Advertising & Marketing

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Sequels, Reboots and the International Box Office

Posted on by Daniel Arriola

A question that has been on my mind of late is why are so many movie sequels released each year? And to be clear, I’m not referring to ones like The Dark Knight Rises or Skyfall. I can’t wait to see those. I mean ones I might opt to catch on network television or, you know, not at all.

In 2011, eight of the top ten grossing movies were sequels. This consisted of Harry Potter, Transformers, Twilight, Fast Five, etc. Each of those franchises has an enormous fan base, so it makes sense that they’d do well in theaters and later on when released to DVD. What I don’t understand is why a movie that underperforms at the box office gets revived and brought back for a second or third go.

Roger Ebert listed Baby Geniuses as the worst film of 1999. Its sequel, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 is considered one of the worst movies ever made, and both have (un)successfully found their way to IMDb’s Bottom 100, a list of the worst movies ever released. There’s also Return to the Blue Lagoon, Speed 2 and Son of the Mask. None of these premises seem remotely plausible, but that’s easy to gloss oA more recent example would be The Green Lantern. Production on the 2011 film cost around $200M, and the marketing budget was somewhere in the $100M ballpark. To date, the film has grossed a total of $220M. But despite generally unfavorable reviews, and the $80M loss, a sequel has been announced, albeit unofficially. That’s not to say that the next movie will bomb by default; Warner Bros. can turn the franchise around. It did with Batman & Robin, a 3.6 on IMDb, to Batman Begins, an 8.3, so it’s certainly not improbable.

None of this is to say that Hollywood’s creativity is waxing or waning. I want to point that out because this argument is inevitably brought up when it comes to talk of the overwhelming number of pending sequels. I don’t think that’s the case given the release schedule through the end of the year, which looks amazing, but Hollywood’s down numbers are often attributed to a lack of original work. The basic claim being that a shortage of compelling material results in dips at the box office.

While that can certainly be the case sometimes, the fact of the matter is that unoriginal movies are typically made because numbers are down and not the other way around. Building on an existing franchise is a safer bet than starting from scratch, especially abroad in the international box office.

In 2011, the foreign box office accounted for 69% of overall sales according to the MPAA. When box office receipts in North America slipped to $10.2B, they were somewhere at or around $22.4B internationally. And for a number of films that had less than spectacular openings and runs stateside, several were able to gain traction abroad and recoup costs. Underworld Awakening made $62M domestically on a $70M production budget. Abroad, it raked in just under $98M bringing it to a total of $160M. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance earned $51M domestically and about $81M internationally. Wrath of the Titans made $83M in the states but $218M overseas. Most impressively, MIB: 3, which was released at the end of May, has generated $169M stateside and $429M in foreign territories.

So if each international region experienced box office growth in 2011, with China leading the pack by 35% growth in 2011 alone, will this affect which movies get released here and abroad? Maybe. Stephen Saltzman, a Hollywood lawyer who has handled several Chinese film deals, says, “People are trying to design projects for success globally, but producers today really have to make a judgment call about if their films can really appeal to both the Chinese and English speaking markets.”

So what translates well and what doesn’t? Very generally speaking, special effects driven films consistently do well overseas because explosions and fist fighting translate pretty seamlessly from one language to the next, as does the fear of giant robots. Transformers, Underworld, Wrath of the Titans, and Nicholas Cage vomiting fire in Ghost Rider each fit that bill. What doesn’t make the jump nearly as much is American comedy. I won’t say that’s always the case, but something tends to get lost in translation (e.g., with Will Ferrell movies). They typically fall flat overseas leaving audiences more confused than anything else.

In the near future, studios will undoubtedly continue to be incentivized to produce flicks that appeal to the widest demographic. Stateside, the box office ebbs and flows because it’s very much cyclical. Sometimes, it’s great. Other times, not so much. In countries around the world, the box office is booming. And if it continues to, I would expect to see major studios concentrate on more inclusive films and less so on ones with highly specific followings.

That’s not to say that great films won’t be produced independently or otherwise. Despite the large number of sequels produced last year, some which may have been lacking in substance, also released was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Artist, The Descendants, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life and War Horse. This year, the box office is estimated to be up nearly 14% according to John Fithian, President of the National Association of Theatre Owners. Maybe that’s enough for now. In any which case, this is definitely a reminder that we have a responsibility to support really great art whether that’s a summer blockbuster or an indie flick. It’s certainly possible to love both.

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Outdoor Advertising

Posted on by Daniel Arriola

One of the earliest mediums of mass communication was the stele of ancient Egypt. Made of basalt, these tablets were about five-feet long, two and a half-feet wide and eleven-inches thick. Displayed prominently in high traffic areas, these stelais were the earliest form of mass advertising known to man. Fast forward several thousand years, and we’re kind of doing the same thing. Between the two, we’ve had numerous developments and breakthroughs in technology. We went from papyrus to paper. We built the printing press, the Internet, Facebook. So what changed or… what didn’t?

Once upon a time, outdoor advertising came in a variety of sizes. Okay, it still does. What’s different is that it can be posted basically anywhere. Aside from posters and bulletins, you’ll see advertising on newsstands, bus benches, on buses themselves, blimps, on gas pumps at gas stations, everywhere. The different shapes and sizes facilitate reaching consumers seamlessly, several times a day, from when they commute to work to when they pop out for lunch or coffee to when they leave to go home. Doing so presents both challenges and opportunities to those searching for the perfect marketing mix. As a word of caution, the more you segment and target, the more complicated your advertising campaign will inevitably become. Though, complicated does not necessarily equate to bad. For me, the objective is to reach the right people at the right times, which is convenient because outdoor advertising thrives on simplicity.

To be forthright, writing this entry has been really hard. Mainly, because you won’t find actionable metrics you can leverage like you will from the different analytics services you currently use. It’s difficult to link a piece of signage and the completion of a call-to-action. And when I say difficult, I mean it more closely represents shooting in the dark. That’s why marketers will typically prefer to buy placement in newspaper and magazines and continue to allocate their marketing dollars to online ad spend despite the fact that click-through-rates (CTR) are abysmal. Despite this, billboards are everywhere, and companies still pay to erect messaging on them. Why? Because you don’t have to try and convert the non-believers with truncated messaging in the smallest of windows only for them to maybe navigate to your website and then drop off. Billboards aren’t supposed to persuade. It’s a place where you can establish your business’s name and strengthen its image.

