How much time and effort did you put into your company slogan? A minute or an hour? Chances are it did not get the attention it deserved. Now before you grab a pen and paper and start revising it now, hear me out.
While the phrases “New and Improved” and “There has never been a better time…” spring to mind when you are trying to be “creative” note how many times these have been used in advertising in the past.
The public today are looking for the B.B.D (Bigger, Better Deal), so how can you hope to compete in a market where your competitors are providing the B.B.D? The answer is simple. Be creative. These creative approaches may seem risky, however you have to be risky in business, why not in your advertising also. I am not saying be insulting or offensive, but you need to WOW your audience, if not WOW, then at least give them something to think about or remember.
When you think of great advertising campaigns in the past which ones spring to mind? Is it Nike “Just Do It” campaign, THAT ran in 1988 and we still remember it! How about “An apple a day keeps the Doctor away”? That was a campaign that ran in the 1900’s and it was advertising… you guessed it… Apples!
Looking back at great campaigns from history you soon see a pattern, they were all short catchy slogans, but beneath those slogans was a great product. And there is no point in advertising a sub standard product. But if you have a well polished and marketable product you need to be creative. Agencies are paid millions of dollars to think up simple ways to remember your product, the Nike “Just Do It” campaign was first created by Wieden & Kennedy in 1988, it was co founder Dan Wieden who first coined the phrase and now it is a part of history. Three simple words.
Which goes to show you how you don’t have to be fancy, just be creative!
Let me give you an example, we have a product called ActivCart, which is an e-commerce website program. We started out with a simple system and have gradually expanded it into a program that is used by some of the top online stores in Australia. Originally our “catch phrase” for ActivCart was “E-commerce systems”, however this was boring, unimaginative and uncreative. We needed to make a change. We conceptualized and trialed many variations but came up with the same results. So it was back to the drawing board. We needed to capture the essence of the program. We came up with a list of keywords, here was the top 3.
- Smart
- Simple
- Easy
We looked at each of the words carefully, Smart was very accurate, not only was our software smart, but smart businesses were successfully running it.
When we looked at the word, simple, we needed to be very careful, we didn’t want people to think that the software was too simple and therefore not have the features people needed. Not only that it could have implied that the client needed to be simple to run it, again this was bad. So simple went out the window.
Easy was similar to Simple. However this was close to how to use the software, easy. But being creative we had to concede that the use of the word Easy was, frankly, overused and had lost its impact with the public.
So we had an adjective, now we needed something to represent how it, or we or they are smart. Again we looked at the options.
- Think smart
- It’s Smart
- Go Smart
Think smart is used by another company, out it goes. It’s smart, well what is it’s, the software? No too confusing out it goes too.
Go smart was good, it was a call to action, Go, be smart or choose the smart product, Go smart was looking good and after discussing it further we settled on it. We now have a creative brand and a recognizable phrase to associate with it. So Go Smart – ActivCart is what we use in our adverting materials now. What we found was that it gave us the ability to stick into peoples minds. If you doubt it, see if you still remember it in an hour or a day.
So when you are working out your advertising costs next time, think of how your actual advertising is affecting your clients. A smart creative idea can mean the difference between remembrance and obscurity.
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Nike Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike,_Inc.
