To keep your brand relevant, don’t blow it up. Get Dynamic Branding!

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

To keep your brand relevant, don’t blow it up. Get Dynamic Branding!

B2B

The world is changing more quickly than ever. And so are consumers. With that in mind, do you know if your brand is still relevant? We’ve been working on a strategy to help brands be dynamic, so they can shift with behavior changes and stay aligned with consumer sentiment.

We’re pretty excited about it. It’s the culmination of what we’ve done successfully for over 30 years in creating new brands, refreshing brands and helping them adapt.

You might be going through a merger, gaining new leadership with a new vision, entering into a new market segment, experiencing a market shift in attitude towards your product, or simply just having an outdated brand visual identity, logo, or message. There are countless ways a brand can lose relevancy, and sometimes it happens so gradually that you don’t even notice.

As they say, the only constant is change.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time to blow everything up and start over. Your brand may still have a lot of equity. A recent DENTSU survey found that the top concerns for CMOs are understanding consumer shifts and behavior changes, as well as staying aligned with ever-changing consumer sentiment. Our dynamic branding process helps brands remain relevant in a world where change is constant.

It’s something we preach AND we put into practice. We proudly point to our new website as an example of not throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Our brand needed to reflect how both we and our marketplace have evolved over the past few years. So we surveyed the landscape of our industry, took some time to assess our own brand’s relevance, and worked to align it with who we’ve become and how we serve our clients.  This refreshed branding is being reflected in our newly launched website, social media efforts, and public relations.

But like anything, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. That’s what dynamic branding is all about. We get to learn about brands, get to know them, gain a deep understanding of their market and find a unique solution to regain brand relevance.

If any of this resonates with you (and in 2022, it would be surprising if it didn’t), then we would encourage you to get in touch to schedule a quick, 15-minute call to assess your brand’s relevancy. It’s easy and pretty enlightening.  We also have a quick self-assessment survey available on our GL homepage that helps identify why your brand may need a refresh. Lastly, check out our video series all about dynamic branding – you can start your viewing here:

 

 

Industry Spotlight: Equine Web Design

Randy Micheletti
VP, Director of Brand Strategy

Industry Spotlight: Equine Web Design

With approximately 9.2 million horses in the U.S. coinciding with approximately 2 million horse owners, the equine care market size has grown to a substantial $900+ million dollar business. That’s nothing to shake a stick at.

The good news is there are many opportunities to communicate with consumers about your equine products; the hurdle though, is that the category is extremely crowded. As a brand, it’s more important than ever to stand out. One way to do that is through your website. It’s vital that equine brands keep up with technology to converse with their consumers…but how can your site stand out from others? Here are a few tips to follow that will ensure your site stands out:

Consistency

I’m sure your brand has created a corporate identity. It’s crucial that you use that guide to ensure your brand and message are communicated consistently online and offline. Continuity within your site is also important – actually, it’s a major factor in conversion. When a consumer moves throughout your site each page must deliver a consistent design and message.

Aesthetically pleasing

Part of being aesthetically pleasing is keeping the overall design as clean and simple as possible. White space is a big part of that. It will allow your visitors to focus on what’s important and help get your key messages across.

Colors and images

This is extremely important, especially with horse owners. The use of warm and inviting colors resonates well with horse owners and it can complement the tone of the copy. The use of imagery is vital in this category. Horse owners love to see photography of horses. Showing a variety of different horses is effective as it broadens your opportunity to reach many horse owners. One thing to keep in mind – as you select an image, be sure it’s relevant and adds value to the message you’re communicating.

Relevant content

Equine sites have to be populated with relevant, keyword-rich content. You might ask, how do I determine if my content is relevant? Well according to Angie Schottmuller of Interactive Artisan, using the “Triangle of Relevance” can help. The triangle strategy incorporates three angles – business interest, user interest and time significance to maximize relevance and content, creating user action.

