Look up! A simple marketing idea

Walking along recently I was forced to look up by the contrast of a brilliantly lit building in my area. Amongst the finery of Mayfair the luminescent glow of green, yellow and blue neon tubes draped in windows definitely got my attention.

As did the fact that the very beautiful building is for rent.

Elegant, cool, effective and low cost. Love it.

YOU? What could you do that with a bit of creativity could have a BIG impact?

Dreaming in BIG

Innovation and inspiration can come from any angle. But inevitably they come from dreaming of ideas.

So why dream from the possible?

Why not dream from the seeming impossible?

Why not dream in BIG?

Some great business examples include Kiva, Old Spice (the campaign), Earth Hour and Flickr.

I'm dreaming of you dreaming in BIG and it's making me dream in BIG. Fancy that.

You? What's your BIG dream?

Image and artwork credit: Christo and Jean-Claude

Fishing for global insight

Understanding your customers and brand perceptions in multiple countries is not a one size fits all project. Differences in cultures, infrastructure, communication channels and sheer geography mean that one methodology will often not work across different countries, as articulated well in this Marketing Week article by Steve Hemsley.

The difficulties and expense that these studies can represent is considerable and can cause conflict between offices.

So why not enlist the local team as the local experts they already are - and empower them to collect and collate the research for you? Working from central questions and a rigorous framework, just expressed differently in different regions (in consultation with a research expert), doing the hands-on research can only help local teams get closer to customers, more engaged in the results and implications.

Creative research methodologies involving imagery, stories and clear, repeatable metrics could create a wealth of layered multi-national customer insight, at lower cost and deeper engagement, for both your team and your customers. Who knows, maybe your sales manager, accountant or CEO might enjoy the venture into something different!

Your team will now know how to fish, and will be able to repeat to catch more tasty insights in the future.

You? Do you think this is possible, flawed or will work for your organisation?

Image credit

An ice rink for Christmas

Sometimes the most powerful form marketing is to capture the feeling of your brand and make it tangible for potential customers.

And that is exactly what Tiffany & Co. have done with their sponsorship of Somerset House Ice Skating in London, UK.

The experience is magical, laced with excitement and romance in the most elegant of ways.

Totally Tiffany & Co.

You? How can you capture the emotion of your brand and make it tangible for customers, what is the purest expression of that - could it be a picnic in the park, a monster truck show or a high-flying stunt?

Prolonging the love

Following on from my post about celebrating the depression I was inspired by reading a trend-spotting, or rather trend-capturing article on Care and Repair by Jane Fulton-Suri of IDEO.

It demonstrates examples of a return to traditional notions of quality, care of items and repair, rather than ongoing consumption. Great examples include lastyearsmodel.com and Model Shoe Renew in Berkeley, California.

From a customer perspective, how could you help them get satisfaction in this new way of thinking?

- Could you offer a service to re-model and re-style people's favourite garments, giving budding fashion designers an outlet and experience and customers a chance to participate in the design process?

- Why not offer car maintenance workshops, like home depot DIY classes - but for care maintenance. Everything from tuning to the sperfect polish. Could you make it a social occassion, have a girls only session or simply create a small chance for people to have fun while helping them care for their cars? Imagine how much more into their car (and potentially your brand) they will feel once they are more comfortable under the hood?
- Could you start an organisation that provided a warm, cosy and fun place for people to learn old-fashioned 'Home Economics'? Imagine a lively space that engages older people sharing their old-time skills and younger people coming in with their shared energy and walking away with their newly made scarves, darned clothers or steaming loaves of bread.

From a brand perspective, would your brand be the one that they would re-sole year after year?

Image credit: Sewingsewingmachines.net

Eleven ideas to celebrate the depression

Recently I read a statement delivered by the esteemed NY Times Economics Columnist, Paul Krugman to the ANA.

"History tells us that we should not count on any kind of recovery anytime soon," he said. "The economy is depressed because people don't want to spend."

It was reported as a pronouncement of ongoing doom and caution.

What if we keep it real and accept that people are just behaving the way they need to in order to look after themselves and their families. This is our customers adjusting as needed to live well in the future. Surely this is a good thing?

So, to celebrate our customers newly focusing on that which is important to them and responding in new and creative ways to the challenge, here are 11 ideas to help customers celebrate the depression:

1. Send your customers a surprise bonus - just because. An extra something, a discount, $10 off their bill, some ideas on how they can use your service more efficiently.
2. Use your power to help your customer. If you have large purchasing power, special relationships with suppliers or unique access to places and objects - how can you leverage this for your customers benefit?
3. Do less. Charge less. Ask your customers what they can do without to pay less.
4. Support customers' re-focused lives - what about supporting local volunteering organisations, holding a street-long open dinner party or supporting walking to school?
5. Facilitate re-training and re-employment activities - start / wrap in a re-training program at your business that supports people that may have had forcible employment changes. Help them help each other.
6. Promote the great new more financially conscious lifestyle people are living, publicly. I saw a great campaign with luscious luxe green styling with the message "saving is the new spending". How can you make your customers feel proud of their new conscious choices?
7. Spend less as an organisation. Tell people people about it and the fact that this means that you did not need to put up your charges to them.
8. Spark a 'tight-ass tuesday' dinner party idea for customers. Share recipes, images, theme ideas and social linkages to help them do it.
9. Sponsor a council to create local free events for your area.
10. Utilise your space. Is your foyer, meeting rooms or carpark unused at times - how could you share this with customers to help them achieve their goals more cost effectively?
11. Support people to get and stay engaged in their community, irrespective of their work status. A great example of this is the Innocent big knit.

All of these celebrate the reality of people being more conscious and financially responsible whilst supporting your goal of increasing awareness and loyalty.

I don't know about you...but I'm feeling ready to get out and celebrate right about now :)

You? How are you helping customers celebrate the depression. Or do you think this is unreasonably fluffy for cash-constrained marketing budgets to contemplate?

Image Credit: Life Magazine (via http://www.chrisperruna.com/category/misc/)

stop talking.

Recently there has been discussions, presentations and articles (check out the interesting link to the Age of Singularity from @RyanMacJones here) upon the notion of 'brand purpose'. Essentially, this is a re-badged blend of a good old fashioned brand vision and corporate social responsibility (CSR) marketing.

My challenge: stop talking about it to your peers and do good things.

As a marketer we need to sell constantly, to our management, our sales team and our peers to get our ideas across and implemented. Taking the principle of brand purpose at it's base level - the whole point is to do good things. And do so in a way that sustainable for your business (i.e. delivers profitability).

So now that you have sold it in - stop talking, start doing.

You? What are some of the great brand purpose initiatives you are initiating?

Image credit: Zami.com