A look under the hood

With last month’s launch of our sister company, Brand Shepherd™, completed we thought it would fun to post a little look under the hood of sorts… what’s going on around D&A Design.

How sweet it is! We have begun work on a brand identity and packaging for a line of raw honey and honey-related products. Show-and-tell should be ready in a month or so. Really enjoying the process, and learning all about beekeeping.

Who’s keeping score? Another consumer packaging design project is about halfway completed. Next week a photo shoot in Palm Springs, CA gets underway for this project. We can’t wait to get those images into the new packaging we have designed. This product is going to really pop off the shelf.

PR, Marketing, and… Advice? Yes! Go check out a site we just launched for Cincinnati-based PR firm, Marketplex. A small firm with loads of experience, Marketplex has a very useful service for small business owners:  Advisory Boards. Get in touch with owner Tom Besanceney – you’ll be fascinated by the process. We’re going to get some marketing initiatives started soon to let folks know about what’s going on with Marketplex.

35,000 reasons to visit Chillicothe, Ohio. In mid-January the 2010 Visitors Guide was printed for Chillicothe, Ohio… 35,000 of them! This year’s guide will really stand apart from other guides at Ohio travel pavilions. We visited a few pavilions to stare down the competition and see how we could make Chillicothe stand out. Mission accomplished.

The politics of design. This month D&A Design has begun working on our first entry into the world of politics by working with a local candidate on creating some well-branded materials. Love or hate him, Barak Obama changed branding in politics forever. A serious candidate can no longer go with whatever a design novice creates. Branding has power.

Sit, Ubu, sit. Good dog. How could we post a look under the hood without mentioning Dinovite?! We recently worked on a project where web banners were paired with streaming radio commercials. The banners take you to a landing page where you can learn all about Dinovite Liquid and/or get right to the buying. We continue to be blown away by how much Dinovite lets us design for them – they are great people to do great work for, and our D&A Design’s border collie, Jake, has benefited from their products for almost 2 years.

Lots of show-and-tell on the horizon. We feel that 2010 is literally the time, day by day, for the businesses who want to get serious about their image to do so and take advantage of vulnerable market share. The Great Recession may or may not be over, but there are big chunks for the taking for businesses with a well-honed image and message. Get in touch if you’d like talk with us about how we can help make that happen.

Cheers!

Announcing the launch of our sister company: Brand Shepherd

D&A Design is proud to announce the launch of our sister company, Brand Shepherd.

Brand Shepherd is a social media herding service. It started when a client of D&A Design wondered aloud if there were any B2B social media management services. Dan Crask, owner of our parent company, D&A Design Of Ohio, LLC and owner of a pure-bred border collie, immediately had a mental picture:

“I had this picture in my head of my border collie, Jake, herding social media icons instead of sheep! Jake was moving around, trying to get all these social media outlets back into the pen instead of being scattered everywhere. Some social media were totally lost, some were underfed, and some were just old and no longer useful. Soon Jake had all the social media sheep into a pen, and they were all well-cared-for, bleating in harmony, and all was well with the flock.”

For now Brand Shepherd is a complimentary business to what D&A Design does. We found that a lot of the digital assets we create are re-purposed in a social media plan, and since we are very active in managing social media for our clients anyway, Brand Shepherd was a no-brainer.

Take a look at Brand Shepherd’s site, and let Dan or Andrea know if Brand Shepherd’s service is worth a conversation over the phone or over a cup of coffee.

A few words to entrepreneurs…

D&A Design will never be “too big” to work with entrepreneurs and inventors. We would even go so far as to say that we are the perfect partner for entrepreneurs and inventors. Every new product or service needs a logo or identity, a web site or brochure. Let us help!

We work with entrepreneurs and inventors regularly to develop their logo and identity, web site, packaging design, and other resources associated with trying to launch a new idea. In other words, we “get” you, the entrepreneur.

No matter where the idea is in development we’re open and available to talk about your ideas and dreams, and how we can help make them happen.

Klimick Acupuncture is a Favorite Place on Google

Wow. That was fast.

Google notified our client, Klimick Acupuncture, recently that they are now a Favorite Place, and even gave her one of their new handy window decals so mobile users can scan the printed bar code to find them immediately on their mobile devices.

