Smart marketing moves: Holy cow, look at that cheese!
Again on the topic of giving your customers a great story to tell: in 1911, Minnesota dairy farmer Arthur Parkin decided to make a three-ton cheddar cheese to promote his county’s cheese makers. The story of how smart marketing moves made Parkin a big cheese in the state’s dairy industry appears in this morning’s MinnPost….
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Rolling out the new and improved UproarMusicAndSound.com in time for MSPIFF 2015
I’m happy to announce Department D’s second big site rollout for April, a complete rethink for Kent Militzer’s Uproar Music and Sound. Kent is an incredibly talented musician and studio engineer who provides award-winning musical sound design, mixes and custom scores for television and film. One of Kent’s recent projects was contributing original music, sound…
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We’re proud of this fresh new look for ScottMusgrove.com
A couple of weeks back we rolled out a brand-new website for Scott Musgrove, author of The Late Fauna of Early North America. It’s a first-rate showcase and storefront for his incredible paintings, prints and sculptures. Scott’s solo exhibition Wilder will be at Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York, May 16 through June 13.
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Marketing 101: Maybe if you stop here people would like you more
Following up on my last couple of posts: here’s a perfect example of 1) giving your customers a story they can’t wait to tell, and 2) getting it done in 300 words or less. Phil’s 550 is a little convenience store in the woods outside of Marquette, MI. Owner Phil Pearce has a Facebook page…
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How to write your first blog post
Three weeks ago a marketing consultant talked you into starting a blog for your small business. He said businesses whose blogs have racked up at least 51 posts will enjoy a 77% increase in median monthly leads. He made some compelling points about local search, thought leadership and cost-per-lead, and about leveraging your unique voice…
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Paul Rand and the role of design in customer experience
Quick addendum to last week’s post on giving your customers an experience they’ll want—no, need—to tell their friends about: this Fast Company story about the Paul Rand exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York ties in nicely with my point: Rand’s pioneering work in advertising design in the early ‘40s helped shift…
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Giving your customers a great story to tell
Did I tell you about that time my friends sold me a MacBook? Yesterday I tweeted about an article by Stuffocation author James Wallman, who argues that only those businesses that deliver pleasant or meaningful experiences will thrive in a social-media-driven market where consumers are losing their appetite for stuff, stuff and more stuff. Whether…
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Website builders: be careful what you drag and drop
Website builders—sites like Wix, Weebly or Squarespace that provide easy-to-use, drag-and-drop tools that let you create your own site without having to learn a lick of code—have come a long way from the clunky do-it-yourself options of just a few years ago. These days a small business owner can log in to single site and…
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How important is color to your visual identity? And when do you get to ignore it?
So I’m looking at a bag of popcorn and wondering: how important is color to a brand? The short answer, of course, is very important. Critically important. Color carries indispensable emotional information that the spacial dimensions of a logo—its shapes, lines and letterforms—couldn’t otherwise convey. In fact, color serves as a reliable identifier when shape,…
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American heritage brands, and the ethical treatment of perfectly good words
Marketers like to hop on the backs of useful, sturdy, vigorous words and ride them until they collapse beneath our collected bulk. We love words, and we feel lousy when we discover we’ve loved yet another one to death. Still, deadline after deadline, we keep hopping back on.
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