Marketing

09.19.07
5 Best Key Points of a Marketing Graphic Designer Daily Job, Freelance, Graphic Design, Marketing, My Work | (7)
As a graphic designer, in Iasi – Romania, in the marketing team, there are quite a few things that I have to understand so I can make my job right. Also from my freelance experience and from what I learned from other people here are the 5 best key points of a marketing graphic designer:
1. Think about who is the final consumer of the product that you are creating. What sort of people will read the brochure, flier or other piece of publicity you create and buy the product(s) or services that you promote? A clear description of your target audience will help you gauge what sort of feel your design should have. The look of your design should always reflect the preferences of the customer, not your own preferences or the preferences of your team mates or your customer (if you are a freelancer).
2. The message without emotions is like milk without the bottle. The message you are trying to send is sustained by the emotions you create within the final customer. What emotions should you convey? What specific things should you draw the reader’s attention to? Read your client’s copy carefully. Use the message of the copy, especially the headlines, to inspire the message of your design.
3. The message has to be reinforced by your design. Is your design consistent with the messages in the copy? Can you increase the impact of the copy message in your design approach? If you’re designing a brochure for some computer software, and the dominant marketing message seems to be that the software is "easy to use", your design should reflect clarity and freedom, maybe with lots of white space and clear copy sections. In short, don’t rely on your client to brief you properly on what the design should achieve. Take the initiative to work it out yourself.
4. Emphasize the benefits of the product. Demonstrate how good the product is through your choice of visual. Show how the product makes a real difference to people’s lives. Reread through the copy and make a note of all examples of what the product does for the user. Then think about how you can demonstrate people benefiting from the product in your graphics and choices of photos.
5. Represent visually the product or a concept of the service. Show people using the product/service. Show happy customers. Publicity that shows people is proven to be the most successful at driving sales. Good publicity should encourage readers to imagine themselves using the product to show people of the same demographic using the product! Get as many pictures of the product as possible, and work these pictures into your design.
There are other important things to take care when designing a new piece of publicity marketing materials. Please feel free to share with us your ideas
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07.16.07
Showroom layout design – Dealing with perception in the marketing of a new product – Snowy snowboards – Marketing Management MBA Freelance, Marketing, My Work | (0)
I want to share with you the Showroom layout/plan that I researched for and created for my MBA thesis on Dealing with perception in the marketing of a new product – Snowy snowboards – Marketing Management MBA

You can see that there are some light blue and light pink zones. Those are the areas where every employee has to cover. Blue is for a male employee and light pink for a female. I studied to see where it’s best suited to put each employee, depending on gender and skill. It is not discrimination, it is about what each one is best suited for.

When someone enters the shop/showroom it is greeted by one of the two employees from the door. The customers is invited in and asked if she deserves a drink or to sit down while together with the sales person, they choose to see what the customers really needs, what best suites the consumer.

For further questions and remarks please leave a comment or contact me.
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07.16.07
I graduated my MBA – thesis A++ with congratulations -ti Dealing with perception in the marketing of a new product – Snowy snowboards – Markeng Management MBA Freelance, Life, Marketing, My Work | (21)
I managed to finish all my preparations to present my MBA project in front of the teachers board. The name of my project is Dealing with perception in the marketing of a new product at Snowy snowboards . The teachers liked very much my thesis, and how I presented everything. With God’s blessing, I got an A++ with congratulations . I was honored to receive such appreciation. My supervisor teacher was prof. dr. ec. Rodica Boier. For further recommendation and testimonial you can contact either my supervisor teacher or the dean of the MBA from CRIAP2 (from Technical University "Gh. Asachi" Iasi), prof. univ. dr. ing. Gabriel Luca, at tel./fax +40 (0)232 211 395 or email gpluca77@yahoo.com .

It was hard work involved not only in preparation of the thesis, but also during the whole university year. With God’s help, I put all my energy in every project I did for every subject/matter/object I studied. This MBA program really helped me, and I had what to learn from every teachers we had. It wasn’t perfect. Nothing on this earth is. But, it was what I expected, and I think that it was a good investment for my future, the money were spent in a good way. From now on, I hope that I will be given the opportunity to show what I have studied, what I know and can now, after all this training.

You can download a part of the project from here , a PowerPoint presentation of all the project from here , and the PowerPoint presentation that I used when I maintain my thesis in front of the teachers board can be downloaded from here .

