Free samples spur hundreds of email newsletter subscriptions

Challenge: 3 arranged for a food product client to participate in a local bicycling event giving samples to roughly 20,000 riders. The visibility for their brand was enough to justify the participation fee, but it was 3's challenge to make this event a truly measurable success.



Solution: As part of the sponsorship, 3 negotiated to have an exclusive e-mail sent from the event's contact list of 14,154 pre-registrants. The e-mail contained a special offer to receive a free product with registration to our client's e-mail newsletter. To ensure the client would not be overloaded by free giveaways, the offer was only valid for a limited time at their bakery outlet.

Result: During the four day period of the offer there were 774 new subscribers to the e-mail newsletter - more than tripling the size of their list. 106 coupons were redeemed at the bakery, which considering the two hurdles customers needed to overcome to use it (printing out the e-mail and taking it to the bakery) is an encouragingly high number. The success of this event has redefined our previous model for event sampling promotions.

Action Sales Kit, Not "Leave Behind"

Challenge:
First, please tell us: Who loves the lowly sales kit? Mostly the sales staff. Certainly the client or prospect pays these basics of marketing little respect. It's a quick glance and then a piece of a larger pile on someone's desk. We asked ourselves what we could do that might be a different, though far from novel or rare, approach. What if the sales kit could be used as a note pad? Or, a guiding document on a sales call? What if the sales staff could simply check boxes, make a copy and send one to the client? These days most all forms are Web-enabled. We wanted to take a page, if you will, from Web forms and put it to use in the real world.


Solution:
A colorful, design-forward (yeah, that's a fine cliche), deliverable that is at once informative as it is brand-centric (another cliche' - sorry). Yes, we fell in love with our own creation here. And like any good parent, we think it's as beautiful as it is functional. We'd like your opinion, so lay it on us.



Result:
We have shared the backgrounder -- including it's matching debossed folder -- with several clients and Xenium prospects in the past few weeks. We have received very positive feedback thus far. "It's elegant." "It's so clear and easily understandable." "Me like green," OK, that last one was from the bosses' two year old. But, you get the idea.




Special thanks to Todd Silberman of Green Dog Printing for his help in producing the final piece. It is printed on 100 percent post-consumer waste recycled paper using Soy-based inks. No trees were harmed un-necessarily in the making of this fine piece of collateral.

Special thanks also to Blake Frey of Frey Design for his clever art direction and "design forward" sensibility. Blake, you are the man.

From PowerPoint to Power Video: Reserve Steel

Challenge: What do you do when you've got a product that requires a lot of technical explanation for people to truly understand how revolutionary it is? Do you send them a stack of papers? Sit down with them over coffee? In the case of Reserve Steel's Intelligent Framing Systems, we made a movie. Well, kind of. Please click on the link and see what we mean.



Solution: Now, people mean different things by "movie" these days. We didn't shoot any footage, but the combination of a tight narrative with words and pictures on screen is just as effective – sometimes more so.

We had been working on a PowerPoint presentation, which contained all the information we needed to convey. But anyone who has seen PowerPoint effectively used knows that the success of the presentation is in the charisma of the speaker. 3 associate, Mason West, took all the bullet points from our original script and completely rewrote it to be more conversational.

For the visuals, we wanted to show the product whenever appropriate and reinforce specific points with text on the screen. We also played around with fun visual gags to keep viewers amused and engaged through the video's five minute duration.

Result: This was largely an experiment on our part, so the client had not even read the script before seeing the video. When they finally watched it, their response was pure amazement at how we'd given such life to the story of their product. Let us know what you think. Special thanks to Mason West for the work here.

Boys and Girls Clubs Gives 3 a Pat on the Back

Every so often we get a letter like this for our pro bono efforts in the community. This is one of them. We recently helped the Boys and Girls Clubs of Portland Metropolitan Area create a print ad for the opening of a new club in the region. 3 worked with designer, Tim Silvis of Systom to create the ad.

3 continues to support the Boys and Girls Clubs through the hosting of their email newsletter and through ad hoc marketing efforts. It is our pleasure to support children and those who work to make their lives better. We all benefit from the results.

Videos take one-day events and make lifelong memories... and content

Challenge: In early 2007, Dave's Killer Bread was attempting to raise awareness about availability of their product in Eugene stores. 3 had recommended using Eugene as a pure test market as the company had never done any promotions in the city. 3 organized a number of promotional efforts to test which efforts would work best in other cities. One of the efforts was a three-day presence at the University of Oregon Street Faire. To get extended benefit from the event, we planned to create a video to capture the infectious energy that is present at these live samplings.



