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Needed some quotes this week to keep up the pace. Here are two new favorites.
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
– Thomas Edison
“If you can’t do it better, why do it?”
– Herbert H. Dow (Founder of Dow Chemical)
No matter what the economy, advertising your business is important. In down economies, most companies drastically cut ad budgets, and most small companies reduce advertising to nearly nothing.
Most experts predict ad spending in 2009 will be down 5-8% over last year, but for small businesses that number could be tripple or more.
The trick about advertising is simply to be smart about how you spend your money. Imagine it were your own. Don’t get oversold by print salespeople. Take fresh ideas in and evanulate your options. Find new ways to reach people. Learn about new online techniques that can hypertarget a better audience. Track your results, and always question if there is a better way.
The most important thing about advertising is creativity. Think about the superbowl commercial you still remember. What’s the last billboard your remember? What recent print ad really made an impression?
I had a friend email me some fun examples of ad examples that really made a mark. You can do something like this for any size company, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot. The magic happens when you get people taking pictures of it, then share it with their friends. A regular billboard does little. A billboard that 1,000 people twitter about, post to their facebook, or email out can reach millions.
Bic razor. $1000 custom razor + billboard.
Mr. Clean. $20 in paint, plus getting the city to allow it.
Quit smoking. $500 for outdoor adhesive, plus ad space.
Local Office Supply store. $3000 custom product, plus telling the city you'll repaint the lines every year for free.
How would you like to turn the expense of promotional products into an active revenue stream? How would you like to never pay a room rental fee again? How would you like to triple the foot traffic to your event. How would you like to never need to find another event sponsor? How would you like to negotiate half off your meal prices?
Over the next 5 blog posts I’m going to cover the broad spectrum of event planning. I’m going to dive in a little more on the topics of Event Branding, SWAG (Stuff We All Get) and Buzz. For 5 years, before starting Collar Free, I was an event planner that handled 15+ events/year, and served over 6,000 sales reps and managers for Cutco/Vector Marketing. My annual event budget was well over a $1M, and we were masters at putting on a show. Vector was a great place for a young person to work, and an even better place for a young person to learn some mad business skills on the inside.
Not many people know it but the majority of our business actually serve the business community. Collar Free was how we got started, but it takes a lot of resources, money, people and time, to launch a new brand. When we started collar free, we also created a “Custom” division to the company. Here we helped share our knowledge on promotional products (SWAG), custom apparel, commercial printing, and effective on and off-line promotion to other businesses. Now operating under the Artistic Hub umbrella, our custom division has a handful of additional products and services, and we serve all types and sizes of organizations.
This post is going to be a 5-part series on effective promotional marketing. It’s meant for Event planners, directors, and marketing managers, but can be applied to lots of industries. Here’s the outline for the next few posts:
- Branding an Event – How to lay the groundwork for a great event/campaign.
- How to Negotiate everything!
- Effective marketing through promotional products (SWAG) – Turning an expense into a revenue stream.
- How to generate Buzz!
- How to manage an event.
Read a great article today in this month’s Inc. Can’t find it on Inc.com yet, but it’s on p. 90 in the April issue. The article covers 30 classic examples of innovation. This is such great stuff. Just a bunch of tidbits on how to change the game in your business and industry.
We’re launching a new product right now, so I was really interested in the sales related stories. God I love great promotion. Below, a funny story I just had to read up more on…
Before the TV show Barney and Friends became a knock-out annoyance on the everyone’s radar, there was the unknown “Barney and The Backyard Gang,” a video series created by the Lyons Group. Actually, Barney was created in 1988 by Sheryl Leach, and was the only product of the Lyons Group, a privately held company in Allen, Tex.
The clever thing was the marketing genius here. They couldnt get the retarded Dinosaur in a single store, so they sent free tapes to area preschools to create buzz. The creater had created it for her children, and I imagine was pretty passionate about it’s possible success. Then they hired telemarketers to call on stores to stock it. Once stocked, they sent a list of stores where parents could go buy the tapes to the schools they shipped the tapes.
