Inspiration
Even the most creative of minds struggle for inspiration sometimes when it comes to marketing ideas and we’re no different at IceBlue. So here are our 3 top tips for getting inspiration even in the gloomiest of Februaries:
Everyone likes a good story and marketing uses them to relate big ideas to sometimes complex products and services.
1. Start with a story. Everyone likes a good story and marketing uses them to relate big ideas to sometimes complex products and services. As we mentioned in our previous post roller coaster marketing, Barclay’s had a complex story to tell about it new contactless technology to an audience ranging from businesses to consumers to government. It could have presented research, made persuasive arguments about time and cost savings coupled with it impressive security features but instead it decided to tell a fabulous story in the universal language of humour and fantasy. In a 30 second clip, a rather dull concept which could leave many potential consumers non-plussed was transformed into a fun story that had people talking, made it desirable and effortlessly joined the everyday use with high business aims. Think about your consumers, their wants and need and then think about how your product can meet them in a fun, interesting and novel way.
It's funny how we're expected to come up with inspirational ideas whilst sat in sterile office conditions like robots
2. Create an inspired space. It’s funny how we’re expected to come up with inspirational ideas whilst sat in sterile office conditions like robots. We’re partly a product of our environments and so it makes sense that we make those environments as inspirational as possible. We’re not talking big budget space age offices here either. Hang a quote on the ceiling, paint the walls, commission and artist or project seascapes onto the roof whilst playing birdsong. However you do it, putting creativity into the workplace starts a chain of events that can lead to rewarding places. If all else fails you can even leave the office – gasp! Go sit in the park or take a trip to the zoo. Remember, most of the worlds most famous brands were thought up of in spaces outside of work. Rolls Royce’s spirit of ecstasy was an ode to a secret love, Apple’s name was inspired by the Beatles and Mercedes was named after a 12 year old girl.
Too often we're busy rushing round coping with day to day life that we don't take any time out to actually live
3. Look. Too often we’re busy rushing round coping with day to day life that we don’t take any time out to actually live. As the poem says, “What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stop and stare”. Taking time out to actually take in what’s happening around you and living in the moment can really pull insights out of everyday happenings that can inspire great ideas. Just think, if Isaac Newton had been doing chores rather than sitting under the apple tree, we’d never of discovered gravity.
NB This probably isn’t a great excuse to pull out when your partner has a go at you for not helping around the house.
Barclays Rollercoaster Marketing
We love the follow up to Barclays waterslide ad which first showed on 24th January during ‘Dancing On Ice’. Love it or hate it (and we think it’s got a lot of love judging by the fact that it has its very own facebook fan page), just imagine the conversations that Ad agency BBH must have had pitching for the original waterslide idea.
Barclay’s: So what’s the idea then?
BBH: Well, it’s like this – we want to put a ordinary looking man in grotty swimming trunks on a waterslide and, he waterslides to work
[Shuffle of papers - cough]
Barclay’s: Well thank you so much, we’ll mull it over
BBH: Oh and by the way, it’ll cost A LOT of money
Barclay’s: A lot of money……right. Bye then!
Of course it doesn’t work exactly like this. There needs to be a layer of communication between the client and the creative department which is where account managers come in. The account managers explain systems, processes and ideas to the client along with keeping an eye on costs and communicating any problems between the two along the way.
The fact that amazing Ads like this get to go ahead is due in part to the persuasion of great account managers (just you try selling a giant gorrila playing the drums with a Phil Collins soundtrack to a stuffy boardroom).
Search Engine Strategies London
We’ve always been a big fan of the Search Engine Strategies events http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/this year looks like it won’t disappoint. We’ve been attending the London events since 2006 and they seem to be doing what the marketing guys say
“getting bigger and better every year”.
Why do we love going so much? It does seem odd that a conference would excite such Ice Cool people like ourselves but the SES events are a little bit special. First and foremost – they’re not full of nerds. Search Engine Marketing is a young, vibrant and exciting place to be and the attendees reflect that. Secondly, it gives us a chance to take time out from the day to agency work and think of some of the bigger questions that we’re going to have to answer in the future if we want to stay on top of our game.