These are just a few helpers to get you started. One last thing to think about equine web design: always consider who you’re talking to and talk to them in an authentic voice. Horse owners appreciate honesty and a straight forward messaging that helps them understand what is best for their horse(s). Keeping this in mind will keep your brand top of mind with consumers and help solidify the conversion.

Download our Digital Marketing Audit to learn more about successful internet marketing.

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We have experience with equine; we know the brands, consumers and the products. Let’s talk about what your equine brand is doing to grow through digital marketing and your equine web design. Fill out this form with your information and we will reach out to you!

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Trending from G/L: Ads in Colombia Sell Peace

Randy Micheletti
VP, Director of Brand Strategy

Trending from G/L: Ads in Colombia Sell Peace

So let’s face it. When you think of advertising, you usually think of highly egotistical, Mad Men-style executives, or a bunch of overconfident hipsters sitting around their offices thinking of ways to push products on people. And yes, some of that is true. But in Colombia, advertising’s being used to save a country and its people.

It’s the power of changing minds that’s being used to try and put an end to a 50+ year war that’s killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions of others. Yes, advertising is being used to help stop a revolutionary army hell-bent on overthrowing the government.

“This gives us the ohance to apply our skills to something that is fundamentally important to us, to our kids, to our country. We created campaigns and TV commercials that were all build to convince guerillas to surrender and, as important, to help the Colombian people accept them back,” Jose Miguel Sokoloff, Co-Chairman and Chief Creative Officers at MullenLowe SSP3 said in a statement.

Here are several campaign videos that show the amazing work that Sokoloff and his team are doing – and talk about results that truly count:

  • Over eight years, 18,000 guerilla fighters have put down their weapons and came home.

  • Negotiations between the fighters and Colombian government have started

  • The overall energy and spirit in Colombia is back again. Per Sokoloff, “If you had been there 10 years ago and you go today, you would say, this is a completely different planet.”

This quote really sums it up nicely:

“You have to find a truth in what you’re saying,” Sokoloff says. “And when you get there, when you find something, that’s something that you can actually hold onto and you can actually communicate, that’s the salvation.”

Pretty cool, right? Let us know if you have anything awesome you’d share with our team!

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Trending from G/L: We are All Going To Die

Dave Geile
Creative Director Managing Partner

Trending from G/L: We are All Going To Die

If trending products like this one continue to be invented, we are all going to die of muscle atrophy. I present to you the Honda U3-X Personal Mobility device. Personally I would feel ridiculous riding around on this thing. But if someone doesn’t put their foot down (pun intended) and take a stand, this kind of lazy contraptions will become the norm – and life as we know it will be extinguished.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8IoQoprBXk

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for technology and I admire this technology a great deal. I suppose I’m more upset in how it is presented and how it’s major contribution to mankind is demonstrated. In this new product video, we see perfectly healthy, capable people mounting their personal mobility device to get together to go over some office information. They wave at each other as they pass in the hall or admire and discuss art in a gallery. Huh?! The video even touts the benefit of being hands free so you can carry stuff! Here’s a news flash: walking allows for the same benefit!!!

More info on the device:

Honda’s U3-X was cleverly developed by pursuing the concept of “harmony with people” and with its size and weight, it will clearly mix comfortably with pedestrian traffic, though Honda will be conducting extensive testing in a real-world environment to verify and refine the practicality of the device.

The design of the U3-X places the rider on the eye level zone of other pedestrians so that it as friendly and non-threatening to fellow footpath users as possible, while also making it easier for the rider to reach the ground from the footrest without stretching.

Like the Segway and Hands Free Transporter, the U3-X’s speed is adjusted by shifting body weight, though the U3-X adds a whole new dimension in that it doesn’t just go backwards and forwards – it goes sideways, thanks to an ingenious omni-directional wheel system which Honda has dubbed its “HOT Drive System” which is short for Honda Omni Traction Drive System.

