Tag Archive for Advertising

11 Mar 2011
Advertising • Design

The Power of Color

There are many sources and resources about color and color psychology, we stumbled across this image that was a part of post.

Color's Influence on Buying Behavior

How Colors Affect Buying Behavior

There was some great information that we hope you can use in your marketing and mailing creative.

  • 93% of consumers placed visual appearance and color above other factors when shopping.
  • 85% of shoppers placed color as a primary reason for buying a particular product.
  • Color increased brand recognition by 80%.
  • Color can increase comprehension by 73%.

North American online shoppers found:

  • Yellow to be optimistic and youthful, often used to grab attention
  • Red connotes energy, increases heart rate and creates urgency, it is often used in clearance sales
  • Blue creates trust and security, it is often used by banks and businesses
  • Green is the easiest color for the eyes to process, it is associated with wealth, used to encourage relaxation in stores.
  • Orange is perceived to be aggressive, can create a call to action
  • Pink is romantic and feminine, used to attract women and young girls
  • Black is powerful and sleek, used to market luxury products
  • Purple used to soothe and calm, often used for beauty or anti aging products

We are here to help you use and maximize all resources and information as you put together your mailing and marketing campaigns.

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25 Feb 2011
Advertising • Marketing Strategy

Repetitive Sounds in Brand Names Affect Moods

The Harvard Business Review’s Daily Stat summarized some findings from a Journal of Marketing article titled, the Sound of Brands.

A restaurant name containing repetitive sounds puts patrons into a good mood, and they are thus more likely to order chocolate cake for dessert than fruit salad. But the effect vanishes if the name represents too great a departure from linguistic norms: 80% of participants ordered cake when they were asked to imagine they were in a restaurant called Rantifanti, compared with just 30% for Ranthfanth.

The sound of brand names can affect product evaluations. For example, names such as Coca-Cola, Hubba Bubba, Tutti Frutti, Jelly Belly, Kit Kat, Bits & Bites, Lululemon, and Tostitos might elicit positive feelings, especially when the names are spoken aloud.

Exposure to a brand name that has sound repetition in its phonetic structure and is spoken aloud produces positive affect, which favorably affects consumers’ brand evaluations, reactions to cross-selling, and product choice.

We hope you remember this as you work on your next naming and branding project.

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21 Feb 2011
Advertising • Buying Behavior • Direct Mail

Direct Mail and Marketing Response Numbers

We have shared many statistics the past year about response numbers. We think we should review some of them.

More than 70% of Gen Yers (born 1977-1994) and Gen Xers (born 1965-1976) sort their mail immediately.

76% of internet users were directly influenced to buy an item or service thanks to direct mail.

78% of email recipients do not open the message, so that means that 94.1% of email recipients are not clicking through to your landing page.

55% of survey respondents cannot effectively measure marketing ROI of mobile, social media and video.

65% of companies had not increased revenue or profited using social media.

79% of all households read or scan the advertising mail sent to their home.

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16 Feb 2011
Direct Mail

To-Do List Management

BNET recently interviewed David Allen abut 3 Reasons Your To-Do List Keeps Getting Longer.

  1. Personal organization tools don’t get you organized.
  2. Technology won’t help, it is making things worse.
  3. It’s not about managing time, it’s about managing your attention and focus.

So thinking about your customers, how can you help them? Present your information in a way that allows them to give it attention and focus. Direct mail is a great way to do that. The Mail Moment study gave us: “Right now – in a market you want to reach – your ideal prospect is just waiting for the moment. She’s eager to invite you in to see what your message can bring to her life. She’s even willing to set aside time to focus solely on what you have to say.”

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14 Feb 2011
Advertising

An Attachment to Paper

Bain & Company published a brief titled “Publishing In The Digital Era” discussing adoption of E-Readers and the future for the publishing industry.

The report shared that most readers still report an attachment to paper, even younger readers born in the digital age. Paper beats digital information for yielding a response. This supports more wow numbers, magazine readership has actually increased 11 percent in the last 12 years. Typical young adults now read more magazine issues per month than their parents.

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04 Feb 2011
Advertising • Marketing Strategy

Branding Basics

The Harvard Business Review in promoting an article for sale titled, The One Thing You Must Get Right When Building a Brand, offered some information to entice readers.