In a given year, there are about 250 business days after you subtract weekends and bank holidays. My commute to and from work takes roughly an hour combined each day, so we can safely say I commute around 250 hours in a year. That’s approximately 10.5 days sitting in my car just driving to and from the office. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, on average, Americans spend more than 100 hours per year commuting. I don’t think that’s a very a good estimate, but you get the picture. Multiply this by the thousands of commuters driving down the highway, walking down the street or whatever you may have, and you have a monstrous reach that has mass target potential. You’re no longer honing in on just your target demographic but everyone past that. Frequency builds awareness. Awareness builds familiarity, and familiarity builds trust. Because in the end, unaided brand recall can be seen as the pinnacle of any advertising campaign. It indicates superiority relative to all of its competitors, and sometimes it becomes so dominant that consumers are only able to recall that one brand. History is full of such examples. Coca Cola was once so popular that people referred to all soda as “Coke.” “Fridge” is actually short for Frigidaire, not refrigerator. Photocopiers are often referred to as the “Xerox,” tissues as “Kleenex,” bandages as “Band-Aids” and petroleum jelly as “Vaseline.”

That’s not to say that the correlation is if you use outdoor advertising, your brand will become a household name around America. The takeaway is that these brands achieved widespread success by promoting recall instead of focusing on persuasion. If you’re already using cost per mille (CPM) advertising, you might want to start shopping around for outdoor ad buys.

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Movie Marketing

Posted on by Daniel Arriola

Once upon a time, Hollywood could sell a movie with a trailer, some posters and a few billboards. Today, studios struggle to fill seats past opening weekend even with massive marketing budgets.

Though the film industry grosses billions of dollars each and every year, very few films actually turn a profit because of the tremendous costs accrued during production and later on in advertising. To further exacerbate the situation, a picture really only has its opening weekend to gain traction and garner positive reception from its audiences, mainly, because reviews in the paper as well as those from friends and family members can make or break a film.

In a Stradella Road study, conducted by surveying 4,000 moviegoers, 29% said they were much more likely to see a film that was reviewed positively by a professional movie critic. 41% said they were if they heard the review from a fellow moviegoer. Conversely, only 28% decided not to see a film because a professional critic negatively reviewed it. 40% said they would not if a fellow moviegoer gave a similar negative review. With so many potential blockbusters fighting for the same key demographics, Hollywood relies on a few hits each season to make up for the majority of films that fail to recoup their costs.

Each major studio has a marketing department dedicated to creating and executing a cohesive advertising campaign across several different mediums. Theatrical trailers are often the first interaction a studio has with its prospective target audience where it provides moviegoers a sampling of a film’s strong suits while leaving them wanting more. At or around the same time, an interactive web site for the film is unveiled. A typical movie site allows visitors to view multiple versions of the trailer, watch behind-the-scenes interviews, short production documentaries, download media, play games and chat in forums.

As the release date of a film draws closer, marketers try to gain favorable press coverage as early as possible. This usually takes form in junkets, press releases as well as interviews on TV and on the radio. More recently, online Q&A sessions with the makers and stars of films have become increasingly popular.

Just weeks before a movie premiers worldwide, movie marketers start an all-out public relations blitz that serves two purposes. First, with the constant bombardment of ads in the paper, on billboards, TV, radio, online, the goal is to turn a movie into a household name where it ends up being more difficult for anyone not to notice the movie’s release. Second, the media blitz serves to convince the public that the film is something that cannot be missed.

Another strategy is to use product placement, better known as tie-ins, and corporate partnerships that go beyond action figures and lunch boxes. Disney lined up an estimated $100 million in Avengers-related marketing by partners including Hershey, Harley-Davidson, Wyndham Worldwide and Honda Motor’s Acura, which served to supplement Disney’s own estimated $150 million marketing budget as well as position itself in stores across the country.

Target's "Young Avengers," Marketing Target’s “Young Avengers” Commercial

Despite all this, moviemaking remains to be an inherently risky business. Movies implode just as frequently as ever, if not more so, on the basis that moviegoers are more discerning than ever. Studios try to mitigate this by heavily marketing films to protect their investments, but the downside is that, in the process, films inevitably become more expensive.

The Shawshank Redemption is listed in the top spot on IMDB.com’s Top 250. In 1994, when it was released in theaters, it raked in a very modest $28,000,000. Ironically, it would later earn seven Academy Award® nods and be played weekly on network television for the next 18 years. The simple fact of the matter is that while it underperformed at the box office for several reasons, poor marketing was a major factor. At the time of its release, no one knew what the movie was about.

This very same problem played itself out again this year in John Carter. Aside from the blunders often cited in papers, at around the time of its release, very few people knew that the film was based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs cult-classic published between 1912-1943 that, per Wikipedia, “inspired a number of well known science fiction writers in the 20th century, and also key scientists involved in both space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life.” That much was left out of the marketing campaign that went completely under the radar. Instead, the studio tried to make the film as inclusive as possible and advertised it to the widest demographic in Disney’s kid friendly format, which resulted in disaster for the studio.

The better alternative here would have been to implement a niche busting marketing plan. For the film industry, this would entail marketing a movie heavily to highly specific audience segments rather than solely based on genre. For a film like John Carter, something as simple as promoting at Comic-Con would have likely gone a long way, but Disney skipped out there. On average, 125,000 sci-fi, comic and cartoon enthusiasts attend conventions each year around the country, and they might have backed the film in its infancy. Instead, the studio missed what would have been a golden opportunity.

12-weeks prior to the release of The Hunger Games, the film boasted over 2,000,000 fans on Facebook. At that same benchmark, John Carter had around 40,000. According to the Pew Research Center, 95% of teenagers between 12-17 use social media and watch twice as much video on mobile devices. Because this demographic shells out more money at the theater than any other, a big push into social media wouldn’t have hurt.

