity told our story and gave us an award.
The award then becomes marketing and advertising.
Conclusion:
You want to build impressions better than your competition. You need to build the right kinds of impressions that bring attention where you want it. Knowing where is a first step. Once you know, its time to honk the horn, make noise, and cackle-creatively.
Branding goes hand in hand with growing a business and increasing sales. It takes a process that involves patience and persistence. But it pay off in many ways. Hopefully some of the ideas presented here will help you define and determine what to do, then cackle about it.
