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Martha
January 07, 2010
Design Trends, Hot Design Tips, Misc, New Effusion Projects, What Were They Thinking?
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Tags: Clients, Corporate Marketing, Graphic Design, How Not To Design, Marketing Planning, Small Business Marketing, Uncreative Marketing
About 36 hours before hosting a holiday party for almost 40 people from my business group
Million Dollar Ladies, my hot water heater sprang a leak — of course, perfect timing right? When your hot water heater leaks there's no patching it up, you have to do a complete replacement.
Luckily, one of the members of the group is the owner of a plumbing company that does superior work and was someone I trusted. So I called them and they came to my rescue replacing the unit in a just a ... Continue Reading
WIFItising — Dancing the fine line between clevah and stupid.
I came across this interesting way of advertising that in a big picture sense boils down to thinking outside of the box and how many traditional advertisers should start thinking.
Creative marketing tactics picks up old ideas, dusts them off and presents them in a new way that often generates a new found interest just because of the unique approach. You might call this particular idea a form of 
There are many warning signs when it comes to spotting a rogue design firm.
We've heard of horror story after horror story and stepping back to take it all in there are a few commonalities that seem to come up more often than not.
Below are some key red flag indicators to help you realize if you've been or are in the process of being punk'd by your current design firm.
Designing "just because" is no way to develop solid design. If you are a designer or someone in the business you already know this.
There are times though when clients are adamant about something that has to be in the design, not necessarily for a good reason, just because they like the "idea" of it, not because it has any real meaning or validity. This will often put a wrench in the creativity process but it's something everyone of us has had to deal with from time to time.
Consultation throughout the project ... 
Ok so it's really called drip marketing, I also refer to it as "overtising." We've found that a lot of companies are actually overdoing eMarketing efforts to the point where it becomes annoying to the end user.
Personally, we believe once a week to your customer base is excessive (Godiva are you listening?), every two weeks is doible.
We like to send our eMarketing out quarterly or occasionally if we just want to put out an additional touch out to them we'll create a unique piece certain times throughout the year ... 
So you did it, you thought by not marketing your company on the web or with traditional marketing collateral that you'd save huge bucks. You probably did. How much did you lose though because your name wasn't out there or you didn't polish your current marketing pieces up taking advantage of the economic situation? In most cases you'll have to work harder to get that same sale that was approved last year in a third of the time, fine.
The short answer is no. No they can't. If they want something of yours they can get it or know someone that can.
Though more and more businesses realize they need a website in today’s at your finger tips online information age, there is still a lot of misconception that surrounds having one. A major misconception is that “once I have a website, the money’s just going to start rolling in.” That’s just not the case in most instances. If you do nothing to promote the website, it ends up being like home gym equipment: It’s there, but nobody’s using it. What we tell people is that you ... 