Conveniently, promoting a product online is much cheaper than buying spots on primetime television. While there are other factors that come into play like having the right script, director, cast and crew. Providing context to the Burroughs’ legacy would have very obviously helped. Casting someone else in place of Taylor Kitsch could have as well. While casting an A-list star doesn’t guarantee success, it does lend itself a fan base and generates buzz.

There are a countless number of ways the marketing strategy and execution could have been done differently, but hindsight is 20/20. It’s one thing to promote a movie like every other that preceded it and all the ones it’s presently or soon to be competing with. It’s another to make it stand apart. Knowing and understanding who your target market is and what they want is the first step.

Linked is our next installment in this series on movie marketing.

Photo Credit: ChristieTaylorOnline

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Custom Packaging Design

Posted on by Daniel Arriola

Jesse Kirsch, Packaging DesignYou’re at the grocery store looking for laundry detergent, and your go to brand is sold out. There are two comparable substitutes sitting side-by-side on a shelf, but you’re not familiar with either. Which one do you buy? More likely than not, the one that does the best job conveying both quality and value. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably thinking that you’re going to be stuck with whichever one you decide to buy for the next couple of months, so you might end up focusing more on mitigating your opportunity cost than finding something you love.

Whether you realize it or not, packaging gives form. And like any other marketing medium, its function is to help move consumers further along in the buying cycle by shaping perception, working as a tool for differentiation and, in the end, reassuring buyers that their purchase decision is the right one at both the point of sale and every time the product is used afterwards. Though prospective buyers might not know it, they want to be motivated because most, if not all, of their buying decisions are based on information sought out actively and passively.

The process begins with our perception of external stimuli. Marketers and retailers understand that perception can influence our behavior without our conscious knowledge, so they create products and stores, specifically, to maximize consumer spending. To learn more about this aspect of retail, check out our entry on “The Psychology of Advertising” here.

In order for us to efficiently function in this crowded environment, we choose to perceive certain stimuli while ignoring others. This is called “selectivity.” Selectivity lets us focus our attention on cues that provide meaning, while filtering out noise, so as not to waste our finite resources processing irrelevant information. “Thin slicing” is a term psychologists use to describe our capacity to make decisions quickly with minimal information. By and large, thinking is unanimously described as a conscious effort. Thin slicing more closely represents an instinctive behavior.

When faced with a new buying situation, a consumer will typically form a decision for choosing a product based on the information on or around the product, as well as the packaging itself, somewhere in the ballpark of two to four seconds. Generally speaking, shopping is a low-involvement, low-priority event that requires little or no mental or emotional investment, so packaging design should serve to connect the dots between a problem, or want, and a solution.

So what should you do to make your abbreviated sales pitch more memorable?

Consider how you might highlight your product’s image. What qualities set it apart from its competitors? What qualities make it better than any of its countless substitutes? Additional considerations should include your consumer’s involvement level, any possible time constraints and/or characteristics that spread across the aggregate.

Your packaging isn’t any different than a full-page advertisement for your company, more so for that particular product. It’s the vehicle that converts your brand’s identity, its positioning and your company’s culture into something tangible. So yes, it should be taken pretty seriously because a high-quality product coupled with high-quality packaging design conveys excellence, which translates into value in your buyer’s mind.

If you don’t know where to start, consider contacting a professional. As it happens, Bravo Design, Inc. does custom packaging design and has a proven track record doing so for entertainment and consumer packaged goods. Packaging is your first interaction with a customer. We recommend you put your best foot forward.

Photo credit: Kitsune Noir, Jesse Kirsch

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Actionable Metrics vs. Vanity Metrics

Posted on by Daniel Arriola

Throughout advertising’s history, drawing a line from a traditional asset to a sale has been notoriously difficult, but the Internet changed that. Early on, it offered a distinct advantage over its older, offline predecessors: measurability. But despite the enormous progress made, measurement is still one of the major challenges facing both the industry and business owners. Unfortunately, the majority of data made readily available by analytics packages are vanity metrics that scrutinize at a superficial level. They’re useful in the right context and will tell you if your site is engaging or not and how visitors interact with it. But vanity metrics don’t necessarily correlate to more important numbers like cost of new customers acquisition, lifetime value, revenues and profits nor do they affect overall marketing or business goals. Vanity metrics are only focused on because they look great in press releases. The analytics that entrepreneurs should be more concerned with are actionable metrics that help them make decisions.

Think about your most recent website traffic report. What have you done with that? Do you know what drove those visitors to your page? Do you know what actions to take next or how to leverage that traffic? A business that only cares about its daily hit count is the same as a store that only cares about the number of people who come through its doors but not necessarily that they purchase anything. Generally speaking, marketers and advertisers tend to believe that whatever they were working on that immediately precedes a spike in traffic (i.e., new products, promotions or policy) probably caused it. We infer causation from correlation. We aren’t, however, quick to jump on the sword when the numbers go back down. The reality is that a response to a marketing program may often be the result of the cumulative effects of an entire campaign rather than a response to a single advertisement or promotion.

Moving forward, goals should be reoriented not just to validate that you’ve built something people want but also to confirm that your efforts to grow your business are fruitful and paying dividends. This is where you establish and define your product’s unique value proposition. So what should you be focus on instead? Listed below are ways to finding metrics you can act on that will impact your bottom line.

Not everyone who comes to your website will make a purchase or complete your designated call-to-action. That’s a given. Conversion funnels reveal when or where visitors drop-off and are used to mitigate this on a page-by-page basis. An analysis of visitor flow path diagnoses the problems that derail conversion, leading to improved usability and/or the implementation of more effective calls-to-action at each step of the way. Remember that users will almost always opt for the path of least resistance so make it easier by simplifying the process for them. The only problem is that they don’t track long lifecycle events, and almost all of them use a reporting period where events generated in that period are aggregated across all users skewing numbers at the fringes of the funnel.