Oh yes and we almost forgot the parties afterwards.
Google Vs Bing – the war rages on
Google have been keeping a close eye on Bing for a while now. It must be difficult when you’ve been at the top for as long as Google have, watching young upstarts like Bing trying to take your crown. For a while it looked as if Bing were making inroads too – with their search results delivering relevant facebook and twitter entries as well as decent ‘normal’ search results too. It seemed as if people may start to ‘Bing’ rather than ‘Google’.
Google have unleashed their response in the form of their ‘real time search results’ (see below)
These results are mixed in with the regular search results and in our opinion are a definite enhancement. Even if you wouldn’t necessarily click on one of the results, it gives an instant, contemporary view of what’s occurring out there in the web for your chosen search.
We’re proud of a lot of the websites that we’ve built over the years and it’s great when they receive recognition. We were over the moon then when finditinsandwell, designed, developed and built by our own in-house web wizards was nominated for its FOURTH award of 2009.
The Local Government Chronicle is the latest in a growing list of leading industry organisations to recognise the impact that finditinsandwell.co.uk is having on the local economy.
finditinsandwell stats:
Over £120,000,000 of business has gone through the website since April 2007.
The site reaches up to 1,300 business and councils in a single day – not bad considering there are 10,000 business in the Sandwell area.
The site has received 73,299 visitors since March 2009 – each spending an average of 5 minutes on the site.
The sites visitors have come from Egypt to Ecuador. Over 61 different countries in total.
So a big well done to the finditinsandwell team and a pat on our own backs too!
In the current economic climate, branding and reputation are becoming more important than ever, as more and more companies are cutting advertising spend and marketing budgets. Even where budgets aren’t being cut (as many companies realise the importance of marketing at a time like this) efforts are being re-directed into different methods and mediums, including the utilisation of social media websites and blogs to generate online PR, branding and communication opportunities. Before looking at how you can use social media optimisation to help your business I thought it would be a good idea to explore the concept of “branding”.
“Brand”, “branding” and “brand values” are all terms that are banded around a lot but we don’t often stop to think about what they actually mean. Before you can establish a brand for your company it’s necessary to understand what a “brand” is, and what “branding” entails.
A “brand” is a set of perceptions made by a large group of people about a product, company, organisation, individual, service or even a place. These perceptions might have been created intentionally by active promotion using marketing methods, or they might have been unintentionally created through negative associations, for example created by poor press reviews or common bad experiences.
“Branding” is the process of attempting to generate and control people’s perceptions, or to lodge the name of a business, product or individual in people’s minds, to help them grow or maintain their market position. Any company, organisation, product or individual can benefit from having a brand that presents itself as having characteristics that are appropriate to that particular business, for example reliability, quality, trust, excitement, being cutting edge, distinctive, innovative, friendly, etc.
In my next post (which will be soon I promise) I’ll think about how to create a brand and why you need one…
It seems the Gods just keep conspiring against me to prevent me from getting into work – first the God of health and now the weather God. I arrived home from my snowboarding holiday with trillions of fluey germs and was confined to the sofa for a few days of recovery, too weak to even lift my pen (well may laptop actually but as a writer pen sounds more melodramatic) and now I’m snowed in. And as we all know the UK just doesn’t cope well with snow. Scrub that last remark….the UK just doesn’t cope.
I did manage to lift my laptop to send one email to Emma and Jenny (the Ice Blue bosses – see our Team Page profiles) as my voice was too croaky to be understood on the phone and Emma thought it was quite funny so I thought I’d publish an extract of it as a blog post (as I’ve been so lame at writing any others for a while now. I promise to rectify that with a little help from the God of blogging). See below:
“I’m so sorry to have gotten ill after my holiday – actually I got ill ON my holiday, oh joy!! The law of the great God named Sod struck again by allowing me to go on holiday, relax and therefore get ill. I had been feeling a bit run down for weeks but refusing to give in and then it all came out I think. Of course it didn’t help that I decided I was going to ignore it and dose myself up on super-strong cold and flu tablets, Vitamin C and lots of caffeine and go up the hill still. I think the final straw was the freezing cold air rushing at speed down my throat as I surfed the beautiful fresh, virgin powder (don’t cry)…….for one day at least. I was actually happy that the next day was rainy as I stayed tucked up under a duvet looking at the mountains out of the window from my position on the sofa with a DVD for company.