Foot reconstruction, knee replacement, hip surgery…now ya got me. But the inability to get off your health butt and move across the room is not what Honda should be broadcasting. If this trending item is our future destiny, we are all going to look like the Wal-Mart people shopping from a mobile cart. Not because of their inability to walk, but because of their crushing weight!

Sorry to be so upset about this…I need to go sit down. I just wish I could go get a cup of coffee while doing so.

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Healthcare Marketing Blogs

Dan Diveley
VP of Business Development

Healthcare Marketing Blogs

At G/L, we’ve worked on a variety of healthcare marketing projects. Through our years of experience and research, we’ve become something of an expert on the subject, so we’ve compiled all of our relevant insights of the healthcare market in one convenient location. Just click on the headline to view the blog.

Be Disruptive In Everything You Do – Especially Your Healthcare Marketing

When your company brings something unique to the table, it can disrupt the status quo of an entire market. Discover how one of our clients, Metro Imaging, managed to do just that by offering a little extra transparency.

How Effective Healthcare Marketing Can Limit Patient Outmigration

It happens time and time again in the healthcare industry: patients are leaving local hospitals behind for what they (mis)perceive as greener pastures. We take a deeper look into why patients are migrating from their local hospitals and hone in on how hospitals can limit patient outmigration with the right message.

Marketing Accountable Care Organizations – A New Approach

As Accountable Care Organizations trend more towards the mainstream, patients now have a choice for more affordable healthcare solutions. But with a shift in organizational structure comes the need to re-optimize your marketing. If you’ve recently become an ACO or are considering making the jump, we offer you our insights for a clean transition.

Real Price Transparency in Healthcare – I’ve seen it! 

With high-deductible medical insurance on the rise and patient satisfaction falling due to unaddressed price concerns, there’s never been a better time to offer your patients transparency. We examine how much patients value price transparency in healthcare (hint: it’s a lot) and show you how offering true transparency can make your brand stand out.

7 Key Components to Developing a Strategic Healthcare Marketing Plan

Planning ahead for next year? You should be! Here are a few key components you should focus on to maximize your marketing efforts in 2017.

Consumer Engagement: Think Your Marketing is Tough? Try Selling Heart Attacks.

Anyone can make a burger and fries look appetizing or sell you a new sports car. But marketing heart attacks? That’s a whole different animal. Our very own Dave Geile gives his insight on how healthcare marketers can produce viable messaging, even with such serious subject matter.

Creating Effective Healthcare Messaging

Getting the right message out at the right time for the right audience is key for your brand’s success. But how does that translate to healthcare marketing? We take a closer look at what patients are looking for in healthcare and translate their needs into more effective messaging. 

Increasing Patient Volume Requires Thinking Like a Patient

You know the old phrase: “You can’t truly understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.” Well, that’s true in healthcare marketing too. We explore what it means to think like a patient and translate that insight into optimized messaging.

Programmatic Buying: How Media Is Changing

The media landscape is ever changing. Are you keeping up? It’s okay; we’ll fill you in.

Healthcare Marketing Includes Understanding the Cares of Patients 

Tired of marketing that just keeps missing the mark? We break it down for you right here, with our own research and insights into healthcare marketing trends and unique solutions. Grab a snack and get comfortable. It’s a longer read, but well worth your time.

Inbound Marketing

Your Digital Budget: How Much Interactive Do I Need? – A G/L Executive Brief

Move over, traditional advertising! The digital world is expanding at an incredible rate, so how much should you spend on marketing in it? We have you covered.

Integrate Inbound Marketing into your next Website and Social Media campaign 

Inbound marketing helps keep the conversation going between you and your target audience, engaging them in a way that traditional advertising just can’t. It’s relatively inexpensive and any company can do it­—we’re doing it right now! Check out how inbound can work for your company’s website and social communications.

A Step-by-Step Guide to implementing an Inbound Marketing Program

So you’re thinking about implementing a little inbound, eh? Lucky for you, we have an easy, step-by-step guide on creating an effective inbound campaign. What are you waiting for? Let’s get the ball rolling!

