Marketing used to be easy. Have a product or service? Simple. Just put it in a magazine or newspaper advertisement with some nice graphics and if your witty enough follow it with some cool text. Ditto for T.V ads. Just add a nice catchy tune and presto your marketing is done and you can sit back.

When it came to market research simply pay for a focus group session and nod at the feedback that you get. All was very easy until now!

With social media and various methods to engage a customer we now realise that we never really listened during those focus group sessions. Whilst T.V and magazines advertising needs to be super sharp to get the point across whilst all the time your ad if it is not creative enough will simply get ignored. If you are lucky then your advertisment may even get ridiculed (which is actually a good thing as people spread your video or pic around).

A lot of social media is experimentation at the moment. You never really know until you give it a good go. We at Cubic Promote have been doing our best on the various formats:

Twitter
Facebook
YouTube
Flickr

With these formats we aim to let you find out a bit more about us yet entertain and educate with gossip at the same time. Social media has definitely been fun and theres a lot more for us to learn.

Too bad we aren’t a retail company as I would love to see how we would have scored in the customer service awards!

The results are out though. Bunnings has been voted the best in customer service followed closely by Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank. I love the service in all 3 companies. They are all fantastic with courteous staff and they are really really friendly and helpful. Here is a list of the winners of the categories (aparently they were voted on by us customers)

1) Telstra
2) CBA
3) Qantas
4) Woolworths
5) Origin Energy
6) RACV
7) AAMI
8) Medibank
9) Subway
10) Toyota
11) Australia Post

The judging criteria was compiled on a survey of Aussie adults and collated by reseach consultants AMR and Feedback ASAP.

The bad aspect about this reseach is that weather real or perceived Australians have felt overall service levels have gone down whilst only 17% indicated that service has improved. This is tremendously positive. Why? Well if you are looking for a competitive edge for your business this is it! You offer better service and you are instantly in front already as seemingly most of your competitors are perceived as poor!

Branding your logo on promotional items is a great way to advertise your company. It is important to have a clear crisp branding. However branding on promotional items may not be as straight forward as you may think to have a crisp clear brand. Here are 3 points to consider to make your logo stand out. These points are common factors which may make your brand not legible. In no particular order they are “colour choice,” “font style,” “size of print.”

Colour Choice - Selecting colours is the easy part to give you a clear brand. Simply select contasting colours to print such as light colours on a dark surface or a dark colour on a light surface. (eg. Black print on white, or yellow print on black) If you desire something subtler then simply tone down the contast colour such as printing light grey on a black surface instead of branding white). If you wish to be on the safe side simply go for the direct contrast colour. If you are familiar with colour then definitely go for something with a bit of subtlety. You may be surprised but sometimes having a subtle contrast creates a more appealing product and a more appealing brand.

Size of Print - Some of our customers make specific requests for their logo to be as large as possible. Some even request the logo to extend to even the size of the product. Whilst at the other extreme other clients at times may present us with a small paragraph of text and may make a request to have them printed on something like a promotional post it note or a promotional bag. Having so many words essentially minimises the text to the point that it will not be legible. From experience printing something as important as a logo at a large size simply makes the product look bad and worse still can make it look a little cheap. To extract the best print results for a promotional item opt for something that is in proportion to the product. Having a big logo for the sake of clarity may have several consequences from deterring the recipient to use the product regularly to reflecting a bad perception on to your brand. A good way to consider the size of the logo is to consider an automobile. Imagine a luxury sedan with their brand name plastered on the entire bonnet or an entire door to show off their brand. Or consider a budget small car doing the same thing and having their brand on the entire boot. In both instances it will look very very tacky indeed and I would doubt may people would want to drive that car.

Font Style - This is something we have considered before in a prior post. However we have seen some beautiful simple fonts yet at the same time we have received some intricately detailed font. Fonts are an easy way to communicate a feeling. Have a font with sharp edges and sharp lines and the vibe of your logo is instantly modern and futuristic. Whilst having a font with lots of curves and bends instantly conveys a classic traditional feel. There are many other fonts which convey and appeal on different emotive levels. The tricky thing though is when fonts are so designed that they cease to become legible. They still convey their vibe but the actual words are no longer legible. If this is the case and you did wish for your logo to be legible our only solution is either to have a 2nd version of your logo font available or opt for branding in simple arial.