It’s wrong to think we’re entering a world in which traditional marketing activities will become irrelevant. Yet the scale and speed of social media make it urgent to get the branding basics right. The obvious danger is failing to keep pace with social media developments. An equal, less obvious danger is getting distracted by them and losing sight of the fundamentals.

We have a passion for helping you build your brand and your relationships with your customers. Call us for ideas to integrate your marketing and get everything working together.

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02 Feb 2011
Advertising

Advertising Celebration

One of our favorite holidays is fast approaching. The day is this Sunday, a day most others refer to as Super Bowl Sunday. We love it because it is one of the rare days when most of us pay attention to the commercials and some of us even watch the game. We shared some great trivia about Super Bowl advertising last year.

This year 90% of the air time was sold by September, according to Reuters. This compares with a story ran in January 2010 by The New York Times that reported that the ads were “nearly” sold out.

Is this an economic indicator? If it is, then it is a good thing. Advertisers were confident enough to commit to spending $3 million for 30 seconds of our attention about four months earlier than last year. As we celebrate and pay attention to “traditional advertising”, remember that direct mail plays a great role in communicating with your customers.

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18 Jan 2011
Business • Marketing Strategy

Simplify

Because it is still January and many of us are still looking for ways to improve…

Perhaps looking around and asking questions like, “Is this as simple as it can be?” Or even, “Is this necessary at all?” A BNET post titled Do You Make Things Too Complicated? Take the Razor to Them, led us to search for more information about Occam’s Razor. Occam’s writing led to many scientific quotes and thoughts, but our favorite is: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

It’s so easy and so tempting to do too much. You can have a Facebook page, blog, Twitter page, YouTube channel, smartphone app, streaming video content, and cool icons on your Web site. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. If you have a solid, well-executed online/media plan and a clear vision of how every element serves your business, go for it. But if you doing a lot of stuff just because others are or because it seems like you should. Is it doing anything for your business? Are you doing more than you need to?

Are your customers responding? What about sending a simple piece of mail to reconnect?

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14 Jan 2011
Advertising • Design

Lessons Learned from The Gap’s Attempted Logo Change

BNET recently discussed The Gap’s logo change and the quick abandonment for something that looks much more like the original.

These ideas could share some new insights about brand management.

  1. Consumers own brands. Your brand does not have any value until it is valued by your customers. You might feel your business needs to be rebranded or relaunched, but your opinions are irrelevant: You work for the company. You’re so “inside” you can’t see outside. Proceed with caution!
  2. Consumers are savvy about design in just the same way as they are about media and advertising. The 21st Century has really stripped the mystery from design and advertising. Most consumers have better software on their laptops today than professional designers had on their desktops 20 years ago.
  3. As a result, consumers expect more from professional design. One of the main problems with the Gap’s new logo is that it used a typeface — Helvetica — which everyone has available on their own computers. Similarly, the graduated blue box is also something that virtually everyone can do after just a few minutes fooling around on the most basic graphic design software. This left Gap open to the legit accusation, “My kid could do that!” Redesigns need to be a lot more subtle and complex — even if the aim is to to be simple and clean — than they used to be.
  4. The move saves Gap some money. Changing back its web site is a lot easier than changing back all its store interiors, point-of-purchase material, catalogs, etc.
  5. The change removes uncertainty from the brand. Gap could probably have gotten away with keeping the new logo. Fashion and product trends drive Gap’s business, not typefaces. Most people didn’t even know the logo had changed. With the blue box back on its throne, the risk goes away.

So perhaps your website is a good place to test new design ideas. Can we help you before you go to press with a new idea?

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12 Jan 2011
Advertising • Marketing Plan

71 Percent of Tweets are Ignored

Wired.com reported on the findings of an analysis of 1.2 billion messages sent in 2009, seven out of every ten Twitter messages get absolutely no reaction.

We just completed a marketing outlook survey for the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Council that seemed to leave out many aspects of “traditional” marketing.

So the question is if numbers and results are revealing that email open rates are 22% and click through rates are about 5%, why do these and other marketing methods get so much attention?

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