That’s where cohort analysis comes in. This involves segmenting your users into smaller groups, using shared common characteristics or experiences within a defined period, to compare against one another. As an example, let’s say that you’re wanting to increase sales on an application on the Android Market. To do so, you group together users who download the free demo on week one, those on week two, those on week three and so forth. From there, you might find that of the first group, X% went on to purchase the application. Of the second group, Y% made purchases. Of the third group, Z% went on to make theirs. At that point, you’re able to evaluate any changes made which correlate back to your results and fine tune from there. This prevents influxes in traffic due to blog updates, PR/advertising, your competitors or extraneous variables from skewing your numbers.

In A/B split-tests, you have two versions of an element and a metric that defines success. To determine which is better, say it’s a new homepage layout, you randomly split your website traffic between two groups and measure their performance based on visitor flow, bounce rate and/or whether or nor your designated call-to-action is satisfied. At the end of testing, you can select the version that performs best for real-life use. Split testing is effective because it definitively confirms or denies if changes in layout, copy, design, etc. are beneficial not.

Figuring out which metrics to use, and which ones to discard, is difficult because every business is different, and the process is one that iterates itself over and over again. The best solution for you is the one that works best for your customers and/or users so don’t assume too much upfront. Measure what matters. It’s easy to think that more reports is better, but it’s not. The key is to have as few as possible. When in doubt, remember that users seek out sites in a goal-oriented fashion (e.g., to learn more about a company, to sign up for a newsletter and/or to shop). Provide a great first experience, and they might just come back and make a purchase.

If you have questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the fields below. To learn more about how Bravo Design, Inc. can contribute to your growing business, click here or fill out a contact form by here.

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Klout

Posted on by skulkaew

Average Klout ScoreFirst and foremost, to those of you who have been checking this blog regularly over the course of the last few months, we want to say thank you. It’s been a goal of ours to provide resources that help small to mid-sized business owners, marketers and designers run their businesses as best as they can. If you think we’ve been successful there, do us a favor and let us know. Conversely, if there are things we can improve on, feel free to drop us a line. We’d like to hear what you have to say.

Last spring, Sam Fiorella interviewed at a marketing agency in Toronto. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford and Kraft, Fiorella was confident in his qualifications. But during the interview, he was caught by surprise when he was asked about his Klout score. Fiorella initially hesitated before eventually confessing that he didn’t know what a Klout score was. The person conducting the interview pulled up the webpage for the service, that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100 based on “the ability to drive action,” and turned the monitor so that Fiorella could see the result for himself. His score was a modest 34. While the average score is at or around 20, the company ultimately ended up hiring someone with a score of 67.

Klout is an algorithmic system that purports itself as the “standard for influence.” It’s calculated using variables that includes follower count, frequency of updates, the Klout scores of your friends and followers as well as the number of likes and shares your updates receive. And if you have a public Twitter account, you’ve been assigned a Klout score. That is unless you’ve opted out on the website.

Before you start worrying, Klout might not be the accurate representation it’s hyped up to be, and it can be manipulated. To put the scoring distribution into perspective, Warren Buffett has a 34. President Obama has a 93, and Justin Bieber is the one person with the full-score of 100. By Klout’s measure, the Oracle from Omaha and the leader of the free world each have less influence than the 18-year-old pop star, which can’t be right.

But maybe more importantly, outside of marketers, most people probably don’t know what Klout is. And for those who do, many of them just don’t care. When it comes down to it, if a prospective employer is reluctant or unwilling to hire you because of your score, you probably don’t want to work there anyway.

So if it’s not everything and making major decisions solely on it is silly, why mention it at all?

Because we all benefit from ranking signals. PageRank helps us find better data by tallying inbound hyperlinks that act as votes of confidence. AuthorRank carries attributes based on trust and authority. Trending subjects reveal the most talked about topics in real time. None of these social graphs, Klout included, is perfect, but they do help us make sense out of all the noise around us.

Additionally, businesses can use Klout Perks to measure their social media success. Klout and its partners offer rewards, better known as perks, for third party products and services based on score, expertise, location, etc. This most often takes shape in gift cards and free samples. Brands like Virgin America, Audi, Red Bull, along with 3,000 some odd applications and partners, use the program to prioritize, segment and engage influencers who will subsequently create thousands of pieces of user-generated content and millions of impressions for a brand’s new product, initiative or campaign. They do so conceptually at least.

So should you use Klout?  It’s really up to you. Everyone uses and leverages social media differently. Some have a larger reach than others, and each has varying degrees of authority on disparate topics. If you do decide to, remember to take it with a grain of salt.

Beyond the metrics, the goal of building, or optimizing, a web presence should be to complement existing marketing and sales efforts. James Howe may have summarized it best when he said, “Popularity may mean someone has influence, but you definitely don’t need to be popular to have influence. Connecting with one person or a small group can change a neighborhood, a community or go a long way to make our world a better place to live.”

If you are still totally and unequivocally against it, you should check out Klouchebag.

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Brand Attraction

Posted on by skulkaew

By and large, people buy goods and services for two reasons. One, to get rid of a problem they have and don’t want. Or two, to create a result they want but don’t have. By doing so, they believe it will improve their lives in some way, shape or form. And since any decision affecting your life is largely an emotional one, marketers, advertisers and/or sellers need to appeal to prospective customers on an emotional level.

Traditionally, the retail value equation was predicated on offering the best features at the lowest price. But because features can be, and usually are, copied shortly after introduction, cutthroat pricing dictated consumer behavior. When you take into account the evolution of the global competitive landscape and the shift in consumer priorities, you realize a new equation is mandatory. That much is evident from the rise of startups and the decline of retail giants whose business models were either unsustainable or are unable to compete in an ever-changing marketplace. The new equation should take into account quality and customer service, where expense takes a back seat to appeal, and arrives at a competitive price. It might not be the lowest price, but it needs to feel appropriate to the customer. Because in their most basic form, brands are extensions of belief systems. Their promise is a succinct expression that states what customers can come to expect when interacting with brands whether that be online or at the store. How can you ramp up your brand attraction? By dressing it up and maximizing its appeal. That doesn’t mean stop improving your product, customer service and/or the overall experience. That process is never ending. What it means is that you get to cast the light on your business in the most favorable way. Here are a few considerations to make when playing to your strengths.

