Can’t Get Any Hotter
Posted by De La Marque in Marketing Tips, Who to watch, 2012, Run It Right on 03/22/2012
Tabasco (Photo credit: kenny_lex)
The favorite pepper sauce, known as Tabasco Sauce was first produced in 1868 by Edmond McIlhenny, who was originally from Maryland but moved to Louisiana and began producing his sauce from Tabasco peppers that were grown only on Avery Island, LA at the time. The recipe is a simple one, although time consuming, as the peppers, vinegar and salt are aged in white oak barrels for three years before bottling. McIlhenny first bottled his sauce for sale in previously used cologne bottles, and when the product took off he stayed with what worked. Today we buy the famous sauce in a tiny cologne like bottle with a simple red and green label on it, that hasn’t changed in any measurable way since 1868. The company has been owned and operated by McIlhennys since the very beginning, and even all of today’s stockholders are family members or inherited or purchased their stock from a family member. There is something to be said for finding your winning game plan and staying with it. That red and green square label on the elegant little bottle is known by people all over the world as the original pepper sauce that gives food a good kick. It has appeared in movies and television shows and even Loony-Toon cartoons as the sauce that makes your face go red and your eyes water, and it is hard to find a restaurant anywhere that can’t provide you with a bottle on request. Today the company produces as many as 720,000 two ounce bottles per day, all on Avery Island, all with only genuine Tabasco peppers, all marked with the square red and green label.
Believe
Posted by De La Marque in 2012, From The Pros, Marketing Tips, Who to watch on 03/20/2012
Facts are facts and it’s time we faced them. Business success depends almost entirely on one thing. Marketing. It , or the lack of it, is why really worthless products make millions and pure genius goes unnoticed. Marketing is why a B Level movie is a box office hit and a masterpiece is noticed only by the critics. It is also why great products go from drawing room to being a staple in most homes, recognized worldwide, more profitable than whatever is in second place. Whether it is Barbie Dolls or Bacon, the way it is labeled, packaged, promoted, and presented has everything to do with the general public’s need to own it. Don’t assume that because your wine is made from grapes blessed by the Pope, grown in a lost village at the foot of one of the Seven Wonders of the World that it will end up in the cellars of the world’s finest restaurants. It has to be talked about in back rooms before it makes it to bar rooms and that is all about your marketing. You have a great product, invest in its future. Market it like you believe.
Core Values
Posted by De La Marque in 2012, From The Pros, Marketing Tips, Who to watch on 03/16/2012
The most successful businesses will have their priorities straight. They are an example of the fact that successful business should focus on the things that truly matter – the relationship built when we do business with people of integrity. At Buckley Graphics we take pride in our longstanding reputation for quality and innovation, always working with an eye on doing things just a bit better. But, at the heart of our success is an understanding of certain values, and keeping them in the forefront-the value of family, the ones who started the company, and the ones who run it now; the value of being good for our word; the value of a handshake that carries some weight. Buckley Graphics has a substantial presence in an industry that has changed more rapidly in the past ten years than in the forty years prior, but the thing that has remained the same is our leadership in quality, creativity and customer oriented performance. Some things never change, because they cannot be improved upon.
Perception
Posted by De La Marque in 2012, From The Pros, Marketing Tips, Who to watch on 03/13/2012
Image via Wikipedia
All of us carry an image in our head of what our forefathers looked like. We picture George Washington as stoic, white-haired, stately, and Thomas Jefferson as tall and thoughtful, Benjamin Franklin as a character with spectacles and knickers. Our perspective of not only what these men looked like but who they were, comes from a very deliberate act on each of their parts. They sat for a formal portrait and they did it with a definite purpose in mind. They wanted some control over their portrayal in history. These people started a whole country, for heaven’s sake, they were no fools. They knew that the time and money they spent on getting their portrait painted would have a lot to do with how they were remembered or if they were remembered at all
. In this day of digital imaging the perceived value of personal portraiture has diminished, but it is even more important today than it was hundreds of years ago. The truth is that the only impression many of your competitors, customers and potential customers have of you is your representation on the internet. You and your entire company are being judged by the world through the snapshot that you have posted on your website. Some of us do our selling entirely through the internet and yet we have not invested adequately to get the proper return. Professional photography of your product, your facility, you, will put you on a different level than your competitors. If you’re still wondering if it really makes a difference, you be the judge. Which one would you buy?
Bananas about Bananas
Posted by De La Marque in 2012, From The Pros, Marketing Tips, Who to watch on 03/07/2012
Image via Wikipedia
When you picture a bunch of grocery store bananas, what do they look like? They look like bananas, probably yellow, and there’s something else. Most likely, somewhere in your mind the bright yellow fruit has a small blue sticker on it. In the minds of most Americans a banana grows with a yellow peel and a little blue sticker that reads, say it with us, Chiquita. Chiquita Bananas became the first company to “brand” a fruit in 1944 when they introduced Miss Chiquita and gave their bananas the same name. In 1963 they came up with their oval blue sticker, each one placed on the delicate fruit by hand, and that hasn’t changed. The Chiquita brand of bananas has captured the market, they virtually own the banana world, and their little blue stickers led the way. Something as small as a blue oval of self adhesive paper, seared the Chiquita brand into our psyche so that when we think of bananas we think of Chiquita. Branding at its best. Simply brilliant.
