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Up on the 17th floor of their office building in central London our client, United Trust Bank went for gold when thanking the brokers and intermediaries who have supported them over the past few years by throwing a sporting themed cocktail party.
There were athletic ‘games’ (complete with prizes), great views, good conversation and of course, a mojito or two!
Fancy a sneaky peak? Take a look at some of evening’s highlights below:.
So good, I tore it out and kept it!
I’ve written here before about adverts that I thought were terrible, so now it is time to redress the balance and share with you an advert which I think is fantastic.
Last year a client came to us with a request for an advertising campaign to promote their care-in-the-home service. During that time I saw a perfect example of an advert for a similar service and tore it out a magazine to show them.
The job never went ahead but I still couldn’t bring myself to throw this advert away… surely the sign of a successful advert.
As you can see the advert is for Bupa Care Homes, which was never going to be an easy sell. Care Homes don’t have the attention grabbing, luxurious imagery that products or services such as exotic holidays or consumer goods have in their marketing battle tools. Care homes don’t have persuasive promotional pricing opportunities open to some companies, and they certainly don’t have the benefit of offering us a glimpse of some other fantasy life which can only be accessed through making a certain purchase.
Their challenge is a tough one, and one that defeats many services aimed at the elderly. How do you promote something that people hope they will never have to purchase or make use of?
Bupa has showed us how.
Their advert is well designed, but that isn’t where its strength lies. It has been created with compassion, with care and most of all, it puts the subject (in this case Sydney an elderly man) centre stage and introduces us to him as a person.
And this is the beauty of this simple advert. Bupa cut to the quick and address the fear we all have about putting our loved ones into a care home… that they won’t be seen as the valued relation we know them as, but as another faceless patient.
Rather than making false promises through using that terrible American royalty-free photography of people in their 60’s skipping along a Californian beach, Bupa have used a real person in a real situation. Their carefully produced imagery goes a million miles further to demonstrate to us the benefits of their service over others which here is their commitment to the individual.
They have produced an advert the reader feels they can trust, they have produced an advert that engages the reader in a subject they don’t want to think about. Their advert steers clear of making false promises, but offers hope and it does so quietly, concisely and with a real sense of integrity.
For this, their quiet, unassuming advert stands out a mile as being a perfect example of how to produce a fantastic, effective ad campaign.
If you enjoyed reading this post you may also like to read Picture Perfect – Choosing the right photography for your marcomms or Rant alert! When a good advert goes bad
We had an interesting conversation with a client last week during which he posed a question that got me stumped – what’s the difference between marketing and sales?
Having worked in marketing for ten years and studied for a CIM qualification, I was adamant that there was a clear distinction between sales and marketing, in fact more than a clear distinction, the two functions may often be lumped together but are in actual fact very different beasts.
And often different beasts that don’t see eye to eye! Call a marketeer a ‘salesperson’ or describing their job function as ‘selling products’ is likely to lead to a frosty reception. But that said, as we had the discussion with our client I couldn’t put my finger on the one point that clearly clarified the difference.
So I went away determined to collect my thoughts and find a suitable answer for next time the question was posed. I went home and dug out my old CIM workbooks to find the definition of marketing that we learnt in our very first ‘marketing fundamentals’ class, the definition that by the end of the year we could all repeat word for word!
The CIM definition of marketing is ‘The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.’
The definition of sales is much harder to find, but one good example I discovered is ‘Sales is converting an inquiry or lead into a contract or shipment.’
When read together, these definitions could lead us to see marketing as knowing what the customer wants and sales is delivering it. But is it really that simple? What about companies that have no sales team or those organisations with no marketing department?
To find an answer I wanted input from real people, so I turned to LinkedIn.
I asked a marketing group what their opinions were and got some fantastic answers… and a few more questions. (If you’re interested, you can see the full discussion here)
Some of the great points raised were;
All these points are valid and add to the discussion of how to define the difference between marketing and sales, they certainly gave me great food for thought. When I posed the question, I had (most probably naively) expected to be able to come away with a clear, concise answer that marketing is X whilst sales is Y with the difference being Z.
This obviously isn’t the case, it seems that the difference is not just between B2B and B2C, but from individual company to individual company. The requirements of different markets necessitate different responses, sometimes marketing led and sometimes sales led, but where the line between the two functions falls can sometimes be hard to establish.
I feel that this blog post has barely scraped the surface in producing a conclusive answer, but realise that you all have jobs to do so must draw to a close here. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject, I suspect it’s one discussion that will rumble on for some time yet!
If you enjoyed this blog you may also enjoy reading; Do you hide from negative feedback or What is the difference between a logo and a brand
Imagery can make or break in marketing communications. When you must grab your reader’s attention in seconds, photography can be the key to encouraging them to read on.
Imagine you were choosing a new toothpaste. Would the advert with a close up of the tube and paste on a brush win you over, or would it be the happy, healthy lady with the perfect teeth?
So how do you go about looking for your perfect picture, guaranteed to swing an audience in your favour?