Solution: We filmed all three days at the Street Faire, focusing on getting shots of people tasting the bread. Still, we walked away with almost six hours of footage. By combing through the tapes and selecting only the best moments, we pared it down to a tight five minutes. The background music was composed and performed by Dave himself, and has become a recognizable tune on his radio commercials and other video efforts.

Result: The video was broadcast via the Dave's Killer Bread web site and blog and has been viewed over 100 times in less than a few weeks by viewers in Eugene. Many thanks to 3 associate, Mason West, for his work here.

Fonts as the basis for design

Challenge:
Produce a two color brochure that people will want to read. Well, that was the ideal goal. We'd like to note that Charles de Montesquieu said, "An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations." Here at 3 we have a rule: do your best not to bore people. And so it was with our assignment for Social Venture Partners. We needed to strike the all-too-familiar balance between cost and effectiveness for the organizations primary membership prospecting collateral.

Our recommendation:
Use different fonts from the same general "family" in a way that would increase the readability of the content. We decided not to use images other than the logo of the organization to encourage people to read, not just glace, the content.

The writing needed to be quirky, but not over-the-top. Social Venture Partners mission is a serious and important one. More plainly, we wanted the writing to be approachable, fun and as non-corporate as possible.

Result:
A 5 X 7 staple bound two-color booklet that could be slipped in to a coat pocket, purse or briefcase. An unusual approach to the typical "We need a brochure" problem.

Process Graphics: Telling the story in "pretty" pictures

Here are some examples of graphics we have used over the years to express complex processes, ideas or notions of one kind or another. We've long shared with clients our belief that because we've been drawing in the sand and on walls longer than we've been reading and writing, images are often better communication tools than words.

No duh, you might be saying to yourself right about now. But, we are writers (generally) and so are most comfortable working with words. We have to push our feeble little brains into new channels of expression. Certainly there's nothing necessarily brilliant about these examples here. We just want to make sure our clients and friends have them here to refer to when they are creatively mired.

More on this issue later. Perhaps we can come up with a graphic to describe our process for using graphics?

Guerilla Sampling Success?

CASE STUDY: Promote a new coffee beverage using earned media and Internet marketing techniques.

PROBLEM:
In the early spring of 2006, we were approached by a successful beverage industry entrepreneur. He had created a concentrated espresso product. To use it you just needed to add milk (cow, soy or rice). Heat – or chill it over ice. And serve. It came in four flavors: vanilla, mocha, caramel and espresso blend with a touch of sugar. Initial research showed that the market wanted a product like this as lattes are expensive, difficult to make at home, and are the most widely purchased product in coffee shops.

The founder’s background driving beverage consumption for leading international brands was an important advantage as we sought to gain attention among Internet-savvy consumers and food and beverage editors.

SOLUTION:
Using our trademark-protected framework – Organize, Strategize, Publicize, Capitalize – we mapped out a strategy to put the product into the hands of food and beverage editors in the founder’s hometown – Los Angeles. That effort was unsuccessful. New product ideas pour into newsrooms daily; there are not enough resources to vet them all. We narrowed our focus to the editors in Glendale, a Los Angeles suburb, where the founder was raised. And while we were able to capture the attention of two reporters there (one, the Glendale editor of the Los Angeles Times), we could never get them to agree to do a story.

We moved up the coast to San Francisco, following on an angle that the product’s long shelf life and fresh-brewed taste would be perfect for offices – especially those in Silicon Valley – a place known for long work hours and bad office coffee. The San Jose Mercury News bought off on the angle and assigned a reporter to the story. While we waited for the Mercury News, we pushed north to Seattle – by-passing Portland media altogether. We believed that if the product idea made the news outside of the Portland market – the company’s home base and an internationally recognized coffee capital – we’d gain the respect of hometown aficionados and critics more easily.

We began our efforts in the early spring. By mid-summer it was apparent that reporters were not interested in hot beverage stories – no matter how novel. The summer heat – the second hottest on record in North America – led us to switch our pitch to “Iced Lattes.” It was an earnest approach, but a late one, as many monthlies are put to bed months in advance of publication. Major daily newspapers also plan their editorial content weeks in advance. Increasingly, we found ourselves at one dead end after another. We had feedback from editors and consumers claiming that they enjoyed the product – its flavor and convenience being the most notable adjectives shared. But, without wider editorial coverage, coupled with consumer purchases in stores where the product was already stocked – grocery chain buyers saw no reason to take a chance on the product.

The founder believed that without consumer awareness, the product would not move. We agreed. Although, we has a suspicion that the product required a paradigm shift in how people enjoyed their morning coffee that it would take longer then we had allotted to spur consumer demand. As of this writing, that theory appears to be correct.

