 |
Three partners who will build your business
To a cowboy, "Howdy, pardner," means "Hi, friend." To a tennis player, partner means playmate for doubles. In committed personal relationships, partner means life-mate.
Partner
has multiple meanings in business, too. You may lead or work for a company owned by people who formed a legal partnership. Many firms, including Hollister Creative, strive to become partners, not merely vendors, to their clients.
So when we tell you that developing partner relationships with other companies is a proven business-building strategy, we first have to define partner.
To build your business, three types of partners can be beneficial:
- Referral partners: Non-competing businesspeople get to know each other well and look for opportunities to refer business to one another. This can be especially effective if the referral partners sell different products or services to the same types of customers.
- Outsourcing partners: To be "full-service" and offer clients "one-stop shopping," a business takes on work it can't fulfill in-house and subcontracts that work to another business. When this is seamless, it is a win-win-win for the customer, full-service business and subcontractor.
- Strategic partners: Two companies agree to help each other succeed by leveraging their combined expertise, capabilities, resources and relationships. This works best when it provides competitive advantages to both companies and clear benefits to the customers.
Hollister Creative has had partners of all three types. Over the past year, we worked closely with strategic partner Allied Pixel on an innovative plan that blends those three types and takes the partnership concept to a whole new level.
T
he idea grew out of a simple observation: Clients benefit when Hollister Creative and Allied Pixel combine forces to design and develop websites that have strong written and video content. Wouldn't clients benefit even more if we combined forces with additional specialized small businesses to offer the full gamut of marketing communications services?
The result is the MarCom Alliance
. The owners of Hollister Creative and Allied Pixel formed an LLC. As the managing partners, they now have a legal relationship, which just formalizes their previous handshake relationship.
In a highly selective way, the managing partners have been onboarding strategic partners who, like themselves, own and lead well-established, best-in-class marketing specialty businesses. Importantly, the partner firms have a compatible vision and culture. Their owners sign a contract agreeing to certain terms, including their willingness to share knowledge at educational events presented by the MarCom Alliance.
Learn from the Alliance partners how to improve engagement with the prospects and customers of your business, education or nonprofit organization. Register to attend one of the Engagement Road Show events on October 21 at The Main Line Chamber of Commerce or October 28 at the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce.
To learn how the MarCom Alliance can help you achieve your goals for marketing and communications, email Kim Landry or call 610.900.6202.
|
|
|
New website video
Thanks to Allied Pixel, we now have a professional intro video on the Hollister Creative website.
View our home page video
|
Monstrous footprint
Kim Landry will give a MED Week talk at Wharton on why you need a Bigfoot-size digital footprint.
|
Cat in the woodpile
|
|
|
|
Give voice to your brand's personality
|
|
Shouting won't make your voice stronger. A strong voice is a distinctive voice. |
Q. I work for a nonprofit helping kids who are at risk. My boss has asked me to rewrite our marketing and outreach materials to give them "a stronger voice." What does she mean?
A. In writing and speaking, voice is what gives your words attitude and personality. It makes your writing distinctively your own. For a business or nonprofit organization, it is an extension of your brand, expressing your values, how you perceive yourself and how you wish to be perceived.
Voice is a state of mind, rather than a specific style. It is a combination of word choices, sentence structure and tone, which taken together convey who you are and your point of view.
Every famous writer has a voice that is easy to recognize. Ernest Hemingway's voice is far different from that of Jane Austen, and J.D. Salinger's writing will never be confused with Alice Walker's.
The same is true of famous speakers. If you follow politics, you know that Donald Trump has a very different voice from Hillary Clinton.
Clinton and Trump are classic examples of using voice to extend a brand. In each of their voices - the attitude, not the sound or volume - the audience hears a strong personal brand expressing how they see themselves and how they want others to see them.
No one voice is "right."
The voice you use when writing or speaking for a business or nonprofit should express the authentic brand personality that attracted your current customers and made them receptive to your message.
A law firm, for example, may want a serious and authoritative voice. A family-focused organization may seek to sound warm and accessible. A nonprofit helping at-risk kids may want to express urgency and passion for its cause.
At Hollister Creative, we pay attention to voice in our monthly newsletter. We like to have fun, so we share our knowledge in a light-hearted voice. We think of our readers as Friends of Hollister, so our voice is friendly. We want our voice to convey who and what we are.
|
|
|
Answer Key
Click here for the voice behind Dory and the rest.
Pixar Animation/Walt Disney Pictures/Newscom
|
Name the source of these movie
voices!
In writing, voice gives your words perso
nality. In movies, voice creates personalities. Can you name the voice
behind each of these famous animated characters?
1. Dory in "Finding Dory"
2. The Donkey in "Shrek"
3. Tigress in "Kung Fu Panda"
4. Scar in "The Lion King"
5. Woody in "Toy Story"
6. Joy in "Inside Out"
7. Lightning McQueen in "Cars"
8. The Genie in "Aladdin"
9. Mrs. Fox in "Fantastic Mr. Fox"
10. Mr. Fox in "Fantastic Mr. Fox"
Talk about voice!
|
|
|
Watch this 12-year-old find his own true voice after Simon Cowell humiliates him. |
Simon Cowell, the ultimate "show me" judge, is talking about voice when he tells TV show contestants to make a song their own. Here's a kid who did that in spades on "Britain's Got Talent."