You can find related post I wrote here:
Here is a short review of my MBA thesis…

TITLE: Dealing with perception in the marketing of a new product at Snowy Snowboarding

DATE: July 2007

SUPERVISOR: prof. dr. ec. Rodica BOIER

AUTHOR: eng. Daniel Mihai CONDURACHI

SHORT TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1. Purpose Statement
2. General Description / Syllabus
3. Marketing Research
4. Marketing Perception
5. Research on Snowy Brand
6. Competition Analysis
7. New Snowy Products & Services
8. Platform to Stimulate Sales at Snowy
9. Conclusions
10. Bibliography
ABSTRACT

MOTIVATION
- Marketing research
  - lately global increasing significance;
  - but can not be said that is reached maturity yet;
  - itâ€™s wrongly done when something seems to go wrong in the company;
  - it should be done:
    
    to optimize of the work flow,
    
    to feel the market beat/trend,
    
    before any major action,
    
    even in short term marketing planning;
    
    it should involve and entail the operational work force.
- Sales stimulation
  - it’s wrongly done:
    
    only in a compact environment,
    
    only in the marketing team,
    
    without actually being effective on the market.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
- Understand where Snowy stands in the snowboarding industry;
- Improve Snowy’s position and seize more market share in the snowboarding industry;
- Develop new innovative snowboarding products based on marketing and technical research;
- Improving perception over Snowy’s image.
APPROACH
- Theoretically approaching the problem statement;
- Research, analyze and understand Snowy inside sales trend;
- Research, measure and understand the market regarding:
  - age segmenting of the consumers,
  - aiming for the most important quarter,
  - gender segmenting of the consumers chosen quarter,
  - repositioning Snowy with introducing a new department exactly designer for the new segment,
  - differentiating Snowy’s new department from the competition;
- Prototype concept construction based on the above:
  - design innovative new products exactly suited based on the differentiated process,
  - develop associated products creating family products,
  - develop special services for the new family products;
- Develop application programs to deal with the perception of the new family products and stimulate the sales:
  - value perception of the chosen customers quarter,
  - implied roles involved in the commercial process,
  - increasing the motivation to buy,
  - personal sale tactics,
  - dealing with perception over the information customers receive,
  - study and resolve the purchasing risk for the customers,
  - Snowy brand managing,
  - manage the cognitive dissonance.
RESULTS
- Understood where Snowy stands in the snowboarding industry;
- Improved Snowy’s position on the market;
- Seized more market share;
- Developed new innovative family products based on marketing and technical research;
- Improving perception over Snowy’s brand;
- Optimized of the work flow of the whole company;
- Increased the perception of the market over the new family products
- Stimulated the sales.
CONCLUSIONS
- Applied the new global marketing developments in Snowy;
- Discovered new ways Snowy could acquire large share of the market;
- Developed new product families and the associated services;
- Dealt with perception in the marketing of the new product families;
- Stimulated the sales.
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06.29.07
Excuses Not To Plan Freelance, Marketing | (6)
Todayâ€™s world comes at us so fast that it almost seems as if the speed of change prohibits planning. Less than 20% donâ€™t think so. The work of todayâ€™s service professionals mirrors this. Pick an area where your prospective customers have problems, and help them fill those needs goes the mantra of todayâ€™s consultant.
1. It is too scientific – some of the greatest examples of success are often told for their lack of schooling – Bill Gates from Microsoft, Dave Thomas of Wendyâ€™s fame. Is it an academic issue… or an issue of hard work and common sense? The educators comment among themselves about how many people have put into practice the subjects that their doctorate dissertations cover, and how many of those ventures fail. Donâ€™t you have to have a Harvard degree or be a member of some famous consulting firm to have the smarts to do planning? Doesnâ€™t look like it.
2. It takes to long – this is probably true. But, it does not need to take as long as it currently does. Using new strategic planning tools such as graphic facilitation, have shown to shorten meetings by 24%. These new processes make consensus of the group move from 58% to 79%. We, as humans, think visually and some of these new methods have been proven to tap into the human thinking process.
3. It is too expensive – as practiced by most people that are doing planning, this is often the case. But a few companies have adopted the new visual/graphic process for their planning and are seeing huge benefits in speed, communication and direction. For every Procter & Gamble, or General Motors, who use the new processes, there are also others who donâ€™t want their competition to know about these cost saving tools.
4. It never gets used – a builder has a strategic plan that gets used a lot – it is called blueprints. A ships captain has a strategic plan that gets used a lot – navigational maps. A professional football team has a strategic plan that gets used a lot – a play book.
Don’t make excuses anymore for not planning. Plan it all before you act!
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06.28.07
Program to Stimulate Sales at Snowy is Finished and I got 100 out of 100 Freelance, Marketing, My Work | (7)
I finally finished my project on Program to Stimulate Sales at Snowy. I send it to the teacher and I got 100 out of 100. This was the biggest project I’ve ever done for my master courses, in marketing management.

