Strategy

When you start to put a puzzle together, do you start with the outside pieces or focus on a certain colour grouping on the interior? Either way you start with a plan, you know the end goal of completion and you know what needs to be done piece by piece. From the project conception to completion, there are many steps than need to fall exactly in place for the final result to work. This involves several stages, such as estimating, scheduling, design and production, , proofing, editing, press approvals and shipping and can take organizing to the extreme.

Talk to most creative agencies and you will often – and passionately – hear, "We will not work on spec". Spec work – or speculative work – is essentially a company opening a contest of sorts to a number of agencies or designers to have them produce work on their behalf with little information or creative brief and with little (often no) compensation for the time spent. The "winner" is then selected and at that point receives payment for the services rendered.

We recently had the opportunity to brand a new product for one of our clients. This involved developing a unique, but meaningful name for the high-tech device as well as a logo and slogan. Most people would think that the logo would be the tricky part, after all a name is just a name, right?

There is a term called signal-to-noise ratio, used in science and engineering to measure how much a signal has been degraded by noise. It’s a good term to use when assessing our communication strategies too.

Having multiple touches with your customers is key, and what better way to do it than with an eNewsletter. An email newsletter can be a very effective and inexpensive marketing tool that any business can use to promote a new product or service, communicate to your customers. The hard part of running a successful email newsletter campaign is that it is a science, and getting all of the variables right is more difficult than you might think. Most particularly, timing is key but often difficult to determine.