Hope these tips help you to create a clear legible brand for your next promotional item!

Needing new promotional products? Want to be the first to come up with a BRIGHT & SMART IDEA? How about be a Smartie and recommend using Custom Printed Smarties for your next marketing event. Newly available at Cubic Promote, we offer branding onto the those bright coloured button chocs. Available in bulk buy from 5KGS or order them as individually packaged packs.

Don’t head to your next marketing meeting with generic ideas, be SMART! let them know the new craze is Promotional Chocolate Smarties!

More Custom Printed Smarties will be up on our website soon, stay tuned.

Today is Daffodil Day! Daffodil day is to raise awareness and money towards Cancer research. What a huge charity event from the moment I boarded a train to work to working to the office I was approached 4 times to buy a promotional pen or a promotional mini footy ball or a lapel pin. Yellow and blue was the main themed colour for all the products and all the merchandise tents. Attention grabbing and very appealing. The colour yellow is definitely a great colour to base an event around. But what does it mean and why do yellow promotional items appeal so much?

Well yellow is of course the brightest of all the colours even compared to white. It is a fun sunny colour and you may not know but it is a colour that can be seen by even colour blind people. Yellow is used as a symbol for creativity (hence may be why it is a good colour for cancer research to create a cure!) Other symbolic meanings of yellow include: Happiness and glee as well as clarity and awareness. As a corporate colour for a logo or to represent an event these are definitely positive traits to convey.

Some of the products that we have in stock that come in yellow colours include:

Custom Branded Yellow Post Its
Promotional Yellow Pens
Yellow Promotional Stressballs
Yellow Custom Umbrellas
Yellow Custom Printed Bags
Yellow Promotional Balloons
Yellow Promotional T shirts

Have you ever wondered why some television adverts or even radio advertisements are mind numbingly uncreative? In fact some are so simple that you cant help but comment on them. Its not just small companies with possibly a smaller budget but also large corporates are equally the same. The reason is (other than its cheaper to film) is that using these advertisments a company can repeat their products using more variety of different ads and expose their product or service repeatedly to you.

Why? Simple! The more a message is repeated to you the more likely a customer will buy into your product or service!

Consciously or unconsciously we make decisions everyday based on what we know or what we are familiar with. From everyday purchases through to large purchases familiarity builds trust. A person will also buy something that they feel they know.

This is exactly what things like promotional items can help achieve as having your brand on an item can extend your marketing dollar to long after the event. This repeated exposure of your brand will in the medium term create familiarity and new potential customers for you. The added benefit that the promotional item may be useful or fun and the goodwill generated to the recipient is a great bonus.

Having promotional gear such as embroidered caps and shirts creates a visual marketing message too.

So for argument sake you have $10 to spend on marketing it would be preferable to spend $10 on a long term marketing plan compared to spending it all on 1 extravagent event. It will give you more effectiveness.

Do you have an upcoming event but are a little short of funds to add anything that is fun? Well sponsorship and having an additional logo on your promotional product may be a good idea. The trick here though is to choose a promotional item which have a larger than normal branding area to ensure that there is enough branding space for the both you and the sponsor. If you are looking for a sponsor it is generally a good idea to have the sponsor in a similar field to either what you do or the event that you will be using the promotional items for.

However first things first. How do you attract sponsors in the first place? Well here are some tips.

1) Be persistent. Assuming 1 out of every 35 companies will reject you it makes sense to contact as many companies as possible. So statistically speaking if you contact 70 companies there is a chance that 2 of them may be interested.

2) Be patient and plan early. The wheels within a large organisation can move slowly so please plan ahead and contact your potential sponsor early. It can sometimes take as long as 6 months.

3) Target businesses first that are either related to what you or the event does. eg. If it was sponsorship for a motor car race then perhaps target companies that sell oil or car accessories first.

