“Customer Service”, let me tell you about Big Charlies Gun and Jewelry.
A tough name for a really tough looking guy. He doesn’t have a website and he doesn’t seem to advertise but if you google him he seems to come up all over the place.
He’s a big scary guy who must bend the scales at over 300lbs and wears twin shoulder holstered .45′s.
He has a burly gray beard and wears a jewelers visor and jewelers glasses cocked in the up position. They are the kind that look a little like military night scopes — only something more steam punk retro from the 40′s.
Befittingly, He sells and fixes guns and jewelry. Yea I see the relationship. I guess if you have a lot of jewelry you might want a gun too.
When you first arrive at his store, you’re faced with and must traverse through a series of security obstacles that make you doubt the reason that you’re there in the first place.
When I first started in business most businesses had one phone and a person to answer it. Somehow you seemed to always be able to reach someone and talk to them.
Technology and population have advanced since those old days. Everyone seems to have an office number, a fax number a cell phone number, and an email address.
Though our technology has made us more connected, it seems that it conversely made us harder to reach.
Ok, so you want a brochure, ad, package, website, billboard or TV commercial…
Whatever and whenever you need something designed, you need a plan.
Let’s say you want to do a design brochure for your company. Think of it as a puzzle. You have to determine the size and the elements that will have to go into it. Your best place to start is the copy.
Trip Wire Magazine compiled a list of company slogans that they think are “catchy and creative.”
Having read the list, I’ve concluded that slogans are usually empty statements that need to be supplemented with a good product, interesting advertising, et al..
If read or heard in a vacuum, slogans seem like words uttered by a paranoid schizophrenic.
Let’s play a game: Read all of the following slogans consecutively. This will allow you to empathize with crazy people. (more…)
Thanks to Fast Company for releasing this exclusive excerpt from Jonah Berger’s latest book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On. These are six easy-to-learn, easy-to-share ways for your business to earn the audience that it needs to thrive.
6 “STEPS” To Making Ideas, Products Go Viral
“Contagious products and ideas are like forest fires,” Jonah Berger writes. “They can’t happen without hundreds, if not thousands, of regular Joes and Janes passing the product or message along.” Here are the qualities he says make things sharable (this excerpt series covers the first ‘S’).
Social Currency: We share things that make us look good (even if that means pictures of our cat).
Triggers: Easily memorable information means it’s top of mind and tip of the tongue.
Emotion: When we care, we share.
Public: Built to show, built to grow.
Practical Value: News people can use.
Stories: People are inherent storytellers, and all great brands also learn to tell stories. Information travels under the guise of idle chatter.
If someone came to me and said, “Welp, I need you to design a logo of an Irish guy for a basketball team called The Celtics,” then I’d probably over-think the whole image.
Shoes with buckles? C’mon. A pipe? What about how kids perceive the logo?
Luckily Red Auerbach, the hall-of-fame Celtics coach who led the team to nine championships, commissioned his brother Zang to whip up a leprechaun who’ll play you one-on-one for his pot of gold.
The character even comes fashioned with a shillelagh, which is an Irish cane used to beat other leprechauns bunny foo foo-style.
(Editor’s note: A shillelagh is just a cane.)
Zang Aurebach concocted a transcendently iconic logo that will never be divorced from the basketball team hailing from Boston.
Say, would you like a transcendently iconic logo? You would?? Then go ahead and call Cimetta Design at 954.680.4584.
And when you call, ask for Cindy’s pot of gold to receive a free quote!
Nothing says “mmm” like corn-flavored cereal. Just put a cob in milk, please.
Pretty please?
When deciding what design should be your product’s face, make sure that you’re not wholly off the mark. Kix is trying to hawk cereal, and they try really hard to appeal to youngsters.
“Kid tested, mother approved”; “Kix are for kids!” – the cereal fails by virtue of their marketing push.
No, really: Kids love our cereal.
When deciding on your package design, let me Cimetta Design do the work for you.
The website Brand Packaging published a thoughtful article on the ways that package design is changing.
No longer are words such as “Bigger,” “Better,” and “Bolder” moving products the way that they used to move products.
The reason for this is due to a different generation of consumers.
Consumers nowadays are numb to the appeals to of companies who became comfortable using language gimmicks to lure in profits. The consumer is now aware that a box may just say “better” while that product is still the same…whatever it may be.
Nowadays, companies build a brand by labeling their products honestly and directly.
With the latest cultural conversations ranging from environmentalism to questioning product ingredients – in example, the use of aluminum in anti-persperants and its link to Alzheimer’s disease – companies must engage their audience in a way that builds trust.
With companies moving toward a more ethical way of advertising their products, the markets, overall, will move toward more consumer confidence and more brand loyalty.
This interesting video by Jac de Haan, animated by Luke Rowsell, delves into the deceptively complicated reason that you always see businesses in competition with each other next one another.