Presence creates potential. How your marketing collateral and website look will determine how the public perceives you and your business and can decide how successful future marketing campaigns will do. Design is an essential part of any marketing campaign, and a necessity to compete in a media driven world, and it’s one of the easiest ways to separate your business from the competition. It’s the difference in a 40% bounce rate on your landing page and one that hovers around 10,000%. That’s actually not possible but rest assured that you are being judged at every single touch point by the very people you’re targeting.

Genuine interaction is key to building deeper relationships, but spamming out quasi-useless information won’t help you on this front. I included this in our entry on New Year Resolutions, but it’s worth repeating. More important than tweeting a frazillion times a day is having something compelling to say. One of the many upsides to social media is that it’s another platform for your prospects to touch base with you and vice versa. Thoughtful engagement will catalyze the development in a relationship that might otherwise take months or years to form.

Exude positivity in your messaging tempered with real-world insight. If your collateral contains brazen claims with little or no information, your prospects are likely to grow suspicious. Conversely, if you sound like a wet towel when it comes to your own business, those very same prospects might assume that you’re offering an inferior product. It’s a necessity that you and your brand instill confidence, all while building awareness and encouraging engagement. Being real and down-to-earth can help you build trust with your prospects who are likely to be skeptical.

Your reputation is the lifeblood of your brand so make sure your brand stays true to what you’re offering while producing great results. A group of brand champions can enhance a brand’s image in the same way a group of unhappy customers can tarnish it. If you don’t already know, you’ll soon find that brand development is an ongoing process that iterates over and over again. The goal is to eventually move past attraction and engage with fans, followers and prospects, so that they become customers. From there, you can make the shift from acquisition to retention. Knowing your consumers and what’s important to them as well as being able to align that with your advertising efforts is the key to creating value for them and for your company.

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The Psychology of Advertising

Posted on by skulkaew

Most of our supermarket purchases are habitual. From a consumer’s point of view, a trip to the grocery store is pretty straightforward. We don’t tend to put a lot of cognitive effort into most of our purchases, and we typically choose the same brands week after week. So to convert potential consumers, supermarkets create dissonance.

Retailers employ different varieties of stimuli (e.g., color, smells, music, etc.) to affect consumer behavior. Color has been considered to be the most salient, resonant and affective feature seen in human vision. It contributes to the appreciation of and preference for products and plays an essential communication role, improves the efficacy of messages and may increase the likelihood of a purchase. The olfactory sense, or the sense of smell, has been the subject of study in several papers published in the marketing field. In an experiment performed exposing individuals to 26 different ambient scents of varying intensity, as well as a neutral control group, subjects in the scented condition perceived that they had spent less time in the store. Those in the no scent condition perceived having spent significantly more time in the store than they actually did (Spangenberg, Crowley, and Henderson, 1996). Surprisingly, whether the scent was pleasing or not had no effect. Neither did intensity. One of the most famous research studies in marketing (Gorn, 1982) used classical conditioning and illustrated that hearing well-liked music versus disliked music, while being exposed to a product, can directly affect product preferences as measured by product choice.

Going back to the supermarket, entryway placement and layout have a significant effect on how people shop and how much they spend. Generally speaking, items with the highest profit margins are placed on shelves that are at shoppers’ eye level. Less profitable brands will be stocked at the top of a shelf or near your feet. Contrary to intuition, shoppers don’t walk up and down aisles. Research of movement patterns using GPS trackers show that people tend to travel in select aisles, using the perimeter of the shop as the main thoroughfare, and rarely in a systematic up and down pattern. People, who do venture into the center of aisles, tend to spend more time in the shop but not necessarily more money. What this means is that key products, ones with the higher profit margins, will typically be placed at the ends of aisles in end cap displays. Familiar household brands will also be placed here to serve as a psychological “welcome mat,” which results in increased traffic.

Psychology of Advertising, Bravo DesignDespite the fact that consumers generally indicate that they make rational purchasing decisions based on considerations like price, selection or convenience, subconscious forces, involving emotion and memories, are clearly also at work. Scientists used to assume that emotion and rationality were opposed to each other, but Antonio Damasio, now professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has found that people who lose the ability to perceive or experience emotions as the result of a brain injury find it hard or impossible to make any decisions at all.

Perception involves the process of categorization and extends to selection and interpretation, as well as gauging risk and opportunity cost(s), to produce meaning. In the process, buyers make use of cues as they’re bombarded with stimulation at all times of the day. However, only parts are successfully transferred and categorized as information. The consumer chooses what information to factor in, as well as what to dismiss. This differentiation between stimulation and information sets a distinction between two types of cues individuals are faced with. A stimulus cue is a conspicuous stimulus somewhere in the sensory field toward which attention can be drawn or directed, whereas an information cue is a bit of information about a marketing stimulus. Not only do advertisers need to draw the attention of consumers, they need to simultaneously argue the case for their product. Between marketing, advertising and design, each discipline recognizes that a psychological component should be taken into consideration at every point of engagement. Behavioral factors are also carefully taken into account because, ultimately, an advertisement isn’t meant to just attract attention, but to actually influence consumers to buy products. Generally speaking, advertising may be one of the most carefully constructed of all human communication as it is certainly one of the most costly.

Psychology of Advertising, Bravo DesignBrand development and maintenance demands a combination of functional, operational and psychological elements to create a unique entity that has a lasting personality, which will build retail brand awareness with existing and potential customers. When a brand has a well-defined personality, consumers interact with it and develop a relationship that can influence individual attitudes and behaviors in terms of how consumers perceive and react to a brand. A successful retail brand will help to build long-term demand, add some perceived value and ultimately improve sales. Consumers will be willing to pay more for a brand if there is added actual, or perceived, value from their experience of using the product or service. Because ultimately, they’re purchasing a total experience consisting not only of the physical item but also the packaging, after sales services, promotions and image.

Advertising is a ubiquitous and powerful force that lulls consumers into buying wanted, and sometimes unwanted, products that can change lifestyles for better or worse. The impact of advertising is often subtle and implicit but, sometimes, booming and impossible to overlook. Messaging aims to convince, or pair, target audiences with solutions to problems they may, or may not, know they have which may lead to a potential purchase or impulse buy. By and large, studies show that the effectiveness of psychological application will continue to impact advertising in a huge way, both online and off, as methodology is fine-tuned and studies unearth the motivations that compel consumers to make specific purchases.