Here are a few post that I wrote while working on this big project:
For all of you that know Romanian, you can download my Program to Stimulate Sales at Snowy from bellow. Be advised that you are not allowed to copy and use anything from the document without my permission.

My project is here here. To view just click. To download right-click and choose Save Link As or Save Target As, depending on your browser.
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06.15.07
Graphic Design & DTP Brochure / Folder for Marketing Support Company Freelance, Graphic Design, Marketing, My Work | (1)
I was contacted by Marketing Support company to design for them a 4 page brochure. Actually it is kind of a folder.

In the first step I did some research on pharmaceutical marketing. Marketing Support Romania has as main field of expertise the pharmaceutical marketing. This brochure is targeted to this are of marketing, but in the same time they requested that the brochure could be used for other companies as well. If it would have been targeted 100% for the pharmaceutical field, than the brochure was more high-tech, with bottles, pills and chemical signs.

After the research was done, I had to decide on the colors I was going to use. I worked on color palette, that I later used in the graphic design process. I was provided with Marketing Support logo. But, I didn’t like the colors, the tints actually. After the color palette was chosen, I stepped to deciding the fonts and the point size that I’ll use. The logo I was provided with was actually in word, so I had to redo the logo it in Adobe Illustrator.

The next step consisted in creating the general layout. Because it is a simple brochure with only 4 pages I decided to do all the main work in Adobe Photoshop. I had to do some work on this because from the first place I already had an idea on how the brochure should look. In the end I got a better result than my original idea. Of coarse the color palette had to be tweaked.

After the fun part, came the DTP work. Many may say that it is just a cop-paste process. But that is not right. You have to fit everything to look just right. Play with the font size that I chosed and in the same time tweak it a bit. Because it the main target for this brochure is the pharmaceutical field I used as bullets a pill. I made the reflection and look for the best positioning of the bullet regarding the paragraph.

After all this was done, I had to take care of the graphics and images to use in the brochure. This took me a while, but in the end I was happy with the results.

Of coarse in all this process the client was involved. I provided them with plain versions and also 3D ones of the brochure’s preview. I asked the people from Marketing Support Romania if they like what I did. They send me their feedback and I did the changes accordingly, without the debates on what is best to do. This process repeated a few times, until it materialized in the final version of the brochure as you can see bellow…
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06.01.07
Company Customer Newsletter Design Template Daily Job, Graphic Design, Marketing, My Work | (0)
Between many projects in progress, one is more dear to me. It is the new Customer Newsletter I have to design. For now I create the template of the newsletter. Soon, I will be provided with the text to go with it. The customer newsletter is a powerful marketing tool. You draw all that customers, they are happy with your products. But, in time, if you do not remind them about you they end up forgetting your name. In the same time, do not send to many newsletters to your customers, because they’ll feel attacked. Once a month is enough to bother them.

Here are some cuts from what I’ve been working on in the last day or two…

Julie Beckham gives you some very general hints in her Tips for Creating an E-Newsletter. You can check it out
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05.24.07
Advertiser & Consumer – harsh reality Marketing | (3)
It’s so true this video. Each of them with their problems and point of view. But actually who’s interest is to change? The advertiser, of coarse. Talk to the consumer… Daniel!

The Break Up
Uploaded by geertdesager
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05.24.07
SNOWY snowboards – Back & Exo Freelance, Graphic Design, Marketing, My Work | (0)
For my project Program to Stimulate Sales at Snowy I did 2 designs for the snowboards Back (freeride) and Exo (freestyle)

For this project I also did the Snowy logo, Snowy cap/hat, Snowy t-shirts.
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05.17.07
More is Less Marketing | (1)
What I mean with the title is that giving more choices to the customers, you actually get less profit. This happens because
1. the customers freezes when sees so many choices and does not know what to buy. This means a waste of time, when he/she could have bought and come again to buy some more.
2. when the customer finally decides about his choice, he/she ends up less satisfied with the choice made, than there would be less options to chose from, because:
  - it the result of the choice is not perfect, then it is easy to imagine how it would have been if you choose better. So, you regret the decision you made and this subtracts from the satisfaction you had making the decision you did. The more options there are, the easier to regret your option is.
  - the value of something depends on what you compare that thing to
  - when you choose to do a thing you choose not to do others
  - with all the options available, the expectation raise
  - everything was better back when everything was worse because back then you could have had pleasant surprises
  - raise of the clinical depression because people have fell bad because bad choices they made when there was so much to chose from.
The secret to happiness is low expectations. What enables all of this choice is the material affluence. So, Barry recommends to give our extra choice to the others that have no choice.

So, More is less!
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