Greenwashing: Are Your Marketing Materials Guilty?

Greenwashing is the consumer perception of being misled by a company regarding the environmental practices of the company or the environmental benefits of a product or service, according to Wikipedia. In other words, it’s being misleading about your company’s green marketing claims (I call it lying, but I learned in my PR classes you never [...]

Highlights from the Best Ads of the World from May 2008

Here’s a sampling from some of the winners of the Ads of the World May 2008 competition. You can check them out for yourself at http://adsoftheworld.com/blog.
Royal Automobile Club of Victoria Insurance Disclaimer
This one is pretty good, although some say it takes something that is mildly funny and makes it only mildly funnier. Not sure if [...]

How to Avoid Hype in Your Marketing Copy

When you sit down to write advertising or marketing copy, you probably don’t mean to include any hype. Hype is contrived, promotional publicity. In other words, hype is a lie.
Hype is an ad that claims to bring in 50 new customers a month for an industry’s whose average is one to two new clients a [...]

Marketing Necessity: Drip Marketing

It’s easy when your business is busy making money with current clients to put marketing on the backburner. You have tons of money rolling in at the moment, who needs marketing? You do. By the time your current wave of clients dies down, it’ll be too late to start marketing to drum up new business. [...]

Educational Marketing Basics – A New Way of Thinking

Educational marketing is a somewhat new idea, a new spin if you will, on traditional marketing.
Instead of selling to the consumer, educational marketing aims to inform the consumer and will let the consumer decide for herself which product is best for her. Of course, the information should be non-biased while at the same time point [...]

Creative Thinking Crash Course

Creative thinking is essential for…just about everything!  What does it really mean to be a creative thinker?  Can everybody be good at creative thinking?
I think there are several parts to being a creative thinker.  It’s not just any one of these things, but putting all of these into one person certainly creates the potential for [...]

Unbranded = Unmemorable

Don’t make the mistake of generic packaging.  Anytime you have an opportunity to connect your product with your corporate image, take it.  Not only will your customers have one more point of exposure to your brand, but this also increases the likelihood of exposing new customers to your brand.
Examples abound: unbranded envelopes, basic business cards, [...]

Get Your Customers to Market for You with Social Media

Word-of-mouth marketing can sometimes be better at promoting your company than traditional marketing outlets. Established brands that have loyal fans can create an online presence without actually doing anything company-wise. It’s almost like people paying to wear clothes with a Nike swoosh except people are promoting their fave companies for free on the Internet.
One good [...]

The Three Types of Brochures

And Basic Designing Differences
Brochure printing is used by companies from almost every industry, and each uses brochures for specific purposes. The three main uses are to advertise, inform, or entertain. All three types of brochures can come in different sizes, layouts, and fold techniques depending on the preference of the designer, yet all three types [...]

Optimize Your Direct Mail Postcards

Postcard marketing campaigns can give you a great return on investment (ROI). Postcards don’t cost much to print or mail, so your biggest expense will probably be the time it takes you to design and write the copy for it. To help you along with these tasks and others that go along with postcard marketing, [...]