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Providing Versus Promoting

Posted on by skulkaew

It’s difficult to say when and where marketing has its definitive roots, as people have been trading for thousands of years, but it took the shape we’re most familiar with some time during the Industrial Revolution. It was then that firms were able to ramp up production on a significantly larger scale for national and international markets due to the innovation and adoption of machines. As a result, consumption became dispersed over greater geographical distances, and producers no longer had immediate contact with their consumers.

To overcome this problem, forward thinking entrepreneurs started to plan their business operations in a marketing orientated manner. Their very survival was at stake. This demanded they be innovative and creative to stand apart. In order for producers to manufacture goods and services that would appeal and sell in widely disparate markets, it became necessary for them to carefully analyze and interpret the wants and needs of customers.

Fast forward to 2012, and we can see that firms are still being challenged to address those very same issues in segments that may be nearly impossible to breakthrough due to the sheer amount of competition or lack thereof. As marketing, as a whole, continues to evolve and be refined, companies are recognizing the increased strategic value of leveraging emerging technology, maintaining an optimized online presence, deploying content marketing, engaging with consumers before and after sales via social media and so on and so forth. Sadly enough, that recognition doesn’t necessarily translate into measureable success. The truth is, one of the primary reasons, new products fail is because companies fall short when it comes to providing a high-quality product or service or when it comes to effectively promoting it in the marketplace.

Today, expressing and delivering on your value proposition is one of the most important activities you and your business can engage in. It’s your promise of performance and value aimed at creating and occupying space in your prospective consumers’ minds as the best solution available.

When it comes to evaluating initiatives to launch and pursue, the simple fact of the matter is that most businesses aren’t aware they’re pursuing a bad idea. Let’s say that, hypothetically, you’ve come up with what you believe is a great idea, or product, as well as a business strategy to roll out alongside it. Maybe you already have. Because you’ve worked so close to it, and may have a teeny tiny amount of bias, it’s easy to get hunkered down in your own perspective and not see the bigger picture. In order to evaluate new ideas, you need to be dispassionate and fact-based. Not all bad products are total losses. Some just need tinkering. If you can change direction, or pull the plug early enough in the process, the downside risk can be mitigated. Of course, some ideas are destined to fail, so you have to ask yourself if you honestly believe it can succeed. If the answer is yes, can you find the due diligence to support that?

As a sidebar, failure isn’t a “bad” thing. It’s a learning experience, and it’s something we all inevitably come across. When Thomas Edison, one of the most prolific inventors in history, failed time and time again at improving the incandescent light bulb, he pressed forward only saying, “We now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb.” He later prevailed.

From there, having a strong product or service doesn’t remove the need for promotion. It just increases the likelihood that your consumers and affiliates will do some of that for you. If your business doesn’t include marketing in determining which products to develop and pursue then, at best, it’s missing a big opportunity and, at worst, it’s setting itself up for failure. As a public relations major in school, my classmates and I analyzed case studies by using SWOT. That stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. By doing so, you can figure out how to leverage and capitalize while not overextending yourself in areas where you might not have depth. In a nutshell, the risk in making a bet is defined by its potential downside. That can be anything from time and money to the opportunity cost(s) associated with not following initiatives A, B and C. You’ll just have to discern which gambles will be best for you.

The most compelling value propositions address high priority concerns and reduce the risk and opportunity cost, for the consumer, associated with the purchase.  They’re clear and concise, distinguish the value and provide evidence that substantiates those claims. Even more important is the fact that you deliberately act on it. That’s the difference between providing versus promoting. Promoting is saying that you’re better and unique for X, Y and Z reasons. Providing is proving it. Warren Buffett, the Oracle from Omaha, says, “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” What are your end consumers getting?

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Breaking All the Rules

Posted on by skulkaew

Creating web design that’s intuitive and easy to navigate through are qualities that web developers continually strive towards in order to maximize traffic and increase usability as best as possible. Those qualities make overall use more enjoyable which, ultimately, plays a critical role in a website’s success. While there are generally accepted conventions, best practices and design trends. For every rule, there is always an exception. Let’s keep in mind that guidelines are not definitive answers. Listed below are rules to break (or at least consider breaking):

Usability should be directed at the “lowest common denominator.”
Web design is, and always will be, about problem solving. The constituency that comprises your user base will be widely disparate, and that’s a good thing. What that doesn’t mean is that the quality of the site and/or its content should be sacrificed in favor of tailoring to the “lowest common denominator.” Give your users some credit and treat them how you’d want to be treated. If it’s worth your users’ while, they’ll figure it out.

Information needs to go above the fold.
“Content is king.” I know. You know. You hear this 94 times a day. It’s the quality and usefulness of your site’s content that will determine the success of your site. While the layout plays a significant part in the effectiveness of your delivery, it doesn’t mean that information needs to be scaled back or, worse, crammed indiscernibly into a single frame. Books have pages that must be turned in order to move backwards and/or forwards, and websites have content that must be scrolled to on and off the screen.

Instructions have to be ultra specific.
I’m not really a Mac kind of guy. Outside of now, I’ve only had to use one once. Despite the lack of incredibly specific directions in the form of a manual, replaced with my sense of pride that renders me unable to ask my more tech savvy coworkers for help, it’s pretty easy to figure out. This same principle applies to the text deployed on a page. At the end of a short teaser for a blog article, there’s no need to have anchor text that reads: “Click here to read this full article.” Something as simple as “Read more” will suffice. There are going to be times where giving users some extra instruction is necessary, but you’ll be able to figure that out on a case by case basis.

Make Your Site’s Goal Obvious.
Something that really gets drilled into the minds of young designers is that a design should instantly tell viewers what they are looking at before they read any text. Brand recognition is important for large corporations, but the smaller guys sometimes need to approach the game differently to attract a viewer’s attention. Be mysterious every now and again. Holding back can intrigue the viewer into wanting to learn more. Applying this technique to web design can greatly increase the time that users stay on your site.

