How can creative entrepreneurs benefit from using social networking systems such as MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, del.icio.us, Second Life – and others? Leanda Ryan is the director of Leanda Ryan Graphic Design, in Manchester, UK. Her story is an interesting one: “Flickr was the first service I signed up for 2005. I posted a …
Category: Marketing
The Message and Medium must be in harmony
The message must be right for the medium – and vice versa. The message and the medium must be in harmony. The “3 Ms of Marketing” are the Market, the Message and the Medium (in that order!). In other words, firstly be clear about the Market you are targeting, secondly decide the precise message for …
Innovating for the ‘Base of the Pyramid’
TÉLO is the first public telephone especially designed for public transport vehicles. Using a card for payment, millions of people using public transport are already using the phone on buses, trains and underground transport networks. Founded in August 2004, by Paulo Lerner and André Averbug, Brazilian company PV Inova (Public Vehicular Innovations) invented the system …
Co-opetition – friendly competition
Combining traditional Vietnamese fine art with pioneering technology has created success for VietnamArtist.com, a virtual online gallery based in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). Tran Thi Anh Vu (pictured, right), an art gallery proprietor, set up VietnamArtsist.com in 1999, seizing the opportunities offered by e-commerce to develop her business. She engaged the services of an …
Viral Marketing Video
One of the subjects discussed at the meeting of the Marketing and Advertising Global Network (MAGNET) in Munich recently was viral marketing. I was there as a guest speaker and one of the other presentations was from Gabriel Szapiro, whose Paris agency Saphir also specialises in marketing – especially permission marketing and viral marketing. He …
Say No to customers
Paradoxically, great art lies in what the painter chooses to leave out as much as what s/he decides to put in. Similarly, the art of business strategy is not just about deciding what you are going to do; just as important is deciding what you are not going to do. Having a ‘must not do’ …
Selling hope, wrapped up in t-shirts
Cassandra Postema and Dong Shing Chiu (pictured) are in the business of selling hope, wrapped up in t-shirts called ‘Hope Tees’. Their Hong Kong creative enterprise is called ‘Dialog’ because it embodies an exchange of conversations between marginalised Asian textile craft wisdom and modern western design. The result is an attractive and fun range of …
What are you selling, really?
If you’re a creative business or cultural enterprise, you are selling goods or services to customers, whether it’s graphic design, fashion, architecture, music, crafts, theatre, film or books. But what are you selling, really? Or to put it another way, what is it that the customer is really buying from you? It’s often the case …
Buzz Marketing
Buzz Marketing is another term for ‘Word of Mouth’ marketing, ie creating a ‘buzz’ as people spread the word about a product or service. Buzz Marketing could be described as turbo-charged word-of-mouth marketing. The difference for me is that word of mouth advertising can happen at a low level. It’s great, and many creative businesses …
Viral Marketing
The term ‘viral marketing’ describes any strategy that passes a marketing message from one person to another – and goes on to spread ‘like a virus’. In other words, the message must spread automatically as one person contacts another (like a virus). To be able to do this, the marketing message must be built into …