This was a line I heard many times while cutting my teeth in this business with Tampa advertising icon Bob Denton at Denton Advertising.  All we did was shelter advertising for large developers, like US Home, ITT Palm Coast, Westinghouse (now WCI), Ryland Homes, Seven Oaks, Cheval, and Tampa Palms to name a few.  Inevitably, there would be a sales manager who wasn’t making their numbers and we as the ad agency must be to blame, right?

Wrong.  Here’s how Bob would handle that.  Instead of asking clients how much revenue they were making, he would ask how often they had to replace the carpeting in their sales centers.  The baffled client would say, four, five or however many times they’d replaced worn carpeting. Then Bob would go on to explain that they obviously don’t have a traffic problem, what they have is a sales problem.  And advertising agencies don’t have much control over sales.  

Ad agencies are masters of understanding psychographics, building trust in a brand, and motivating prospects if clients give them a realistic budget to work and the freedom to roll out a compelling campaign.  In the case of large developments, we threw every tool we had in our kit at them – from TV to outdoor, newspaper inserts to direct mail.  Because it was our job to deliver qualified bodies to the sales center.  Once there, it was up to the sale team to close them.

On the digital side, I work with a proven studio in Philadelphia called Push 10 Design Studios. They recently had a client question poor sales on an e-commerce store they designed.  Even though the Pay-Per-Click campaigns were generating a lot of qualified traffic, conversions were not happening at the rate the client wanted.  Push 10 gave their “replace your carpeting” pep talk to the client, and pointed out the many factors required to close a sale, of which Push 10 had control over only a few.

For instance, it was Push 10’s job to generate traffic via PPC campaigns, design the site professionally to build legitimacy and trust, make it easy to use, and provide a simple, error-free checkout process.  The client on the other hand was responsible for providing the right Google Adwords budgets to work with, offering compelling products, providing professional photography that makes the products appealing, competitive pricing, and special incentives like free shipping.

Point being…no matter how stunning the website, how easy it is to use, or how able to generate traffic, if the products, imagery, pricing, return policies, and purchasing experience is not up to par with the look and functionality of the site, sales will suffer.

So if you’re thinking that your advertising or marketing isn’t working because your sales aren’t where you want them to be, ask yourself, ‘when’s the last time I replaced my carpeting?’  Whether it’s a Berber on the floor of a retail space or a virtual storefront on the World Wide Web, if you’re getting traffic but not reaching your sales goals, then perhaps you’re focusing on the wrong targets, your team might benefit from some training, there’s brand confusion, or you’re trying to be too many things to too many people.

But the good news is that ample traffic is a good thing.  You’re then 9/10ths of the way to making the sale.

Blog written/created by Jennifer Frazier.
To view more – visit my partner Jennifer @ www.thecreativestable.com

…so why treat it like it is?
When it comes to brand integration or brand development, many businesses think as long as they have a great logo and tagline they’re set. You can create a campaign and slap a logo on it and you’re done. But that doesn’t always work. Your logo is like make-up. It may make you look pretty, but it’s what’s underneath that counts. All the make-up in the world won’t hide a dysfunctional personality. A logo is not your brand. If your brand is struggling take some time to date it.  Be truthful and honest. You just might get lucky!

Here are three brand development steps for businesses:

1) Get a personality 

Discover what your brand stands for. Be honest with yourself. Like any relationship, if you don’t know what you stand for, then how can you be honest with your relationships? Likewise, if you don’t know what you want your brand to be about, then how will anyone else know? You have to discover your voice.

Take the time to truly look at your business. Be brutally honest. Try and define at least five characteristics you want your business to embody. Make sure they aren’t characteristics that make you say “duh”. For example a bank may want to say they are “secure”. But isn’t that the definition of a bank? I put my money in one because it is secure. Don’t tell me you’re secure if that is an expectation. Look more for personality traits that will create an emotion in people. So instead of a bank being safe, secure, and honest – it might be convenient, flexible, and helpful. Define your unique personality traits. Begin to build a picture of what you believe your brand is all about.

2) Define your dream date

All right, you know what your business stands for now, but what type of consumer wants to use your business?  Who are you trying to attract? You’re all dressed up and sitting at a table just waiting for Mr. or Mrs. Right to sit down. You need to define the type of personalities you expect your buyers to have. Now is the time for you to look at who is actually using your products or services. Profile their demographics. Learn about their spending habits. Are they younger? Older? Do they have families? This is important. You need to understand your consumers so you can offer them the products and services they want or need.

3) Fish the pond

So here we are. You know what you stand for. You know who you want to attract. But do you know what they are thinking? It’s time to get out and find out what people are actually thinking. It’s time for a relationship. That takes understanding and communication. You need to talk to your customers and find out what they think about your brand.  This is one area you don’t want to skimp on. This is how you find the real, meaningful data. This is how you develop a strong bond with your customer. This is where true branding happens and lives happily ever after.