The point of this post is to think outside of the box. It’s not encouraging you to break rules just for the sake of breaking rules. If you do so for the wrong reasons, you’ll probably see mixed results at best. While unconventional design can be dangerous and even damaging to your reputation as a designer, standard convention should be used if there are no better alternatives. If, and when, you do come up with a better way to present something, the choice becomes obvious. So approach every new design with a question in mind, what is the best way to execute this element? Keep the user and their tasks in mind and if you think of a great and innovative way that will improve their user experience, go for it.  Maybe your idea will become the next great design convention. If it fails, you can always fall back on what works for others. When it comes to breaking all the rules, as Robert Francis Kennedy famously said, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

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Logo & Corporate Identity Design

Posted on by skulkaew

Logos and corporate identity design are integral to a company’s branding. What does that mean exactly? Think of branding as shaping how a company will be perceived. It differentiates products and services in a positive way and may ultimately be a business’ most valuable asset. So why are logos so important? Well, think about it. As an individual, you want people to remember your face. Taking that line of reasoning one step further, what qualities would you want people to associate your face with? Kindness? Fairness? Trustworthiness?

Choosing the right logo can convey these qualities while cultivating a positive association in the mind of your consumer. Some logos hint at what the company does or sells. Others are teasers that pique a viewer’s interest. What’s certain is that a logo that’s well designed effectively represents your business, is timeless and looks good showing off on its own. Listed are points to consider when designing your next logo.

A simpler design is conducive for flexibility.

Envision every possible place your logo may appear and then think about how it will look in each format. Will it be on billboards? Online ads? Car wraps? Stationary? Each of these has technical requirements different than the next, but a strong logo will translate well across different mediums while maintaining its integrity. More importantly, it will need to effectively convey a message in a variety of contexts, possibly without copy, and reproduce well in black and white.  For now, omit the tagline and company name in your master. You can integrate it as often as you’d like in collateral after.

Your logo is your brand so make it distinctive.

Nobody likes a copycat. It’s one thing to look at what your competitors are doing. It’s another to emulate or steal those ideas. When it comes to the actual execution, use this knowledge to make your design stand apart instead of mimicking what you see. You also don’t want your customers to confuse your logo with that of another company. Additionally, another error to avoid is using stock images in your logo. You run the risk of copyright infringement.

You want people to remember your logo.

You want your logo to be memorable, and the best way to achieve this is to avoid having to change it every couple of years. Avoid the temptation to latch on to the latest trend. Trends are fickle, and your logo can become very dated very quickly. Your logo is your business calling card. A bad one will cause people to ignore you, but a good one will not only get them to notice you. It will command attention. Treat your logo like you treat your own appearance and make it look good.

As a warning, a common error that often occurs is when a company underestimates the importance of defining its identity in its infancy. Some time down the line, that company may eventually outgrow and/or realize that the logo does little or nothing to enhance its image. From there, the company can either continue on with the subpar design or abandon it altogether, losing some or all of the recognition it had previously built. As a rule of thumb to live by: think twice, design once. Steve Jobs once called Paul Rand, “the greatest living graphic designer.” In his book, Design, Form, and Chaos, Rand says:

A logo is a flag, a signature, an escutcheon, a street sign.
A logo does not sell (directly), it identifies.
A logo is rarely a description of a business.
A logo derives meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes,
not the other way around. A logo is less important than the product it signifies;
what it represents is more important than what it looks like.

If you have questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the fields below. To learn more about how Bravo Design, Inc. can contribute to your growing business, fill out a contact form by clicking here.

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Content Marketing

Posted on by skulkaew

People want solutions to their problems, plain and simple, and they’re willing to seek them out. What’s actually happening is that they’re becoming increasingly inundated by thousands of irrelevant marketing messages that attempt to pull them in different directions, which they typically ignore. As someone seeking to grow their business, you’ll have to do more than just create content. You’ll need to become both authoritative and engaging. It’s a necessity that you and your brand strongly communicate your story, instill confidence and trust, all while building awareness and encouraging engagement among prospects and customers. The potential exists not only to solidify your position but also to increase your market share.

Sound easy? It’s not.

The majority of organizations are set up to develop, produce and sell products and services not to create and deliver weekly editorials and/or seek out potential customers to interact with in cyberspace.  That’s why content development seems so unnatural to most businesses. What this all comes down to is an opportunity to educate potential buyers about your product offerings, the industry at large as well as your company culture. Ultimately, the information you distribute should make it easier for your consumer to purchase your goods and/or services. For tips and considerations on improving your copy, click here.

As a sidebar, creating unique content might not be the appropriate goal for each and every business. Some companies should focus on engaging customers via social media sites and answering their questions as quickly as possible to spur them into action to quicken conversion and, ultimately, speed up the sales cycle. Remember, not every hit on your website is a potential customer. Think of it in the context of a department store. Of all the visitors who stop in, only some are in the market for actually making a purchase. Likewise, only some of you website traffic is considering purchasing goods/services offered. To leverage your online marketing efforts, you’ll have to discern where your business stands and which group of visitors you’re trying to reach out to (in this example, casual shoppers vs. the purpose driven).

Once you do have content, another hurdle that will inevitably present itself is placement. If you create content but aren’t effectively advertising it, you’re wasting your time. Successful content marketing requires a combination of interesting content combined with social networking, link building and public relations working together synergistically. Push your content through your social media pipeline and through your website. That doesn’t mean spam. You’re more likely to lose some, or all, of your following if you become too overbearing. At Bravo Design, Inc. networking with other professionals online has helped us nearly triple our Facebook following over the course of the last two or three months. Building genuine relationships with your end consumers along with professionals within your industry will help you gain the most out of your marketing efforts. It also helps improve the pipeline for expanded delivery options in the future.

Your ability to concisely define your brand and establish credibility, while standing apart from the crowd, will have a huge impact on your future success(es). If content is improperly targeted, your message is wasted on an audience that doesn’t care about you, your business or your news. Even worse is the possibility that if you use an affiliate website to host miscellaneous content, potential readers will be redirected there rather than to your own site. Not only do you lose that traffic, it devalues your news and your brand.

