by Next Wave Team | Dec 3, 2005 | Advertising, BMW Advertising, Design, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Marketing & the Web, Retail, Web strategy
“Pardon me, please check your cell phone at the door” might be the future greeting at Wal-Mart- or any other retailer. Today many health clubs don’t allow cell phones in locker rooms because picture cams could be used to take pictures of people without their permission- your local retailer may not want you to be scanning barcodes into your web-enabled cell phone.
Picture this: you walk into Best Buy intent on buying a 60” Plasma High Definition TV. You’re ready to spend $5000 and then some- but, before you say yes to the kid in the blue shirt who’s thinking about the neon he’s going to be putting under his new Honda with his bonus for selling that big TV to you- you whip out your cell phone, scan the product barcode- and send it off to Google’s price comparison site- Froogle and back comes the information that if you drive 1.2 miles over to Circuit City (and here’s the link to the Google map) you can buy that same TV for $4200, and if you order it from Amazon.com you can get it for $3995.
Whoa. Did I just say going out of business sale for every brick and mortar store?
Quite possibly. There is a rule to retail, you can’t be cheapest on everything all the time- and still be profitable- even if you can accomplish huge economies of scale like Wal-Mart has, because there will always be someone else out there ready to beat your price on something.
A client of mine in the very competitive pizza business calls it the race to the bottom- and refuses to take part. He focuses on quality, value and being distinctive- making pizza that no one else does.
So in the retail wars- what has Wal-Mart really brought to the table that isn’t available somewhere else? Nothing. Just as GM flooded the market with different versions of the same vehicle- with so many dealers all competing to sell the exact same thing, Wal-Mart, even with the low price, can be beat by someone else- and if you have the power of the Internet in your palm- you may realize that you can get your milk, bananas and eggs at the Kroger on the way home for 20% less- so you skip Wal-Marts profitable items and just stick to the stuff that they make no margin on.
What retailers are going to be immune from this Internet assisted buyers- those that have unique products – like Target has done with its designer lines. Or where the branded buying environment is a lifestyle statement- like the new Harley Davidson showcase stores. Although I would have sworn that Apple was making a huge mistake by investing in retail stores- they’ve done two things very right- true customer service with hands on experts to guide the uninitiated in the way of Mac- and extended their brand into a branded environment that reinforces their high style franchise that differentiates them from all the other processor in a box manufacturers.
So, before you worry so much about the utilitarian low price behemoth that is Wal-Mart, or the froogle enhanced cell phone price shopper, start identifying how to evolve your shopping experience into a one-of-a-kind branded lifestyle. If you need further reinforcement of this branded experience- here are some of my favorites: IKEA, BMW Mini Cooper, Apple, Chipotle, Trader Joes, or W hotels.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Oct 21, 2005 | Advertising, Design, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, How To Select An Ad Agency
My father bought one of the first Saturns. Four doors, A/C, 5 speed manual, FM radio- no haggle cheap transportation. He still has his plastic car and it runs like a champ. When Hal Riney and Partners started with that “A different kind of car, a different kind of car company” people just thought it was another tagline.
Well all these years later, I read a story my dad sent me from Business Week and get this- they really are a different kind of car company:
Recently, a man called Saturn’s customer-service number with a big problem: His daughter’s car had broken down in Arizona, and she was stranded. He reported her location, her license plate number — and the fact that her car was a Honda (HMC).
DIRECT ACTION. When the Saturn representative pointed this out to the upset father, he said “You’re the company that cares about people, and that’s why I called you.” What would your company do? Saturn sent out a truck to pick her up, towed her Honda, and let her father know that she was safe.
Think about it: competitive brand, no warranty card, absolutely no reason to help. Except that there’s no substitute for this kind of concrete action when it comes to creating a brand with real meaning.
How many times do you not go back to a restaurant because of one bad experience? Or not shop at a store again because someone was rude to you? It’s always been said that do something wrong and someone tells 10 people, do it right, and they may tell 1, or possibly none.
Sure, Saturn may take this story and turn it into one of those warm and fuzzy commercials (or they may not- since they can’t afford to tow every car that breaks down) but it comes back to no matter what your ads say- your company has to over deliver.
Bad ads may kill a company slowly, but great ones will kill a bad company faster. All business is one-to-one, even in the days of the Internet- your user experience governs how likely you are to do business with that company again.
The BW story continues:
It’s the sum total of all your actions. Yes, positioning messages and advertising imagery play a supporting role in developing your brand identity, but what really matters is what you do and how that makes people feel.
And everything matters. If you want to make a great brand, you need to pay attention to all the ways it gets expressed in the world. How is the user manual written? How does the off/on switch sound? How do you hire people? How does the receptionist answer the phone? All of these things are as important as expressions of your brand as an ad campaign.
So when building your brand story, don’t forget to teach your employees how to live it as well.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Oct 4, 2005 | Advertising Case Studies for The Next Wave, Design, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, How To Select An Ad Agency, Low Budget Advertising, The Craft Of Advertising
Sometimes things happen beyond your control. Sometimes they are good things, and sometimes, they are not so good. We have done award winning posters for the 2nd Street Public market for the last few years. People want to steal the posters. One woman told me her boss decorated his living room based on our color scheme for a poster- and had it framed on the wall. We’ve talked about selling copies of the poster, that’s the difference between good and great.
As Howard Luck Gossage said “people don’t read ads, they read what interests them- and sometimes it’s an ad.” These posters are interesting, people read them- well, we’ll let you pick-
this year, before we were scheduled to be done with the poster, another publication was going to press and a page was donated- as was the labor, there is a saying, you get what you pay for… so compare:
The “Free” poster or:
The Next Wave poster. (click on image to enlarge)
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | May 27, 2005 | Design, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising
They say the cobbler’s kids always need new shoes, well; we needed to update our site. Although people were always impressed with it, we did it 3 years ago, before CSS was fully implemented, and (x)HTML wasn’t quite 1.0 yet.
So we recently, quietly, went under the hood and rebuilt it, faster, stronger, better than it was before (and it didn’t cost 6 million dollars for those of you that got the reference).
Many of you won’t see any difference other than a few pages that no longer require you to continue to another page to finish the story. The site now features (x)HTML 1.0 Strict programming and is compliant according to theW3 Consortium. The site is now; handicapped accessible, works better with all current and future browsers, better optimized for search engines like Google, and of course, work and look just as cool as it did before.
Why should you care? Well, if you are a client who has an outside vendor building your site, lack of compliance can actually hurt your sites effectiveness, and your bottom line. You’re not getting the site you think you paid for. We often hear clients ask for fancy Flash sites thinking they look hip, but when we explain that search engines can’t index the vector images embedded in a Flash site, they trust us to build them something to standards.
As a designer, building a compliant site is just good craft. You wouldn’t ship a print file to a printer with low-rez RGB jpg’s anymore than you should build a site that isn’t compliant.
Our site gets hits from all over the world, and brings us inquiries about employment from as far away as Hong Kong, Finland and Austria. We’re actually embarrassed that it’s taken us this long to tighten it up, but the cobbler’s tale holds true- our customers always came first.
If you are interested in having your site evaluated for compliance, and effectiveness, please give us a call. We’ll rebuild your site to be faster, stronger, better than before too.