4) You must be precise on what you offer. You need to consider something that is measurable and articulate this quickly and briefly to the potential sponsor. If they are briefly interested you need to have more in depth detail and a measurable benefit to them in order for the sponsor to be interested.

5) Put yourselves in your sponsors shoes. Identify if they will benefit from increased brand exposure and if that will lead to greater sales.

6) Create and emphasize cross marketing opportunities like internet websites, social networking site exposure, print and media exposure, promotional items co - branding like team shirts and the like.

Hopefully these tips may help you secure sponsorship.

Chances are if you are looking for promotional items you may be needing them for a conference or an expo. A product that you can take along to an expo to draw more crowds to your stand and also to provide them with a quality useful memento in which to remember you by. However what product to choose? Our website has now almost 7000 different promotional items so there is definitely a huge range of choice for you to suit your budget or your theme. Today I’ll recomend some products which are perfect for tradeshows and conferences basedon 1 important and common criteria which is portability. A lot of our products are fantastic however if you are looking specifically at a conference they may not be too ergonomic and may not be a good idea.

Products like branded water bottles, umbrellas, coffee mugs take up a lot of space and in the case of coffee mugs they are easily broken too when dropped.

Whist items like printed tee shirts, apparel and any product where different sizes may be an issue should be avoided when using them as hand out items.

Other basic items are also just that. Bare minimum items which are low cost such as promotional pens, corporate candy and business cards are conference neccessities however realistically will not make you stand out from the crowd but is absolutely essential in todays conferences. (plus they are quite cheap anyway)

So what items would we recomend for tradeshows which are portable?
We would recomend to opt for things that are portable and light. Think promotional keyrings, post it pads, stressballs, branded yo yos, personalised mousepads and you wont go too far wrong.

In a conference or expo setting it is also a great idea to keep a stash of more premium gifting products. These are reserved for loyal existing clients who may pop by or for high value or high probability prospects. It allows these visitors to go away with a more personal touch and with a more personal and exciting product. A good idea may be to use a personalised thumb drive pre-loaded with your company info or some attachments of your catalogue and service range for them to peruse at their leisure.

Hope these ideas help you a little when you are selecting promotional items which are portable for your next conference!

I came across this interesting (albeit 6 month old) artical on the Morning Herald. It was on a study on the purchasing and consumer habits of 16 o 30 year olds. I personally thought that their buying habits revolved around parties, alcohol, video games, anything that can log them on Facebook and pizza. Surprise surprise that is sooo not the case. Almost 56% of surveyed respondents had spend over an hour reading books! In fact many of the young survey participants spent time at movies, dinner parties and reading. Even more surprising was the fact that 68% preferred to access their news not through the internet but via the T.V (long live the T.V)

One interesting question asked in the survey was how young consumers reacated to advertisments on T.V. Loud and over the top ads had hardly any resonance with them. However subtle advertising which allowed young people to feel like they have discovered something on their own strongly influenced their buying behaviour. This is very interesting and if you are marketing a youth oriented product and makes social media and influential bloggers quite an important tool if you are trying to market your brand name!

Having someone else do your marketing for your business or as a consultant to your existing marketing team may make a lot of sense. For some activities you simply dont need (or afford) a new full time marketing staff yet there is work to be done for any given project and importantly creativity to be had. However hiring a marketing consultant is not as easy as it seems. I have spoken to companies who have hired marketing help from their feedback seemingly all they have done is order some promotional products from us and seemingly just strutted around the business doing not much else. So what to look for when you are looking for a marketing consultant?

1) Look for qualifications! Degrees / Diplomas anything really! It ensures they have some basic knowledge at least and that they have commitment to their profession.

2) Consulting fee that is too low! Its always tempting to opt for the lowest priced option. Unfortunately it is creativity and ideas you are after… not just to save a dollar! So opt for the best option for you based on skills and experience. Besides you want to undersell your product right? So why get on board a marketing consultant who undersells their own?

3) Written agreements…. you need one from the consultant and you need to mutually agree on it too

4) References from past jobs

5) A method of measurement of their performance using agree Key performance indicators