Lizard Talk
Posted by De La Marque in 2012, From The Pros, Marketing Tips, Who to watch on 03/05/2012
Gecko (Photo credit: rengber)
Some companies just do it right when it comes to their marketing campaign. The first thing you have to do is to get your potential customer to at least think of you when they are in the market for your product. Geico gets their advertising right. There is no way to forget their name because their mascot is a gecko, not just a green lizard with a British accent, but a gecko, which not coincidentally sounds very much like the name of their company. We all stop and watch their television commercial because, as mentioned previously there is a gecko with a British accent that carries a cell phone and a major credit card having lunch with the CEO of the company. He always manages to slip in their tag line, about fifteen minutes and fifteen percent, also easy to remember. Nothing else that is said in the commercial matters, because they have gotten their message across with great clarity. What have they done right? They have entertained us enough to make us stop and listen, they have used the gecko gimmick that makes it impossible to forget their name, and they have honed their message to a concise phrase that we can take away from the commercial. Not bad for a talking reptile!
Linger
Posted by De La Marque in 2012, From The Pros, Marketing Tips, Who to watch on 03/01/2012
Today we are reminded that there is more to life than running a successful business. Loving your business and committing to it must not equate with your business taking the central position in your life. There are important aspects of who you are that will diminish or even disappear as the hours you spend striving and building shut out attention to what is truly important. That can mean children, community, aging parents, your own mental health. So the wisdom we share today, though it be contrary to all that many of us believe to be true of successful business owners, is to stop, breathe, hold a hand, read a book, listen to a story, say yes to a second cup of coffee, ignore a ring tone, lend a shoulder, contemplate the beauty of the moon, walk away from your desk. Your business will still be there when you return and there is just the slightest possibility that you will have more to contribute when next you boot up. Your mind refreshed, your soul renewed, your humor returned will do more to increase your bottom line than any amount of number crunching and strategizing you can do, and when you look back at this week or last month you will find that besides your profitable business there will be a person whose respect you have earned in spades, and it will be you.
Jeepers Creepers
Posted by De La Marque in 2012, From The Pros, Marketing Tips, Who to watch on 02/28/2012
Image via Wikipedia
Have you developed your look? When people think of your business do they get a certain image, or better still, when they see a certain scene, or kind of person, do they think of your product? If a television show wants to set the scene for an Italian restaurant, what do they do? They put red and white checked cloths on the tables. When you’re in the cereal aisle at the grocery store and you catch a flash of bright yellow out of the corner of your eye, what have you glimpsed but a box of Cheerios. Regardless of what is being advertised, if the striking color on the television screen is red, we know that ultimately, it will be a Target commercial. These companies have accomplished something that all of us should envy. They are identifiable simply by the way they look. They don’t have to say anything, they don’t even have to flash their name before our eyes, we know them by their colors, their style, their look. The labeling of your product has the same powerful effect, or not so much depending on quality of design, color, masterful printing. The way you label your product either says, “give me a try”, or “move on to whatever’s next”. Catch their eye and you will establish yourself as the one to watch which will translate ultimately into the one to buy.
Historic
Posted by De La Marque in 2012, From The Pros, Marketing Tips, Who to watch on 02/24/2012
Sometimes when something is right we just have to shout about it. During the past football season a certain amount of history has been made with the Denver Broncos. When a guy who shouldn’t have been successful is, and a team who wasn’t even making the playoff radar does, and when an entire city starts to believe, and the world decides to take notice, there is something happening that is perhaps a little bigger than completed passes and points scored. The glory days of the Broncos mainly rested on the shoulders of one man, and have become a thing of the past in recent years, but this year we saw a glimmer, a hope for a return to the days when we could have it all again. Passing that gauntlet between the old and new finally seemed to happen at the end of the season, and our Eric Bakke was there to capture it. Eric Lars Bakke/Photographer often finds himself in places where history is being made because he has an eye for what really matters and once again he got the shot that rang around the world.
Clearly We Were Ready
Posted by De La Marque in From The Pros, Marketing Tips, Who to watch on 02/17/2012
Image via Wikipedia
In 1970 the ABC Television Network introduced a phenomenon to television viewers. They called it football and it changed the world as we know it – not because it was football, but because it was football on Monday night. It was even called, Monday Night Football, and over the years it was commentated by a variety of sports voices, with varying degrees of expertise and humor, and though we had all been watching football since we were able to sit up without assistance we felt that a new phenomenon had entered our mundane existence. Someone at ABC had the brilliance to know that an old, extremely familiar product, marketed as a brand new, bigger and better event on a new night would shed a new light on the gridiron. Autumn became not only Football Season, but the blessed months when Monday nights were set aside for junk food and the big game. Oddly enough, many otherwise stellar teams fell flat on Monday night as the entire country tuned in to the only game in town, but we didn’t care, because it was Monday Night Football. There’s a lesson. Great product, repackaged and dressed up and marketed like your hair is on fire, equals a product with nothing less than a cult following.
“LIKE” Buckley Graphics
“LIKE” Eric Lars Bakke Photographer
