thinkitcreative

Granted, her writing skills are a bit sketchy but she sure is fun to have hanging around the office. Cuteness goes up to eleven.

The success (and utter genius) of the Old Spice Man campaign shows what can happen when the stars align in that just-right arrangement: a solid understanding of your target market, great timing, 100% client buy-in, brilliant casting, and razor-sharp creative with a thoughtful way of pulling it all together.

Great anecdote in this piece about how the actor who plays Old Spice Man found that unmistakable voicing, without which this might have just been another campaign for some kind of body wash product.

Making the choice to innovate and be creative in your business and in the products or services you offer—it’s a smart move that can can help differentiate in a competitive market. But does it mean you have to balloon your R&D budget or go on an acquisition spree to make it happen? Not necessarily.

Apple has been rolling out game-changing products in steady succession, while keeping their R&D spending at $4.6 billion, or roughly 10% of earnings over the last four years. And as Steve Cheney points out, that’s at odds with the strategy of some of its competitors.

Example: Microsoft, in contrast, have spent a whopping $31 billion—700% that of Apple—over the last four years.

Real innovation starts by thinking long and hard about your customers’ problems, about how solutions to those problems are being unmet, and then finding better ways to solve those problems in ways that benefit your customers…first.

Lulu, one of my favourite micropublishers, has wisely embraced Apple’s brand-new iBookstore (think iTunes for books).

The outcome: Apple gets more content, Lulu gains a distributor and authors gain access to a highly lucrative market of readers who buy a lot stuff online, including books. Everyone wins.

Lulu’s timing could not be better for this. Have a look at the kinds of sales that ebooks are generating these days. According to the International Digital Publishing (IDP) Forum, ebooks generated some $165.8 million in sales in 2009…more than triple what was reported in 2008 ($53.5 million) and more than five times the record for 2007 ($31.5 million).

Data: International Digital Publishing Forum

This is an niche industry that has barely…just barely begun to hit its stride.

Results for 2010 are already described by the IDP as being off the charts…some $60 million in January and February alone, putting it on track to score some $300 million in sales by the time the year is through.

Photo:EllenJo.

Roger Ebert, whose writing has been absolutely on fire these past few years, has weighed in on Hollywood’s infatuation with 3-D films, giving it a big thumbs down.

The distractions that 3-D movies demand of its audience are obvious to anyone who has had to endure wearing a pair of those goofy glasses—and that will play a large part in this being fad that falls out of fashion just as surely as it has before. But Ebert touches on another important point: great films…great and successful films…have found their audience just fine over the years without 3-D, and it’s hard to imagine how any of them would be improved via this newest tech obsession.

The lesson here is this: you can dress up a mediocre product with gimmicks and while it may initially attract a little attention, soon people will tire of it.

The way to reach an audience and to get them coming back for more is by telling a great story—or in the case of studio executives, by having an eye for a good story when it hits the desk.

It’s that simple. And that hard.

Concentrate less on describing what your product or service does. Think more about what problem it solves for your customers.

Five ways to send your sales skyrocketing: a brand-new series of articles we’ve prepared for Engage Selling Solutions, based on the presentations of Colleen Francis. Series starts here.

Remember the advice of bestselling writer Elmore Leonard: “try to leave out the parts that people skip.”

Be brief. Readers will love you for it. (Photo by guestalt).

Our good friends (and longtime client) over at Engage Selling Solutions have just let me know they have only three seats remaining at their Sales Mastery Workshop, April 28-30, 2010.

This is a must-attend event for any business keen on selling more in less time with better results.

Be sure to check out their site for more details…but don’t wait too long! Engage events have a legendary following and I wouldn’t be surprised of these remaining three seats disappear very soon.

[Update] Sold out!

History and statistics.

Be honest, when you read those two words together, do you think to yourself “hey now those topics together could make for a really engaging presentation!” Probably not. But in the hands of the right speaker—someone who is both passionate and knowledgeable about their subject—anything becomes possible.

Just as important, when that passionate presenter invests in the right tools to communicate their message in a meaningful, memorable way, magic can happen.

Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, provides a great example of this. It’s worth watching the entire presentation, but around the 5:25 mark, watch how history and statistics come to life in his PowerPoint/slideware show.

Stunning…

You may have noticed that we’ve refreshed the portfolio icons located on the right-hand side of every page of our website. Many of the new ones were designed by the amazingly talented digital artist, Tatyana Suhodolska, whose hard work definitely deserves praise and attention.

Be sure to check out her work today.

I love treating my clients well, and one of the ways I do that is by sending little gifts periodically just to say thanks. Gift baskets with coffee or chocolates are always popular, of course, but I also try to come up with products that—more than just being tasty—are useful and memorable.

That has lead me to one of my newest gift products: custom-made postage stamps.

After all, even in this digital age, just about everyone I know still needs stamps…and just about everyone I know in business is always short a stamp or two for mail-outs. So when an envelope arrives at a client’s doorstep with a full sheet of personalized stamps (authorized by Canada Post*) ready to use, I can almost hear their cheers right across town.

The feedback I’ve received on this product has been great, and that’s included plenty of interest in learning more about how it’s done. So here’s a summary in three easy steps.

1. Visit Canada Post’s Picture Postage website. It explains all the important technical and legal points that you need to know about.

2. Choose the digital image that you want to feature on your personalized stamp. Make sure it’s a photo you own and have the legal right to feature on a stamp. A company logo might be allowed, but exercise good judgment. Remember that your client is going to want to use the stamps on their own mailouts, so make sure that it doesn’t look as though you’re putting your brand on their correspondence. My approach has been to use photos from my personal collection, but decide what works best for you.

3. Review the finished product and send to your client. When your order ships to you from Canada Post, it features a full sheet of stamps, plus a card-sized reproduction. I forward this along with a short note to my client saying thanks for their ongoing business. I also find it helpful to mention that yes, indeed, these are real stamps and valid at domestic letter rates in Canada.

* American readers take note: there’s a similar service for custom US postage available right here.

This is brilliant. And it even manages to sneak in a joke at the expense of the much-ridiculed Comic Sans.

Be sure to zoom-in on the image or you’ll be missing out on half the fun.

The new iPad app for WordPress is out and it’s one slick piece of code. I’m really pleased with how easy it makes it to generate new posts on the fly with just the right amount of extras without becoming a feature-bloated behemoth. Nice work, folks.

(Photo: WordPress.org)

As a copywriter who is deeply entrenched in marketing, I have a lot of discussions with clients about pricing strategies. Let’s face it, pricing is a delicate art. The last thing you want to do is let price drive decisions in the minds of customer on whether to buy your product or service. The key is provide numbers that mean something of value to the people with whom you want to do business.

Trend-spotting author Jeremy Gutsche relates a great story about this in his book Exploiting Chaos. A few years ago while working for a leading Canadian credit card company, he and his group had an insight: “customers didn’t think about their rates as numbers, they thought about whether or not the rates were fair.”

Rather than advertise the lending rate on their card as a percentage, they switched to presenting it as “Prime +2,” which meant that their lending rate was just two percentage points higher than the prime rate set by the Bank of Canada. Sales skyrocketed.