If you need help to develop a strong voice that is consistent with your brand, call Kim Landry
|
A sense of your brand in the blink of an eye
|
|
|
In the social media banner displays we design for our agency and our clients, viewers see the brand. |
On the Internet, every day can be a banner day for a business. So if your business has pages on social media sites, pay special attention to your banners.
Those are the display areas at the top of your profile pages (
aka cover photo, cover image, header, background). Like a display advertisement or store window display, the impression it gives viewers is hugely important.
Banners are the first thing viewers see. They should give visitors a sense of your brand in the blink of an eye. Capture their interest in a couple of seconds or they will move on.
Even if your banners are nicely designed, it takes regular attention to make sure they continue working with the ever-changing platforms of social media sites.
Each social media platform has its own guidelines for banners and "skin" formats. One size does not fit all, so you cannot simply cut and paste the same image across all platforms. You have to customize, site by site.
Make sure all the images you use are top quality and sized to the correct specs for each site. You can get the specs directly from each platform or host network, or you can do a quick Internet search to find a site that has conveniently compiled them for you.
It's worth the effort because your banner is prime real estate on every social media site. Follow these tips to maximize banner impact:
DO check your social media page banners monthly on a smartphone as well as a desktop.
DON'T assume one image will work on all platforms.
DO research current banner specs and guidelines for every social media site you use.
DO be mindful that specs can change - sometimes without notice.
Need help to design brand-boosting banner images for your social media pages? Call Kim Landry at 484.829.0021 or email
|
Branding Philadelphia's next mega event
Client's Challenge
Vision 2020, the National Women's Equality Initiative, is an effort to make measurable progress toward economic, political and social equality by the year 2020. That year will mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote.
More than a year ago, Vision 2020 assembled a committee to begin planning a multi-purpose, multi-faceted, multi-month 19th Amendment centennial celebration. In March, U.S. Sen. Robert P. Casey, Jr. introduced a Senate Resolution designating Vision 2020 as the host organization and Philadelphia as the site for the national commemoration. In May, the planning committee delivered a draft outline of potential events and programs, and the name Women 100 was chosen.
With 2020 scarcely three years away, Vision 2020 engaged Hollister Creative to assist in branding the celebration and developing materials that Vision 2020 could use to begin promoting Women 100 to potential partner organizations, donors and corporate sponsors. The two biggest challenges were to simplify - yet not diminish - a celebration that will exceed the
Welcome America festival in scope and scale, and to balance the fun aspects of celebration with the serious underlying cause of women's rights.
Our Solution
|
|
|
Click image to view and download Women 100 overview booklet.
|
We began with design of the Women 100 logo. While the celebration will have myriad parts, its reason for being is women's voting rights. In brainstorming and sketching, we kept coming back to that core idea.
With the client, we decided the logo should have a patriotic American color scheme, without looking like a political campaign sign. Vision 2020's dark blue was an obvious choice, as was a flag-like red. The third color, a light blue, tied in a related Vision 2020 program, the
Shared Leadership Campaign.
To represent voting rights, we extended the right side of the W and highlighted it in red to suggest a checkmark. With that tweak, the logo text doubled as an icon. But the client also wanted a boldly visual branding element that could be used with the logo or separately. We agreed that it should represent women of different ages and ethnicities. The result was overlapping silhouettes of four women, all facing toward the future.
With the look and feel established, we next worked with Vision 2020 to turn the draft plan for Women 100 into a colorful booklet that would provide an overview for decision makers being approached to partner, donate or sponsor. Once the booklet was approved, we used the content to populate the website pages devoted to
Women 100 on the Vision 2020 website.
Client Comment
"It was a real pleasure to work with the Hollister Creative team on this project. In addition to their skills in graphic design, copy and layout, team members were immediately responsive and accommodating in making last-minute changes and meeting deadlines. The Women 100 logo and the booklet produced by Hollister Creative are colorful and classy. Both are receiving rave reviews and will help Vision 2020 describe our ambitious national plans for the year 2020!"
- Lynn Yeakel, Founder and President, Vision 2020
Three Quick Tips
If you are faced with the challenge of branding a multi-purpose, multi-faceted, multi-month event, here are some tips to help you:
- Pare down to the core purpose. When an event has myriad parts, the temptation is to create a collage that hints at the variety. Resist that temptation. Powerful branding demands simplicity. Ask yourself: What is the event's reason for being?
- Explain with a tagline. If the event name is short and punchy, that's a good thing. But a short, punchy name is rarely self-explanatory. By incorporating a tagline, you can add enough information to give people a strong sense of the event's purpose.-
- Hold a mirror to your audience. A bold visual that represents your intended audience is a simple and effective way to tell the audience this event is for them. People emotionally connect with an event when they self-identify as members of the group being courted.
|
A Facebook sensation
for your workplace libation
Every weekday on the Hollister Creative
Facebook page, we share fun posts that showcase creativity in writing or design.
We never know which post will strike a chord, but this "Weird English" mug sure did. In a matter of hours, it reached more than 2,800 readers and generated nearly 100 likes and 25 shares.
Since so many people gave a thumbs up on Facebook, we decided to offer the "Weird English" mug as our September giveaway for email newsletter subscribers.
If you would like one,
email us a request
! The first three subscribers who have not won a giveaway item in six months will receive the mug. And if you aren't already following our Facebook page, please like us by
clicking here
.
|
|
|
|
|
|