Barney became the best selling toy in 1993, selling over $500 million in products.
I love working here.
My friend Julio just emailed me a message worthy of sharing. I was a competitive swimmer for 12 years, and I agree with him here. Thanks Julio.
“My friend just Twitter’d me and it says, “USA Swimming suspends Michael Phelps for three months!” Can we please leave this kid alone? Here’s a guy that has been training his ASS off since the age of 9, which means he has had to sacrifice all fun.
Now, at 23, he’s a 14-time Olympic Gold Medalist, a swimming God and the benefactor of several multi-million dollar endorsements. So, the kid wants to let loose, meet a few chicks and holy shit, smoke some a little herb to relax and ponder his massive accomplishments. People, let’s worry about how we’re going to solve the economic crises. Oh, and can you call Cheech and Chong and tell them Phelps is coming over!! Go Phelps. Go Phelps. Go Phelps.”
A note from me:
I would like to note here that who should be reprimanded is the greedy paparazzi, journalist or fellow classmate looking to make a buck by spying on and taking a picture of Phelps. This unnecessary slander of a great national treasure is the real sad story.
Reading a great book, “Tribes” by Seth Godin.
Tribes is about people who become leaders because they find a way to connect people. The remarkable thing, as well pointed out here is how much the internet has changed things for people looking to connect to one another. When I started high school it seemed like only a few people knew about the internet. I remember message boards, and dial-up. I remember how frustrating computers were to sit around a wait for. Our parents didn’t have any of that.
It’s funny, I think of what I would do if I were in High School now. I’d joke about starting a fight club, but it would probably be a young entrepreneur club. Screw all those school funded clubs run by people like me or older. Doing it on my own would be more my style. I’d create a blog to track my ideas and create a small following. I’d use facebook and myspace to recruit on the macro space. I’d tap into craigslist and directly into other High Schools and post what we’re up to. Once we had a good following we’d create a ning community and help enable real interaction at a more micro level. We’d start tapping into Linkedin and get corporate sponsorship (fight club). We’d create a zazzle storefront to create and sell “entrepreneur gear”. We’d start meeting up in cities around the country. We’d start drinking coffee because we’re not even in college yet to have fake ID’s. We’d all get addicted to coffee way to early in life.
Funny how you’d do things different if you knew then what you know now.
This is a different world. This is the hyperconnected world, and it’s moving even faster now than when you you started reading a few minutes ago.
Jimmy and I used to talk about the importance of becomming an expert in your space. Over the past year and a half we have worked diligently to do just that.
Last night I attended the first meeting of a committee that we’ve recently been appointed to at the Art Institute in San Diego. Two years ago AI here started the only fashion design program in SoCal that offers a Bachelor’s Degree in the subject, something only a handful of the 40 Art Institutes in the country offer. To offer outside validation of the program AI invited in industry experts to tour the facility and review the curriculum. Present were industry professionals from Prana, Ashworth & Callaway, professors, staff and the director of the program.
What an exciting group to be a part of. Of course it seemed like most of the conversation was in a foreign language; flats, weaves, and lots of textile jargon. What I think I was able to contribute on, and what I see happening with young graduates is the on business side of things. No matter what the curriculum, or degree there are a few real world lessons graduates should learn while in school.
- Basic sales skills. Organizations run on two things, funding and sales. Funding only lasts so long (unless it’s a non-profit). As it relates here, designers need to know how to present their ideas through clear and effective communication.
- Marketing. This is one component of sales that everyone needs to be aware of. How is my product or brand being presented to the consumer? How does the all the concepts relate. Designers are very good at picking out the details. They understand, better than I do in many cases, why a certain color, fabric or design element was chosen. They understand placement and size. What must be understood is what who the customer is and what they care about.
