Marketing strategy

We’ve just had our historically first meeting with our Business Mentor.

It took 4 hours and we briefly discussed almost all sections of our business. We primarily concentrated on our marketing, our position on the market, our opportunities and created a simple plan to follow.

One of the key elements we discovered during the meeting was that we need to spend more time on marketing our agency. Hence, you will see quite a few new exciting creative projects coming out from our production promoting our own brand. First one that I can promise you is a refresh of our homepage and our portfolio. If all goes well, we will go live by Friday this week.

Big bus challenge

I passed this advert on the London Underground:

Someone has launched this “competition” to submit an advertising campaign to run on national buses: www.bigbuschallenge.com

I love the idea. We got to learn about it only this week so we don’t have much time to prepare any submission. In fact, the decision was not to even try as we would have to spend a few days designing/brainstorming/preparing and the deadline is just around the corner.

The reason why it caught our attention though is that growing as an agency, there are opportunities for us to make ourselves more visible every day. Once again it is a task for me & Adrian to decide which ones we are going to take, leave behind or put on the watch-list for the next year.

Power of advertising…

…is understated. Advertising is not just about making the masses to spend their money on products they don’t need. The power of advertising is also in raising the awareness.

London has a community of passionate cyclist; one of which I am. The dangerous that lie on the road for us are many and are serious. The first time I saw this advertisement I thought it’s great. Everything that advertising could/should be:

It’s funny ( I do find it funny how many of those bikes are there! ), it’s informative (we’ve learnt something, haven’t we?), it’s attractive (captures the attention)  and puts the message across quickly and simply (people won’t give you more than a few seconds of attention).

Moo’s viral campaign

Not only I like Moo’s cards (the quality of print, material, easiness of order, cute box in which the cards come), I love many aspects of this business, which I’ve been watching closely for a while :), too.

On Friday, 1st of April, they introduced a new product. Moo-D ink. This new print technology will make business cards change their colour when touched.

What’s even better is the viral campaign they have launched to introduce the invention. Watch the video of the ‘incident’ that has happened at Moo HQ - someone has attempted to steal the new ink technology!!!

OK, if you are wondering whether this is real or not, then I repeat that it was launched on 1st April / hint: April Fools’ day /.

Isn’t the idea amazing? And you can bet that bloggers, tweeters and fans will blog, tweet and talk about it for days to come. Just like I did.

Viral marketing / Free advertising >>> Don’t you just love it?
It’s not easy, one has to be creative but it is a great fun and definitely worth it (if done the right way).

Read the full article about the launch at Moo.com

Innocent Drinks

Recently I visited this talk by Richard Reed, founder of Innocent Smoothies. Richard talked about how to grow a small company into a million pound business with 70% market share.

Richard doing the intro

Richard summarised the advices into a few classic tips and in-between lines said that Innocent is loosing money since 2008. That was quite an interesting information so I raised my hand and asked why this is and where the problem is.

The answer: price of fruits went up, people stopped buying smoothies during recession, Innocent is spending huge amounts on advertising to secure their position before other competitors will enter the market.

Then he said that people won’t pay more than £1.79 for his small bottles of smoothies which does not cover the costs of  making them. The trouble I see is that I personally would think twice about spending £1.79 for a bottle like that but wouldn’t if the price was £1. I asked around in the office and the team agreed they felt the same. Hmmmm….

Anyway, I now feel like buying at least one of those small smoothies to support Richard’s business. It’s only £1.79 and £1.50 of that will most likely go to advertising so that’s OK - I’ll be supporting my own industry

Now, I have to comment on Innocent’s website. For those of you who don’t understand: It’s part of my job to analyse websites every day so why not to share my insights, right?

Innocent's website

I think Innocent’s website is cute and suits the brand. The shaking style of the top navigation would be unthinkable for any other website but seems to work for Innocent. I like the fact that there is not too much content on the internal pages; it shows the producers have thought of what they are going to say and why. The almost hand-drawn illustrations are fantastic, creating a lot of the “innocent” atmosphere on the website. The internal navigation between pages is a bit confusing and some pages have totally different layout to one another but overall, a good job!