Target Audience

Example Personas to Improve Messaging

Marketers deal in general target audiences all the time, but sometimes it helps drive the message home if we can put a name and face to that audience. That’s where personas come in. We humanize our target audience by showing them as real people with real dreams and aspirations. See for yourself how your messaging can improve with your own personas in mind!

Why Target Audiences Don’t Work

Your target audience is more than data and research; they’re real people. To get messages that resonate, you have to see them as more than a bunch of numbers.

5 Tips to Remember When Marketing to Moms

We love moms. Our moms, your mom, any moms. They’re all great in their own way! And they’re huge decision makers in their homes, according to our research. So here are 5 tips on how to show them some love in your marketing efforts.

Key Elements to Creating Personas

Personas help make your target audience feel a bit more personal than charts, graphs, and raw data. We feel that creating personas for our target audiences is an integral part of our creative process, and we give you the rundown on how you can incorporate them into your marketing efforts as well.

The Importance Of Personas in Shaping Targeted Messaging

You know what sucks? Getting treated like a number. You know what rocks? When advertisers see you for who you really are! Try using personas to create messaging that hits home with your target audience as a person, not a dataset. [snark: It’s so important to us, we wrote four whole blogs on it!]

Internal Branding/Communications

Minimize Medicare Penalties with Internal Communications

Show of hands: who likes paying Medicare sanctions? Anyone? Yeah, that’s what we thought. So what if we told you that your hospital could reduce their risk of having to pay Medicare sanctions with the brand messaging, both internally and externally? Read on and save!

6 Steps to Building a Brand from the Inside Out

Putting your brand on display for the entire world to see is great, but it means nothing if you ignore one vital ingredient: your people. As we discuss here, a great brand is backed by people who truly believe in the brand they represent on a daily basis. Make it a full team effort!

Healthcare Case Studies

Hannibal Regional Healthcare System – “Guiding You to Better”

We talk a big game about our expertise in healthcare marketing. Fortunately, we have the results to back it up. Check out the work we’ve done with Hannibal Regional Hospital. 

Metro Imaging – The Clear Choice 

Our client, Metro Imaging, has a few innovations up their sleeves that could disrupt the healthcare market, and they wanted us to help show them off. We were happy to oblige.

Have any questions? Contact me (Dan) at [email protected] or fill out the form below.

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Trending from G/L: New TV Tracking Opens New Doors for Brands

Mary Sawyer
Vice President of Public Relations

Trending from G/L: New TV Tracking Opens New Doors for Brands

You should know when your brand’s paid advertising is supposed to run on TV. But it has been somewhat difficult to thoroughly monitor unpaid news or other programming brand coverage on TV through true TV tracking.

That situation appears to be changing, though, thanks to new media platforms and monitoring capabilities – just think about the benefits of being able to search for your brand’s appearance or mention on TV anytime.

According to a recent story in AdWeek, iQMedia has technology that can provide those capabilities. Marketers can now track every time their brands are mentioned and when their logos are shown. And they can monitor their competitor’s coverage.

The iQMedia platform includes spoken-word and logo recognition technology, and provides demographics, geographic and other statistics that a brand can use with its own internal metrics. The data is available within a couple of hours of its appearance on TV. Brands can also access six years of historical TV tracking and programming.

iQ Media’s platform includes spoken-word detection technology and, in what the company said is an industry first, logo recognition technology to identify when a brand is seen or heard on TV. It also provides demographic, geographic and time-of-day stats, and lets marketers correlate the raw data with their own internal metrics.

“Our systems are designed to be able to listen and hear for the content, and to be able to distinguish whether it’s in paid or earned,” said John Derham, iQ Media’s chief technology officer. “We get depth and breadth of content and resources in an unprecedented time frame.”

Domino’s Pizza, Energizer, the NHL, Red Bull and Sonic Drive-In will all be using the new platform, which makes data available to clients within a couple of hours of its appearance on TV. (Nielsen and comScore’s brand-mention services take 30 days.) Marketers can enter keywords, brand names or logos for the platform to track, much like a Google alert, and use the data to measure the ROI of theirs or their competitors’ major media investments.

