Posted by admin on February 16th, 2010
How do you know whether your advertising is effective or not? The answer is to track advertising response for each ad you run.
Whether you operate a retail store, a service business, a mail order operation, or an Internet marketing business, you can measure the effectiveness of your advertising.
1. Which Publications Produce Profits?
When new customers phone or visit you, ask how they found out about you. They might say they found you through your yellow pages ad or your newspaper ad.
Record the responses and resulting sales from each ad. Then, analyze whether each particular advertisement is producing the desired results.
If an advertisement consistently produces profits for you, keep running it. On the other hand, if an ad consistently performs poorly or produces a loss, discontinue it.
In mail order, you can key each ad so that you can measure the resulting sales from each publication.
For example, you could add “Dept. A” to your name or address in the ad to indicate the July issue of a particular magazine. Key it as “Dept. B” for the August issue of the same magazine. “Dept. C” could indicate the July issue of a different magazine you advertise in.
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Posted by admin on February 5th, 2010
Given enough time, one boy’s toy is an antique collector’s prized possession. Strange as that may sound, there are many collectors who would love to see an original G.I. Joe or an original Star Wars action figure. Remember He-Man? Action figures tend to be based on shows, movies, or comics that always have a following, and therefore even years after companies stop producing the figures, there are individuals who still seek to collect them. There are many a man who think of all the G.I. Joes they blew up with fireworks, only to find out twenty years later how many hundreds or even thousands of dollars their collection would have been worth if it remained in mint condition!
One interesting story dealing with action figures involves Takara, a Japanese toy company. They are best known to modern toy collectors as the company that built the original Transformers action figures. In 1974 Takara created a 4-inch humanoid action figure, which was called “MicroMan.” In the late 70’s and early 80’s this toy was brought over to the United States by the Mego Toy company, which was desperate for a hit after they made the famous blunder of passing on Star Wars. They re-named the line “Micronauts”, and created enough of a back story for Marvel Comics to get a good run of comics. Mego got several years of good sales, which was about the same size as Star Wars figures, before the whole company went down.
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Posted by admin on January 25th, 2010
Branding is no longer simply about visual appeal (or the cherry in the apple pie example, as given in my earlier article). Unfortunately, many graphic design firms who position themselves as advertising agencies believe that branding your corporate identity is all about developing great looking visual solutions.
However, there is much more to branding than just looking good. Particularly in this web 2.0 eras, where a powerful web presence has become a vital ingredient of your branding strategy, developing the right media mix holds the key to building powerful brand equity.
In other words, a right media mix would mean:
• Creative design solutions (the design, color, and content of your ads, marketing collateral and website enhance your brand equity, attract customers, and generate sales)
• Web development (every product/service worth its name has a web presence these days, some have truly interactive, animated sites encouraging customer involvement),
• Viral marketing (vitally important in today’s age of social networking, tagging, podcasting, blogs, forums, wikis and what have you)
• Television commercial production, print media advertising (traditional media cannot be overlooked)
• Strategic films (have become necessary elements of roadshows, exibhitions and other promotional campaigns)
• Corporate video production (a very important tool for branding your corporate identity)
• Direct marketing (marketing collaterals need to be just as effective and resonant with the overall branding scheme as the communicate directly with the customer)
• Outdoor advertising (hoardings, roadshows, participations in business fairs, exhibitions, etc)
There are some interactive advertising agencies that have recognized the need of the hour – developing creative design solutions that employ user-centric investigation and involve critical and systematic thinking. User-centric means understanding of needs and priorities of end user; the clients’ customers, their channel partners, users, and brand communities.
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Posted by admin on January 13th, 2010
The members of every sports team wear an embroidered logo somewhere on their sports gear. That embroidered logo is a symbol of pride. The makers of those logos are equally proud of their creations.
Who makes those embroidered logos? Does each city with a professional team have its own set of embroidery experts? If one were to look at the logo for the Philadelphia Phillies, one would get that impression. Their logo contains a liberty bell. It looks like a logo designed by a present-day Betsy Ross.
Yet “Ross” was not the last name of the family that did the embroidery for that logo. That family had a different last name. Their name was “Moritz.”
Before the depression, the Moritz family had a business focused on the making of embroidered lace. Then during the depression, Carl Moritz, the founder of the company, and two of his sons changed the nature of the company’s efforts. They got the employees to start doing the embroidery for the emblems put on sports uniforms.
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