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Writing Copy

Posted on by skulkaew

Writing Copy, Bravo DesignE. St. Elmo Lewis, an American advertising and sales pioneer, said that “the mission of an advertisement is to attract a reader, so that he will look at the advertisement and start to read it; then to interest him, so that he will continue to read it; then to convince him, so that when he has read it he will believe it. If an advertisement contains these three qualities of success, it is a successful advertisement.”

Advertising and marketing professionals are finding that traditional media channels and one-way communications are losing their effectiveness. And as they, along with business owners, experiment in finding the right blend of traditional and digital strategy to adopt, one prerequisite for a successful advertising campaign that needs to be satisfied is that for quality copy. It serves as the backbone of a campaign by commanding attention. It highlights the main selling points of a particular product or service and conveys it clearly and concisely. It examines subjects from different perspectives and is empathetic to people’s problems and needs. So without further ado, here are a few tips on improving the copy you produce.

Do your homework.
Read everything you can get your hands on, ask questions and take notes. You won’t be able to clearly articulate a message if you don’t. Throughout the process, ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve with each bit of progress so as to stay on point. If you’re in a copyblogging role or writing online collateral, make sure all new copy supports the content strategy for the website.

Understand your audience.
Understanding the demographic that makes up your audience will help you find and utilize an appropriate tone as well as identify selling points to leverage in messaging. Before you lay any words down on the page, figure out who you’re speaking to and write with them in mind. Put yourself in a prospective customer’s pair of shoes and think about what might spur you to action.

Say more by writing less.
Each and every channel adopted has its own unique attributes. Writing for Twitter will be different than writing an e-mail to a client which is different than writing to a Facebook fan and so on. While microblogging to the tune of Twitter’s 140-character-limit might seem like a burden, it forces you to think outside of the box while being judicious with the content that does make the final cut. Studies show that the more words you add to a web page, the less time people spend reading it so your writing will have to intelligibly and simply state a message.

Be prepared to make revisions.
Copy is almost never embraced and loved instantly. More often than not, it will require tinkering and revising, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, so don’t expect to get it right on the first try. Be willing to change your copy to meet a goal. And if that doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to start over.

The war wages on.
Even if you do build a campaign that succeeds in marketing a product or service, with effective messaging, your work is far from over. History shows us that brands that have been successful, and continue to be, are constantly fighting to defend top spots. Give yourself a pat on the back and then move on. In the world of advertising, your work is never over.

If you have any questions as to how Bravo Design, Inc. might contribute to your growing business, please fill out a contact form listed here or leave a comment below, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Aside from the smashing design work and web development you’ll see throughout our portfolio, we write copy built to convert.

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Cross Channel Marketing

Posted on by skulkaew

Social media marketing has evolved into a global phenomenon as it continues to become an evermore important communication medium for businesses to promote brand awareness, customer engagement and enhanced service. This effort largely revolves around creating content that resonates with an organization’s target audience while encouraging readers to forward said content through their social networks. It’s advantageous on the grounds that it appears to come from a trustworthy, third party source, as opposed to a company itself. Improved customer relationship management (CRM) along with increased visibility, familiarity and credibility are all enhancement mechanisms connected to social media marketing. Additionally, it’s a relatively inexpensive medium that serves as a platform for organizations to build marketing campaigns. While it is a good way to knock on the door, it’s not the be-all and end-all of sales, marketing nor is it a one-stop shop that fixes businesses overnight at little or no cost. It requires a real time investment with a firm grounding in well thought out strategy. It’s important to remember that social media works by driving traffic to your website where it can be converted into a sale not the other way around. A survey done by Demandbase and Focus indicated that a company’s website was the top online source of new sales leads and seven times more effective than social media.

One medium that has become increasingly underestimated is outdoor advertising, an effective adjunct to advertising; especially, when coupled with other media. Unlike newspapers, TV, direct mail and/or online advertising, it doesn’t have to be invited into the home. It works at all hours of the day and night, seven days a week. People are exposed to it when they walk by or drive past and, whether they like it or not, they can’t turn it off or throw it out. It, literally, has a captured audience, and its messages work on the advertising principle of effective frequency. Since most messages stay in the same place for a month or longer, the multiple impressions made reinforce the presence of a product or company making it more memorable. Without a doubt, billboards will continue to be successful in the future. The simple reason for this is the very nature of them. They are large posters in public places that can’t really be avoided.

Every channel has unique communications attributes, and every customer his or her own profile, that marketers must be aware of in order to effectively present consistent and coordinated information to customers. Cross channel marketing involves tracking a user across multiple channels, listening and engaging with him or her at the right time and place. While some are quick to say that content or context is king, the fact of the matter is that opportunity resides in engagement. Content refers to a carefully crafted message. Context deals with all the details surrounding its deployment; especially, in regards to its timeliness. Cross channel marketing can lead to higher conversions and higher customer loyalty. Both are steppingstones towards generating more revenue, but the caveat here is integration. If there is dissonance in the message(s) delivered, goals are misaligned or it’s executed too early or too late, a campaign will fall into shambles. Over the next several years, making the move to true cross channel marketing will be more critical than ever before to a company’s success. A company’s capacity to integrate, manage and interchangeably use both traditional and emerging technologies will enable businesses to reach customers in motion and optimize the user experience from beginning to end. A strong advertising campaign will integrate as many of these channels as possible.

The introduction of the Internet has changed advertising and marketing. It has vastly altered the ways in which people view, use and interact with media. This has, in some ways, changed the effectiveness of certain techniques and channels, but it has also created new opportunities. While there is no doubt that the media landscape is moving towards a digital future, it doesn’t mean that print and digital are mutually exclusive. It doesn’t signal that traditional media is on the brink of extinction either because social media marketing is not a replacement for the traditional marketing framework but an extension of currently existing marketing strategies. Ultimately, businesses that have their finger on the pulse of what customers want will always have a competitive advantage.

If you have any questions as to how Bravo Design, Inc. might contribute to your growing business, please fill out a contact form listed here or leave a comment on this page, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.