These types of TV tracking tools give media planning and PR professionals’ insights that help to make better marketing decisions. The more that we know about who, what when, why and how people are brands; the better we are able to counsel our clients.

As measurement of success becomes more important to our clients, we’re putting data at the heart of everything we do. If you’d like to learn more about our approach, contact us using the form below:

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Trending from G/L: Thanks Canada for telling us we’re great!

Mary Sawyer
Vice President of Public Relations

Trending from G/L: Thanks Canada for telling us we’re great!

A couple of weeks ago, Ken Bone, a debate audience member, emerged as an unlikely hero to Americans weary of political negativity. Someone referred to Mr. Bone as a “human version of a hug.” With a week to go until Election Day now, we keep looking for positive moments to keep us sane.

Now, our neighbors to the North in Canada are sending us virtual “hugs” and positive affirmations via a social media campaign called “Tell America It’s Great,” complete with a hashtag, a Twitter account and a series of YouTube videos.

Seems America could use some cheering up right about now. As their closest friends and neighbours, we thought we should take a minute to help remind them that no matter how bad things might seem at the moment, there are lots of reasons why we think they’re still pretty great.To paraphrase the Stuart Smalley character from Saturday Night Live, the campaign tells we Americans that, “We’re Good Enough, We’re Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Us.”

Designed by workers at a Toronto creative agency to make positive statements as a response to the depressing American political setting, the campaign is not selling anything. Its motivation is to be remind us that the world sees us as great.

The Canada campaign comes at a time when most Americans are desperately looking forward to the end of the election cycle with all of the sniping and accusations. We do need to take a breath and think about our national parks, our contributions to music and the countless other American innovations and characteristics that are admired by people throughout the world.

Many Americans are showing their appreciation to this campaign through a reciprocating “TellCanadaThankYou” campaign.

It is nice to receive a group hug from our kind Canadian neighbors. Maybe their goodwill and civility will inspire us to feel better about ourselves, as well as acting nicer to one another. Eh?

Have you seen any politically-focused messaging that stood out for its lack of, um, toxicity? Please share it with us using the form below.

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Trending from G/L: The Vegetable Orchestra is cooler than a cucumber

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

Trending from G/L: The Vegetable Orchestra is cooler than a cucumber

The Vegetable Orchestra based in Vienna, Austria performs with instruments made from fresh, local vegetables.

Worldwide one of a kind, the Vegetable Orchestra performs on instruments made of fresh vegetables. The utilization of various ever refined vegetable instruments creates a musically and aesthetically unique sound universe.

The Vegetable Orchestra was founded in 1998. Based in Vienna, the Vegetable Orchestra plays concerts in all over the world.

There are no musical boundaries for the Vegetable Orchestra. The most diverse music styles fuse here – contemporary music, beat-oriented House tracks, experimental Electronic, Free Jazz, Noise, Dub, Clicks’n’Cuts – the musical scope of the ensemble expands consistently, and recently developed vegetable instruments and their inherent sounds often determine the direction.

Founded in 1998, this innovative group creates a “musically and aesthetically unique sound universe” for their audience. Their concerts truly appeal to all of your senses.

The Vegetable Orchestra prepares for each performance by first shopping at local markets for vegetables to create their instruments with.

Some of these perishable instruments are “ready-made” — like two peppers rubbed together for a squeaking sound. Others require cutting, drilling and assembly to make something similar to traditional instruments — like a carrot flute or a leek violin.

Since their instruments are brand new before each performance, a long sound check is necessary after the creations are complete.

These vegetable instruments achieve sounds traditional instruments cannot — each concert has a completely different and unique sound. The group draws from a number of diverse music styles and influences to create their unusual melodies.

After the concert, the lucky audience members even get to enjoy a homemade soup created from the vegetable instrument left overs.

