Yawn if your logo’s lethargic
Remember how excited you were when you first started your company? Everything was new and the enterprise filled you with endless energy and enthusiasm. No matter what category of business you’re promoting, it’s possible to recreate that excitement in yourself and your staff and to pass that sense of excitement on to your target audience. As marketing consultants to a diverse range of business-to-business clients, it’s our daily challenge to help them create compelling messages and exciting efforts often in market segments that are considered boring or too technical to warrant creative treatments.
Think about it, for years and years competitors in your market have followed suit with, even if professionally executed, lackluster marketing efforts that do little more than get the job done. As long as you’re communicating to potential clients and expending the effort to do so, wouldn’t it be worth the extra effort to attempt to create marketable differences between your company and the competition with exciting and compelling concepts, designs and messages?
“I didn’t think it was possible to make an industrial insulation company look sexy,” said Rick Dickenson, President of Associated Insulation of Willingboro, NJ, when Virtual Farm Creative rolled out his company’s compelling new collateral and display advertising campaign. The company effectively communicated all of their capabilities, but in delivering the information in a more exciting format with interesting visuals and language, they stood out from the competition.
When faced with the challenge of branding a company with such a generic name in a traditionally conservative category– where competitors churn out similar looking marketing materials– we always pitch three concepts; something safe, something completely out of the box and something in between. In this case Associated Insulation elected to market out of the box and really stand out in their category. Development and production might have cost slightly more but, in the end, their company was branded as more creative and compelling than the competition. That kind of brand recognition is priceless when you’re marketing a commodity product or service.
Similarly, Neutronics Inc. of Exton, PA needed to develop a series of product specification sheets for less than exciting oxygen analyzing equipment as well as trade show presence that would promote their product lines. Rather than present the expected for more than forty product specification sheets, we conceptualized colorful categories in hues not normally utilized in high-tech markets. Without any additional costs, the family of product spec sheets created a rainbow of compelling marketing collateral that differentiated the client from the competition’s straight spec sheets.
Some clients are born to think out of the box with their marketing and, even when their core competency isn’t the most alluring offering in the world, they always manage to stand out amongst more mediocre marketing.Take Express Data Systems of Pottstown, PA, a twenty-year-old payroll processing company as an example. This family-owned operation is a perennial standout when juxtaposed against even the largest national payroll companies because they believe in using their marketing efforts to create a sense of excitement.
“The position that a local company can create for itself when it embraces exciting marketing efforts and unique branding techniques is undeniable,” said Express Data’s Jennifer Scotese.
Recently Express Data, who is celebrating their twentieth year in business exhibited at the Greater Reading Business Expo – a trade show that was also celebrating its twentieth year of operation. Rather than throw up a boring booth listing the company’s services, Jennifer and her team elected to create a more memorable experience for their target audience and to play off of the two twentieth anniversaries.
Thinking completely out of the box, Express Data developed an economical, one-time-use booth with a Beatles theme borrowing from the Sgt. Pepper lyric, “it was twenty years ago today.” Instead of stress balls and plastic pens they gave out colorful tie dye t-shirts and promoted their “fab four” quartet of main services.
You can be assured that the people that visited their booth that day will remember Express Data as an energetic, fun and exciting company who, after introducing their compelling brand, could more effectively communicate the excellence of their offering.
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