So there you have it. Three easy steps you can do now for brand development. Discover your values, understand your customer’s values, and research their opinions about your brand. Arm yourself with this information and you’re sure to get lucky.

Kurt Sepf
Director of Creative Services/Fusionfarm

Branding requires a full-time commitment.

You cannot start a branding effort, then stop, and expect to be successful.

Protect your brand while continuously molding and shaping it.

5 things to consider:

1) You can run, but you cannot hide. In a world where social media hold everyone accountable for their actions, you need to accept the fact that if you upset your customers, or your fans, you will likely hear about it on one of the social-media platforms. Many companies are scared that social media will ruin their brands’ reputations, so they hide from it. Confront the problem or questions head-on, and go to bat for your brand.

2) The lens is everywhere. In a world where citizens have become journalists with their mobile devices, assume that you, and those using your products and services, are being photographed or videotaped. Watch what you say or do in the public eye.

3) Be transparent. Candor is at a premium when managing your online reputation. If you’ve inadvertently angered someone, come clean. If your customer service didn’t live up to expectations, or your brand did not perform as advertised, be straight as to why, and how you plan to rectify it. If you don’t, you will inflame the situation, which can quickly get out of control in the social world.

4) Educate those who use the tools. Little has been said or written about the importance of educating the next generation about reputation management. The more intelligently people use social tools, the more they will use them in a productive way.

5) Get out ahead of the noise. You never want to have to be reactive when managing a reputation, though there are times when you need to respond to a situation. The best way to enhance a reputation, whether for an individual or a company, is to have a plan. Develop your message. Identify your most important social platforms. Build and engage an audience with thoughtful content.

In an era that has seen reputations rise and fall in spectacular ways online — and very quickly — it is prudent to take the most thoughtful approach possible to managing one’s brand.

By Jennifer Frazier/The Creative Stable

Back when I was a budding young reporter at the University of Missouri’s Journalism School, the highest honor you could get was a front page story placed “above the fold.”  Even though that was, dare I say, over 30 years ago, the term stuck in design circles and even attached itself to websites in the late 1990s.  I can remember looking at a website that “scrolled to China” and think how clunky it looked to my trained eye.

But the times, they are a’changing.  Above the fold is irrelevant in web design today.  Why?  Because of social media and the explosion of tablet and smartphone use.  It has changed the way people consume information on their computer screens and mobile devices.  “Scrolling to China” is not only expected, but anticipated, as each swipe of the finger leads us to more and more engaging and welcome content on our Facebook pages, Pinterest boards and Twitter feeds.  Sixty percent of us, according to The Pew Research Foundation, would rather read our news via a tablet or smart phone app than on our computer screens.  Time was, the PC market dictated the need for a website that contained itself on the screen.  Today, confining a website in a box is a missed opportunity.

Consider this – for the first time since 2001, PC sales are projected to be lower than they were in the previous year.  Instead, tablet sales area expected to exceed 100 million in 2013.  According to Nielsen, the majority of U.S. mobile phone subscribers now own smart phones instead of feature phones.  The shift to mobile is happening at light speed, leaving many companies scrambling to create websites that can be viewed in any environment.

The solution to this new challenge is responsive web design.  A million new screens have bloomed over the past few years, making it essential to design websites that are equally impressive on any of the more than 2,500 different devices available today.  It’s called responsive because the website automatically resizes itself for optimum viewing on the device it’s been accessed on.

Here’s how it works.  A responsive web design uses media queries to figure out what the device’s resolution is that it’s being served on.  Flexible images and fluid grids then size correctly to fit the screen.  The benefit are obvious – build a website once, and it works seamlessly across thousands of different screens.

As Ethan Marcotte, the author of Responsive Web Design, explains “Now more than ever, we’re designing work meant to be viewed along a gradient of different experiences. Responsive web design offers us a way forward, finally allowing us to ‘design for the ebb and flow of things.'”

The largest responsive web design project to date can be found at The Boston Globe, http://www.bostonglobe.com.  Try this, log onto this site, and then adjust your browser window’s size.  Notice how the site automatically reconfigures itself to the new size without sacrificing any visual quality.   Despite your politics, Barack Obama’s campaign was on the leading edge of responsive web design technology; an advantage some feel had a big hand in his re-election because his messages were consistent and digestible on any platform.

So here’s my advice.  Stop thinking in terms of pages, and start thinking in terms of systems – sites that are developed with functionality in mind first and page layout second.   Responsive Web Design is modular in nature and scalable overall.

While Above The Fold was nice while it lasted, long live responsive web design.  It will soon be the way companies are judged for their ability to communicate well in any environment.