Archive for July, 2008

We’re great believers in simplicity. When it comes to marketing and advertising, there are three key principles that we strongly believe in… KISS, AIDA, and WOM (which, as you may have guessed, are all acronyms).

KISS

This is commonly referred to as ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’ (although as marketeers we prefer the slightly more positive ‘Keep It Short & Simple’). The basic thinking is that a design should be as simple as possible, and avoid any complexity. Want to know more?.. see here for details (did you see what we did there?).

AIDA/AIDAS

If you’re going to spend money on marketing and advertising, you want it to have a positive effect. This might sound obvious, but it’s amazing how many clients (and agencies) lose sight of this fact. In our view, a successful campaign will tick all of AIDA’S boxes:-

A – Attention (Awareness): attract the attention of the customer.
I – Interest: raise customer interest by demonstrating features, advantages, and benefits.
D – Desire: convince customers that they want the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.
A – Action: lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.
S – Satisfaction – satisfy the customer so they become a repeat customer and give referrals to a product.

You can read more about AIDA here.

WOM

‘Word Of Mouth’ is becoming increasingly important in today’s marketing world (as it becomes harder to reach target audiences through traditional media). A good campaign will get people talking about your product and services. You can read more about ‘word of mouth’ here,

There are some nice examples of some highly creative (yet stunningly simple) campaigns at Just Creative Design. Many of them adopt some (or all) of the above principles.

If you’re about to commission some advertising and need a little inspiration, they’re well worth a look.

We’ve brought you some interesting marketing ideas in the past (one of our favourites being the escalator advertising)… but we’re not overly sold on this concept from deodorant brand ‘Right Guard’.

Clearly it’s just a PR stunt… designed to get people talking. In that respect, it has worked (we’re writing about it here after all).

Brand owners Procter & Gamble might want to work on their site rankings though… a UK Google search for ‘Right Guard’ brings up a security company offering burly bouncers door staff.

We’re big fans of keyboard shortcuts here. OK, so it can take a little while to learn some commands, but used often enough, they tend to become second nature (many Windows users will be only too familiar with ‘Ctrl-Alt-Delete’ for example). Keyboard shortcuts  (also known as ‘hot keys’) are especially useful when typing (alleviating the need to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse).

‘Smashing Magazine’ has a nice summary of over 200 ‘hot keys’. Although aimed at web developers, they include commands for commonly used applications such as Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Outlook.

For example, if you use internet explorer, try pressing the F11 key, and the display should switch to full screen. Press F11 again, and the display will revert to normal… much quicker than using a mouse!

Smashing Magazine

Image by visualdensity

A few years ago it was not uncommon to read headlines about the ‘dot com’ bubble bursting. Even today, the media often use the term ‘dot com’ to describe the internet.

Things might be about to change though… whilst you might be used to entering a ‘.com’ or ‘.co.uk’ address into your browser, a whole raft of new web address suffixes are on the way! The technical name for these suffixes is Top Level Domains (or TLDs) and they are about to be overhauled following a new ruling by the net’s regulator ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

“Wonderful” you say…. “but what does that mean in plain English?”

Well, basically, companies will be able to create their own unique web addresses. For example Volkswagen could set up a website with a ‘vw’ suffix (e.g. www.golf.vw). This is a great opportunity for marketeers, or brand owners, offering much greater flexibility for bespoke campaigns for example.

It’s probably only going to be the larger companies that can afford this though (as each unique TLD will need to be bid for, and is likely to cost a six figure sum).

Via BBC News