Here’s a snippet that we found stunning:

Congratulations! You’re a Favorite Place on Google. Between July 1 and September 30 [2009], Google users found your Klimick Acupuncture business listing 4,807 times, and requested driving directions or other information about your business 312 times.

Now consider that we launched Klimick Acupuncture’s site the first week of July. To have that many viewers in just 90 days is amazing.

We believe Klimick’s success speaks to the process used to create the site: Two businesses that was engaged throughout the project, working in tandem to produce a site that not only had the look and feel of the budding Klimick brand, but also a site that contained the words and information that Klimick knew their prospects would be looking for.

And now for the sales line:
If you’re a business owner and your site is not working for you, maybe it’s time to talk with D&A Design.

Cheers!

Dinovite Featured in Cincinnati Business Courier

The Cincinnati Business Courier featured Dinovite on their web site and on their CET television show.

Check out the printed story here.

Or watch the story here.

Congrats to our friends at Dinovite! We love working on these brands and with these people.

Dinovite To Go!

 

This project brought together 2 projects we’ve been working on for Dinovite. The first project, which we’ll post about soon, was to a total brand refresher for the Dinovite brand family. That process allowed us to really take the brand family to a new level of consistency, and the updated packaging will be rolling out as is needed.

This project, however, allowed us to roll out 4 of the updated identities at once: Dinovite To Go single serving pouches! (click here to go to the store)

These bags are roughly the size of a vending machine bag of potato chips, and each bag contains a single serving of your pet’s favorite Dinovite supplement. These are great for traveling, or if you leave your pet with a sitter while you’re out of town.

More to come soon!

Prostitutes or Partners?

[  Preface:  These last few posts have been opinion-based content, so feel free to disagree or agree with what we write. It has been a goal since launching this blog to post opinion-based observations along with updates on what we're up to, so look for more of this in the future   ]

Yesterday I (Dan) visited a client to go over a few projects, and one of the projects involved a vendor/supplier that is creating the packaging structure that we have created branding for. Working with this vendor has been a challenge for both D&A Design and our client for several reasons.

At one point in the conversation my client said, “I am learning that these kind of vendors are prostitutes – they don’t want any kind of relationship.”

That statement baffled me because the success D&A Design enjoys is the result of the relationships we have with the people and businesses we serve.

The particular vendor we were talking about has three people whom my client and I interact with on a somewhat regular basis. Each time we have an interaction it is apparent that these three people don’t communicate with each other because they aren’t aware of information and decisions we have made with the other players in their organization. There is an enormous lack of curiosity within this organization; curiosity to learn more about the business they are serving – going beyond phone and email conversations.

Talking with some of my other clients I’ve learned that the prostitute illustration is more appropriate than I would ever have guessed in the macro economy we are in right now.

I know D&A Design is not perceived as a prostitute – our growth is 100% referral-based from clients – and we often find ourselves being a design source a business goes to after having a bad experience elsewhere.

Bottom line:  The economy is still in a state where market share is available for the savvy businesses that want it. Wanting it, however, is going to require more than phone and email – it’s going to take curiosity, exceeding expectations, and working smart. It might also require realizing where our prostitute-esque vulnerabilities are, and changing them so that our clients know we are their partner.

Give your dog some Nub’n…

Dinovite® has begun selling their new dog treat, NubOnubs™ – a tasty, healthy dog treat that dogs (and even some cats) will LOVE.

D&A Design has continued to work with Dinovite on core branded touch points, including new product brand identities. NubOnubs had a very fun vision from the start, and we worked hard to give it a playfulness that communicated the “Give Your Dog Some Nub’n” tag line, while still making it an obvious part of the Dinovite brand family of products.

We would be remiss if we didn’t include a link so you could buy some:  Get your nub on here.

This project also has an element that is worth mentioning because it show how something we create can then be passed on to other suppliers so they can do their part in helping the brand. Blue Robot in Cleveland is another Dinovite supplier, and they do fantastic Flash®-based web site. They have put together a site for NubOnubs that further communicates the brand experience.

Are Your Marketing Emails Worth Opening?

Today I had a “learnable moment” about email marketing, and thought I’d share because it speaks to D&A Design’s philosophy on this media (email).

I was hard at work when the email tone sounded, and after a few minutes I checked to see what the email tone was about.

It was an email sent by an organization I follow and have signed up to be part of their updates. I quickly opened it and was immediately ticked off that I had stopped work for that email.