It is so cool to see such a fresh idea. It just goes to show that you can create something great out of anything — even a carrot.

Be sure to check out this video for a closer look at The Vegetable Orchestra:

Or listen to one of their super unique performances:

Pretty cool, right? Let us know if you have anything awesome you’d share with our team!

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Trending from G/L: Media Planning and House of Cards

Ben Schwab
Creative Director

Trending from G/L: Media Planning and House of Cards

Having that Big Idea is the backbone behind most impactful and memorable advertising campaigns. But, without the ability to properly expand that core concept across available modern media planning in a relevant and clever way, you are possibly squandering an opportunity to enter attention as part of the larger cultural conversation.

Case-in-point would be the work done over this last year promoting the return of the Netflix original series House of Cards. If you’re unaware of it, this popular Netflix bing-watch focuses on scheming politician Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, who manages to weasel his way to becoming president of the United States through a series backstabbing and nefarious acts. The show recently dropped its fourth season in March.

The media planning was designed to capitalize on the growing media attention given to the real world presidential election cycle by targeting political events and using them as a springboard to promote the reelection of the show’s main protagonist, Frank Underwood. By weaving mock campaign style ads for Frank into commercial breaks during televised events such as CNN’s Republican presidential debate, the spots became more of a topic of discussion in the following weeks than the content of the debate itself.

https://youtu.be/Se44ed4KBMA

The initial ads, which trended across Facebook and Twitter, focused on targeting aired debates and political events leading up to the show’s March launch date. They even went as far as to establish a “campaign headquarters” for the character’s election campaign directly across the street from where the GOP debates were held, bringing the mock campaign style of the television spots to the real world.

When all was said and done, this unique campaign managed to gain 6.6 billion impressions, the most successful launch of a show for Netflix to date. That’s the kind of seamless, timely integration that inspires us at G/L.

Geile/Leon generates tons of unique and captivating ideas like this for our clients every day. Contact us today to learn how we can help your brand tell a compelling story. And if you have any cool examples you want to share with us, we’d be more than happy to see them and chat!

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The Trouble with Design Templates

Ben Schwab
Creative Director

The Trouble with Design Templates

Say you need a one-time solution that cuts down time and cost from production of your print and design pieces. That’s what standardized design templates are for, right? They’re easy to use and promise to alleviate the headache of managing external communication with an agency on a regular basis for every minute project. But sometimes, it’s possible the benefits are offset by some unexpected drawbacks.

Benefits of a Design Templates System

The number one supportive reasoning behind the desire for a template-based system is cost savings. The list below breaks down why, in theory, the use of a template could lead to this desired effect.

  1. Time – Now that a look and layout have been established, your internal art department should be able to easily plug-in copy and photography for production of quick-turn print and digital projects.
  2. Consistency – The use of a template clearly defines guidelines and graphic elements to carry across all artwork, leading to a consistent tone and feel for all of your projects.
  3. Internal – Provides you with the comfort of dealing with your own employees face to face. With proper use of the template, your own art department can handle all projects internally. 

Drawbacks to a Template Design System

Clearly, there are great benefits to using design templates. However, in practice there is a list of drawbacks you should prepare yourself for, including but not limited to:

  1. Time – Having an internal production department handle creation of ads based on a template can take just as much time, if not more, as having the agency handle production of artwork. Since the agency is more familiar with the design, the turn-around on artwork may actually be more cost effective by leaving it in their hands.
  2. Compromised Design – Sacrifice of unique and eye-catching design can occasionally result from simplifying templates to be easier for internal production artists to replicate accurately and quickly.
  3. Longevity – Often changing opinions and direction can force a template to be scrapped after only a short time of use.

There’s no doubt the use of templates can prove beneficial. We have created them successfully for a multitude of clients and continue to do so. But whether the benefits outweigh the possible pitfalls is ultimately up to you and should be carefully considered. If you find yourself in a bind, feel free to lean on us. We’re your resource and are more than willing to help see your project through to completion.

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