Posts about:
It’s tactile, it’s trustworthy, it’s permanent and we love it. Print! Despite what you may have read online, print is not dead – and savvy marketeers will do well to include it in their campaign mix. Here at Focus7, we’re adept in all aspects of digital marketing, but that hasn’t stopped us going to print to encapsulate our new #BrandMeansBusiness positioning in a gorgeous concertina-fold 12-page brochure.
We’ve been banging on for years about the need to approach B2B marketing with the same verve and creative energy displayed by the best practitioners of B2C. We believe that just because someone is at work, doesn’t mean they stop being human. Or stop having the same emotional responses to thoughtful, well-targeted, intelligent brand communication as they do at home.
It’s a fundamental truth that businesses that don’t move forwards go backwards rather than stand still. Balance sheet reality insists that you simply have to keep growing – your customer base, product and service portfolios, sales lines, margins, profits, and, most precious of all, your brand reputation.
Love is in the air, everywhere we look around. Harangued hubbies are discovering that all the restaurants are already fully booked, supermarkets are selling limp red roses flown in on lumbering freight liners from Kenya’s Great Rift Valley (yes, really) and marketers are going all gooey with their copycat social media posts.
We’ve been celebrating National Storytelling Week here at Focus7, gathering around the agency hearth to swap tales of the good old days when marketing was easy; when all a brand needed was a single-minded proposition and a reasonable above-the-line spend.
It’s a perennial problem for creative and strategic agencies everywhere. We’re always busy honing essence, personality, differentiation and the like for our clients. The challenge can be to recognise when it’s time to look inwards to discover whether our own brand needs an injection of fresh thinking.
The second the clock strikes midnight, and the tipsy voices singing Auld Lang Syne have quieted, the cries of ‘New Year, new me!’ and declarations of resolutions begin. It’s very tempting as a brand to take it as an opportunity to tear out the old and bring in the new, but (even though we’re a brand agency so you’d be forgiven for thinking we’d recommend it) it’s not time to throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet.
You wouldn’t forget to update your shop window for 4 years. As your digital shopfront, updating your creative web design is crucial to the success of your business. To rank highly on search engines, it’s no longer just enough to create a good design and stick with it; the goal posts for best practice and high quality are always moving – you have to move with technology and the changing trends to remain successful.
Every time you receive a business card at an exhibition or a letter from a business in the post, you’re presented with another opportunity to judge them – positively or negatively. That’s why your corporate stationery design is more important than many people realise.
There are so many things to consider when creating a memorable logo, especially as they have such a major impact on how customers perceive brands. Imagine a world with no logos, and how difficult it would be to distinguish between different brands! Creating a brand logo design that knocks your customers off their feet is important to help differentiate you.