- Practicality. Designers sometimes get carried away with how things could look, should look, or will ideally look. Sometimes that gets carried into unusual fabric selections, overuse of color and patterns, or expensive techniques. Again, who is my customer, and what are they willing to pay for? We’ve printed cool t-shirts that cost $3 for the design, and we’ve printed ones that cost $12 for the design. That cost must be passed on to the price of the product. Are consumers willing to pay three times as much?
- Networking. It’s cliche to state that “it’s not about what you know, but who you know,” but that’s the reality of the world. It’s never to early to start networking. I thought I did well with this in college because I got a business card every so often at the bars, but I now realize I started way too late. Networking is about meeting people, listening and taking an interest in what they do, and then connecting the dots on how you could help each other, or who they should meet. Once networking becomes a habit, your career takes off.
- Mentors. Probably one of the most important keys to success is finding a mentor, then finding the right mentor. You can start doing this in school, and here’s a hint, it’s not going to be your professors or career counselors (although they might be able to help you find one).
Being the founders of a start-up has required a lot more than I think either Jimmy or I had expected, but there have been some outstanding educational benefits from the hard work. I feel privileged to be a part of organizations like the Art Institute.
The current economy has been tough on retail no doubt, but for new brands to any market success can particularly challenging when people are watching their spending closely. In hard times people still spend, but they are much less likely to step out of their core brands and try new things. Here are some smart ways we are trying to hold onto our brand and make it through the storm.
- Stick to your guns. Brands are created through strategic long term goals & strong leadership at the top. As a founder we are the eyes and ears to the organization, but we must also be the filters.
- Be flexible. It sounds like a contradiction from above, but a brand must have flexibility. In the beginning we thought we had to sit down and clearly define our brand strategy, decide who we were and make our product a living example of it. What we’ve found out is that it is a important to let your customers clearly define the brand for you. They’ll help show you what works and what does not. Ask for their feedback, and you’d be surprised at how much they’ll share with you.
- Be a steward of your core values. If your customers ride the bus, you must get them going in the right direction, or at least give them the map. For us the core message has been ideas like “support independent artists”, “change the way fashion is made”, and “live an independent lifestyle”. Our core values were defined early on as Independence (the idea), Recognition (the promise to our artists) & Quality (the promise to our customers).
- Extend your brand. What other products or services do these core values apply to? If we are a community for artists worldwide, how else can we create opportunity for those artists? New clothing lines, new design competitions, events, partnerships, etc. These are all great channels we’ve found to drive Collar Free further into the market.
A quick props out to a great clothing line I just heard of…
I was out searching for a new boutiques yesterday, and came accross a great new brand, Jedididah Clothing. These guys rock! Great product and great message.
We’re looking for new office space and Jimmy & I have put a lot of thought into what space screams Collar Free. It’s a great thing we’re in such a great market right now for renters because it’s given us so many options at such great prices.
We are strong proponents of the concept that your brand is most accurately expressed by the front lines…your staff, and your office. They create the marketing behind what you do, they create the reality behind the perception. So what screams Collar Free? Meetings on bean bags, recess with trampolines?
My first job out of college was working for a contract furniture dealership in Milwaukee. It gave me the chance to see lots of great office settings. Even though Milwaukee wasn’t the prime market for it, I’m a huge fan of the open office plan. My cousin Michael owns this great design company there called McDill Design. The had an open office much like the pictures I used to see of the concepts made famous by Monster.com and Google.
In Cailfornia, everybody uses this concept of the open space. Some of the great benefits of this are in communication, accessibility and flexibility. When you go into an accounting or law firm, communication is impeded by all the closed off spaces. There are “formal” communication areas. I’ve seen places that make you schedule there use, Steelcase even has a product that comes with wall mounted LCD controls to monitor their use & they’re hella expensive. If I want to talk to someone, I’ll walk over to their damn desk. Sound masking and privacy were the big problems with spaces like this, but I think there can be great benefits there if you have the right people (or if you give everybody headphones).
Branding is in the Details 