The disappointment was due to:  A.)  it was a poorly written hard sales pitch from an organization I normally respect, and  B.) it was an all-text email with no engaging or interesting visuals whatsoever.

Point being, this organization is using their email marketing without thinking about who they’re talking to, and at what time the emails are being sent out.

Let’s face it – most of us are productive small business owners, managers, or contributors who like what we do, and we don’t want to be tapped on our e-shoulder for a hard sales pitch at 1:15 pm on a Thursday. Sales should be born out of relationships, not from poorly written, poorly executed, and poorly timed emails.

If the emails continue I will have my email address removed, and that is sad to think about because the emails are normally informative offerings of useful information that lead me to conclude I might need or want to purchase something from this company.

D&A Design believes that email marketing is part of a business’ conversation with the people they serve, and we learned this by experience.

Earlier in 2009 we experimented with one of the big providers of email marketing with our “Refresh & Engage” promotion. In the planning stages of that email campaign we really tried to figure out a way to sell, but not sell. The solution we arrived at was to start every email with information that hopefully was engaging. We surrounded the content with interesting visuals and used the formulas for best practices in email marketing that we have been trained to utilize.

After the information and need was established we offered a soft sell approach:  Here’s what we’re offering, get in touch if it sounds like something you need. We tried to keep the tone at a level where it wouldn’t be pushy or obnoxious. What’s more, every email we sent out had a different slant to it, with a different offer.

The results were far better than we expected – big ROI for what we put into it. Better than the ROI, though, was that we put to practice what our convictions told us was appropriate, and I am happy to say that since that campaign we have designed and launched about a dozen email campaigns for different clients.

This may border on the line of preachy, yet it is important to realize that the emails we send out are speaking about and on behalf of our brand – perhaps as much or more than our web site and stationery. Let’s be careful and thoughtful with email marketing, and respect the time of we’re sending to.

This sounds really familiar

We just read a fascinating post this morning over at Cincinnati’s Business Courier about Procter & Gamble’s “radical change-up” in an article called “In radical change-up, P&G streamlines how it promotes brands.“

Here’s a pull-quote that we found especially interesting:

The brand leader captains a team of people from the various firms and, in conjunction with P&G, they develop a brand message that can be implemented across the various media.

The line was interesting because it is exactly the thinking D&A Design has deployed for our clients from our beginning several years ago. Rather than become a niche design firm specializing in one particular media such as web, interactive, packaging or traditional print, we opted to take an approach that many of our peers did not think would work. We believed (and still believe to this day) that design is design, no matter the media. We simply design for the media we’re asked to design for, and then work with the best vendors when it comes to production.

A good example of this is our work with Dinovite. D&A Design works in tandem with Dinovite on all of their product brand identities. Once a brand identity is complete we then work on the consumer packaging for that brand, and the packaging can be anything from simple labels for rigid containers, squeeze tubes for liquid product, form-seal film for bags (think: vending machine potato chips bags), or some other structure in need of consistent branding. We work with the best vendor – printers, web coders/developers, packaging structural mfgs. – that produces each of these very different packaging needs.

Our work continues when the packaging is complete because the same brand consistency needs to be carried over to marketing. D&A Design works with Dinovite’s web vendors to create supporting graphics for sales and promotions. We create branded graphics that are used for broadcast email campaigns, as well as the occasional sell sheet. We create the branded graphics that are used to literally sell the products on the e-commerce web site. In some cases we even create the branded materials needed for events such as trade show booth graphics and apparel. All of this work is done in tandem with the very best vendors, allowing designers to be really good at design, and vendors to be really good at production. The biggest benefit, however, is consistency and cost efficiency. Just as the article pointed out, in the past businesses like P&G – and even much smaller businesses – outsourced their web site to a firm that only did web work; their packaging to a packaging firm; print work to a print firm. D&A Design saw the inefficiency of working this way when we formed our business model, and the benefits our clients continue to enjoy (and talk about!) is our measure for how well this philosophy is working. In short: So far, so good.

Point is, P&G’s new, “radical” approach is the approach D&A Design has found success for our clients. We certainly didn’t invent this process, but out of all the different ways to handle design and banding work, we find that the businesses we serve simply want one design source that can handle their design and branding needs. D&A Design is certainly not a trend-setter, but it is nice to read that the world’s largest consumer goods maker has arrived at the same conclusions we have.