Permit us a little diversion here. Lattés are not convenience products. Consumers expect them to cost more in terms of ingredients and time for preparation. In addition, sipping lattés is a social activity – most frequently done in coffee shops. It might be an oversimplification, but coffee enjoyment is a singular pursuit. Latté enjoyment is a social pursuit. Research supports this view. According to Marketresearch.com, in 2003 lattes made up 42 percent of all drinks sold at coffee houses, with brewed coffee a distant second at 16 percent. It’s possible that in the consumers’ minds they equate lattés with group or public consumption. Concentrated lattés made at home don’t have the same “feel” to the consumer.

When you think back to ads in the 1970s and 1980s, coffee ads focused on the personal pleasure one received from drinking fresh-brewed coffee at home (e.g., “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup.”). Compare this to ads for Nescafe International Coffees, which always featured two or more people enjoying the diversion on special occasions.

In the workplace, the consumer needs at least a refrigerator and a microwave to store the milk and the open product (it’s refrigeration shelf-life is about 60 days) and to prepare the product hot. Plain coffee requires no refrigeration and only a hot pot or microwave to heat water plus either a coffee filter or a French press. Clean up is minimal.

RESULTS:
With editors and reporters at major dailies and relevant monthlies rejecting coverage – or postponing intended coverage – we turned to venues on the Web. Weblogs written by coffee aficionados were a primary target. Sites that were written by tastemakers were another (e.g., CelebrityCafe.com, PortlandPicks.com, DailyCandy.com, etc.).

We posted an offer for free samples on about a dozen sites. The reaction to the offer was immediate. Within 48 hours we received more than 50 requests for samples from all over the country. Within two weeks we had well over 100 requests. And, on it went. And while the numbers were small, we did prove the power of guerilla sampling. We received feedback from almost all of the people who received the product and were able to post those testimonials on the site.

This effort continues as we write, so stay tuned for the further results as they become available.

New Brand for The Howells Group

New Howells Group Logo:


Old Howells Group Logo:


Challenge:
In early September 2006, we launched a process of refreshing “brand Howells Group.” Karen Howells is an organizational development specialist with more than 20 years of experience helping leaders around the world. You can read more about Karen here: The Howells Group. If you are a business owner or ultimate-decision-maker (UDM), then you should introduce yourself to Karen. She's a talented decision-maker's decision-maker.

Solution:
First, we interviewed about a dozen of her clients. How do they describe Karen? What could we learn from them to help us create a brand that reflected where Karen has been and where she is going. After gathering the research, we poured over the results and wrote a "brand definition document" and provided this to our designer Tim Silvis of Systom. . Tim took it from there.

Next, we worked with Karen to narrow down a core definition of herself and her practice. Those words are: creative, servant-leader, spiritual, bridge-builder and direct. The design needed to reflect some or all of these concepts.

Result:
The result of the brand exercise – in design – is a “flame” mark that takes its initial design cues from the original butterfly images representing the old Howells Group brand. Upon closer inspection, the flames are comprised of several smaller butterflies of different colors – with the dominant color being red.

The Howells Group brand attributes adjectives that best describe how Karen Howells views herself and her approach to her work.

Creative
Leader
Spiritual/Humble
Bridge Builder
Direct

The old single butterfly has multiplied itself – as Karen has also multiplied and refined her skill set as a consultant. It’s an appropriate symbol of the five brand attributes.

You think going to Mars is hard? Try Vancouver.

Challenge: There are some things you can't fully convey with words, which is a hard fact to accept in our business. But such is the case with the the intricately detailed work produced by Masterpiece Models. These craftsmen just finished a 3-month project fabricating a full-scale replica of the Mars Exploration Rover from scratch using only pictures for reference. It's an amazing feat they wanted to share. So 3 decided to organize a unveiling event the day before the MER shipped – which happened to be Valentine's Day.


Solution: Embracing the funny coincidence that the event needed to be held on Valentine's Day, 3 crafted a short release linking Valentine's with The Red Planet, Mars. Was it a stretch? Yeah, a little. But after all, if women are from Venus... Local print and television outlets were contacted via phone and e-mail but our focus was more in getting interested individuals and organizations to see this replica. Mentions were made in e-mail newsletters to Masterpiece Models' and 3's clients. Also, personnel at all local museums were contacted and encouraged to use this event as a chance to meet Masterpiece Models even if the space-related replica was not directly applicable to their museum.

Result: 10 people attended the event, which was on the high end of expected turn-out. A reporter and photographer from The Columbian were there and very impressed by the replica. Using the event as a hook, 3 has promoted posts on the Masterpiece Models blog and generated leads to other individuals and museums nationwide. The day before the event, the Virginia Air and Space Center delayed the shipping of the MER until March 1, so Masterpiece Models has been able to extend individual invitations to people who missed the event.