Stop!!! Not only am I an account manager extraordinaire I have become a pretty good mind reader. I can tell what you are thinking. Is it something along the lines of ‘I have loads of professional product shots, I need to read no further’?
Product shots are great, they’re compulsory in many industries, but unless you’re selling a product that people are emotionally attached to (such as cars, mobile phones, ipods) they shouldn’t be the leading imagery in your marcomms.
Would you buy skin cream that only showed you how nice the bottle looked?
Would you buy baby food that only showed you the jar’s gloopy orange contents?
Of course not. You buy the face cream to get beautiful skin. So it is the beautiful skin that should go on the advert. Equally, you buy baby food to have a happy healthy baby, so it’s the happy healthy baby that should be shown.
The purchaser buys for benefits, not features.
I know this all sounds rather obvious, but at the moment we’ve only considered B2C markets. It’s much harder to apply this knowledge in the B2B sector. B2B clients often come to us with hundreds and hundreds of product shots and not one single ‘benefit’ image. This is a real shame as it’s the benefits not the features that will sell your product or service.
Consider a printing factory. If you ask a printer to choose imagery for their advert, they’ll go all glassy eyed and tell you about the amazing kit their factory has, then whip out an image of a machine to demonstrate their up to date technology.
How would the customer ‘read’ that advert? They see a machine and to them it’s just a machine, they don’t need or want big dirty machine. They want slick brochures, they want more customers, they want fast turnaround times. This is what the printer should show in their advert.
There is always a benefit behind the feature – sometimes it’s just harder to see from a B2B point of view.
So when you’re choosing imagery for your next piece of marcomms, ask yourself what is the customer really buying from us? Then make sure that is the imagery used in your brochure, website and adverts.
If you enjoyed reading this blog, you may also like to read B2B challenges, the unsexy product or The importance of good photography in design
We know how frustrating it is to have a budget perfectly planned, to have stretched it to cover more marketing activity than ever before only for elements to start coming in over budget and blowing all your careful planning out of the water.
As a marketing communications agency we’re really careful to quote up front and stick to our costings as far as we can, but sometimes it’s just not possible.
Prices don’t change because we are trying to pull the wool over your eyes, it’s usually down to a change in brief. Sometimes these changes may seem insignificant, but they can have big impacts in a design studio or print factory.
To help you avoid price increases from your marcoms agency, we’ve listed 5 brief changes that we’ve recently seen have a considerable effect on a final invoice.
“Please put this accreditation/partner logo on our stationery” We’d designed a two colour stationery set to be the most economical print-wise. Just before going to print, the client requested a partner logo to be included which was full colour. Our economic print job, jumped to four colour. This meant additional plates had to be created and the job required a longer time on press – both of which incur unavoidable additional costs. Knowing the final colour requirements up front will mean help reduce an unexpected rise in print costs.
“I can’t find those photos I promised, please can you find something off the internet instead?” To produce high quality design work, high quality images are required. If we don’t know in advance that you need us to provide them, we won’t have quoted to do so. Images from the internet will not be of a suitable resolution and will often be copyrighted . To source suitable imagery we need to sit down in front of an image library and undertake image research, then purchase, crop or alter the selected photography. This incurs extra studio time and expense which most jobs aren’t able to swallow. If you think you may need images purchased for your project, let your agency know in advance and this can be incorporated as an optional extra into the original quote.
“All the content won’t fit in our brochure? Then go to extra pages” This may seem like the simplest solution, and often it is. We’re happy to increase the length of your document, but we can’t do it without increasing the original quote. The extra pages will not only incur additional studio time, but also paper, ink and factory time. If the item is part of a mailing the extra weight may even increase the postage costs. If you’re keen to keep costs down, it may be worth looking at your content and seeing how much can be cut. People often include a fair bit of padding in their writing which, when cut, leaves an easier to read, cleaner document.
“Here are those illustrations I wanted including, there’s a few more than I anticipated” Illustrations are always going to be time consuming and usually one illustration will take longer to design than the page it’s going into. To avoid unexpected costs, ask your agency to quote on a per illustration basis. Then as you’re compiling document content you can keep in mind the financial impact of adding more illustrations.
“Can I have that print job delivered tomorrow?” When quoting, we will look for the most economical production method possible, this may not always be the quickest. If new deadlines are given to us late, sometimes the only way to hit them is to change the production method. For example digital print can be turned around extremely fast, but isn’t the most economical method once you get into higher volumes. The best way to avoid these unexpected costs is to let us know deadlines as soon as possible, and sign artwork off promptly.
All that said, we work in a service industry and it’s our job to make our clients happy. On a personal level, we like our clients and want to make them happy. Therefore we always try to get a full brief before quoting so that we can cover all the costs likely to arise and on the few occasions where a price change is necessary we work as hard as possible to keep it as low as possible.
If you enjoyed reading this post, you may also like to read How to deliver a killer brief to your marcomms agency or Tricks of the trade – 6 top tips to stretch your marketing budget