Then came the day from hell which I think pushed me over the edge into the dark depths of the pit of fluey illness – the journey home, aaaahhh! I have never had a bad journey from Geneva before so I think this one balanced out the many, many good ones I’ve had, as it was an absolute nightmare. The rain had turned to snow and it had dumped heavily all night so we left Morzine early to get to Geneva on time, again heavily dosed up with hardcore French medication, only to make it safely down the mountain and arrive at Geneva to find the airport closed due to technical problems caused by bad weather!! I then spent the next couple of hours lying on the floor of the airport on Andy’s coat, covered by my coat, praying that some flights from UK would be able to land so we could get on one out of there. Luckily our flight made it and we left the growing hoards in the arrival area only to have to wait on another, equally uncomfortable, floor by the Gate. We then celebrated as we made it onto the plane until we discovered we had to wait another 2 hours to get a slot to take off!! I managed to clear a whole row to lie down on by having an almighty coughing fit – I recommend it to get people to move away from you! We eventually made it to Gatwick but discovered that our bags hadn’t and they were still in Geneva – oh the joys of flying Sleazy Jet.
So when I eventually made it home I was totally exhausted, feverish, coughing, snotty, achy…..you get the picture! I can honestly say I haven’t felt this rough in years, I think I actually have flu rather than a bad cold but I feel terrible about not making it to work. So massive apologies…..” blah blah, etc.
Not long now, and we can jump on a train down to the big smoke (ironic to call the capital that as we live in the heart of the Midlands, possibly the most industrial region of the country, and more specifically in the Black Country, so called because of the smog that once came from the factories) but anyway I digress, down to London to the highlight of the year so far – the SES Conference and Expo at The Business Design Centre in Islington. It’s a 3 day conference from 17th – 19th Feb 2009, with an SEM Training Day on 20th and very useful indeed to anyone in marketing wanting to learn more about online marketing and advertising, including Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation. Marketers, consultants and industry leaders from the world’s leading businesses gather there to review the very latest SEM and SEO techniques, and it is a chance not to be missed to pick their brains and hear their thoughts. Don’t worry if you can’t make it though we’ll bring back all the tips we learn and if you’re very, very nice we’ll share them with you.
We received a phone call on Friday from Acorns Children’s Hospice Trust, a registered charity providing a network of care to life-limited children and their families across the Midlands. We were asked for a small donation, which we gave willingly, but it drew to our attention the plight of the many children and families in the Midlands in need of their help and felt that a donation was the very least we could do. We’d like to appeal to every business locally to give a little something to help fund such a worthy charity.
Acorns cares for children who are “life-limited” – which means they are unlikely to reach adulthood – and offers support to their families. They cover a defined catchment area including the counties of Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and the West Midlands. They have three hospices situated in Birmingham, Walsall and Worcester as well as a community team that offers practical and emotional support to families in their homes.
Acorns offers respite, emergency and end-of-life care and on average one of the children they care for dies every week. They rely on the community to fund the majority of their activities as only 10% comes from statutory funding. That’s why it’s really vital that you help in any way possible as the job they do is amazing.
To support them visit http://www.acorns.org.uk/At_work.asp and help by giving a donation, through staff fund raising or any of the other ideas you’ll find there.
I am now getting really excited about the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo 2009 being held at The Business Design Centre in Islington. It’s a 3 day conference from 17th – 19th Feb 2009, with an SEM Training Day on 20th.
It’s an industry event definitely not to be missed if you want to network with your peers and learn more about SEM, organised and hosted by leading search engine marketing expert Mike Grehan.
There are loads of excellent speakers with years of experience in their respective areas and lots of training seminars. It’s well worth the registration fee so if you are a chief marketing officer, an SEO consultant, an SEM specialist, a PPC campaign manager, a web developer or designer, an internet marketing specialist, or a beginner in any of the above you should get yourselves to London for this event in February.
http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/london/
See you there…….
Uncategorized | Duncan | 
March 10, 2010 12:33 pm | 
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