BlueBlitz, a company focused on mobile marketing solutions has introduced a technology boasting a high ROI for investors. Using its MagicBeamer device, B&M stores looking to reach out to customers walking by or within their doors now have a simple, low cost solution.

An individual like myself could be walking around the mall with my Motorola Razr and receive information about a promotion running at the nearby sunglass kiosk, simply because I am holding a Bluetooth enablee cellular device and within 400 feet of their hub. Businesses are able to transmit anything from images to sounds to java apps to users willing to accept the connection all for a low-cost investment.

Imagine this. You are walking into the food court at the local mall and you are unsure which of the fine dining establishments you wish to eat at. Well, it turns out Hot Dog on a Stick has this device from BlueBlitz. HDOS beams you over a coupon for their promotion they are running featuring a free lemonade with the purchase of a steamy stabbed dog. You decide to walk over, show them the image on your cell phone or PDA screen and voila, you receive your free tasty beverage along with your meal.

Is this invasive to the device holder (you)? My opinion is no. Afterall, you can decline to receive the promotion, which doesn’t cost you a thing to receive in the first place. You can even disable Bluetooth on most or all devices. I, personally, can really see the benefit of features like this as a consumer. But then again, I’m also the kind of guy that likes to look at sales fliers to see what the hottest deals are. I feel it’s a great way for businesses to come into contact with and inform their prospective customers.

Read BlueBlitz’s FAQ about their product here. [PDF Format]

I think Citi has hit the nail on the head. When I pick up the phone to contact a company’s 1-800 number for a little product support, the last thing I want to do is race through the telecom maze of pressing 1 for English, 4 for existing customers…. If the Internet has proven one thing–it’s that we humans, as a race, have a strong lack of patience and an ever increasing love for speed. We want to get that knowledge at a lightning speed.

What Citi’s new ad campaign points out, is they want to save you the hassle. You want to call our number to inquire about financial services? Great! We’ll be here to talk. The bull has been cut.

Home Run.

I am curious to see if I can get a little input from people. After looking around at some reports and popular ecommerce sites, I am trying to get a consensus on the most effective color to use when listing the price of a product online.

Overstock.com uses RED… which I feel naturally is probably not the best representation as us Americans are trained to stop on red? I would be curious to know what Bryan Eisenberg’s opinion on that color is, since he has advised Overstock.com on their conversion rates. My only guess would be that Overstock strives to differentiate themselves from other online retailers by showing their price vs. the competitors who normally carry the product?

Amazon uses a dark red…

I would assume that Green is a good color for price because green means go?

Any ideas?

Of all the things an individual can observe in this world, I think evolution has to be of the most enjoyable. The manner in which strategies and tactics progress through history’s timeline can tell you a lot about marketing in a Darwin-esque way.

What has worked. What hasn’t. What manners of marketing have stood the test of time and which ones have died off. Is gimmick a four-letter word? These are the types of things we should find ourselves questioning when embarking on a venture to influence sales and identification of a brand or product.

What I’m leading up to is my observation of branding through a presentation in which most people have repetitively been exposed but subconciously disregard as a marketing attempt. Yes, the silver ball. [cue The Who's Tommy]

In the glory days of video arcades, you could in most American cities find a basement to walk into filled with bells, whistles, and candy bars. These teenage havens were filled with a sense of youth, entertainment, and even a little competition at times. The dripping of pubescent sweat to achieve the high score in Galaga was not the only competition at hand in these joints however. There was something going on beneath the surface.

Kiss. Star Wars. Robocop. Major entertainment conglomerates. All invested into the exposure each brand could achieve by sitting in a video arcade. The target was right. All the teenagers were looking for ways to rid their pockets of that burning sensation seemingly caused by their allowance. What better way for the latest Batman flick to get their movie on the forefront of their target demographic’s minds than to create a heated battle of Batman Pinball. The strategy is seemingly all too obvious, but effective. Today’s marketers are taking notes.

Fast forward to the year 2006. Here we are, video arcades obselete. With the influx of home video games systems and popularity of computer games, the arcades of yesteryear are all but a dead breed. The strategies put into effect, however, by Data East and Sega on the pinball table are now being found all too common in branding efforts in cyberspace. When larger companies launch a new campaign or product, with a parallel correlation of emphasis on movies and such, Flash and Shockwave programmers take to the keyboard to implement a new interactive, online game of simplistic nature that web surfers can “monkey” around with for a little while to create excitement and buzz about the latest in the commercial world.

It’s really interesting and exciting how well channels have adjusted for the changes in technological innovation. The right target used to spend their time with friends at the arcade, popping quarters. Today’s generation, same age group, spend as much time (if not more) sitting at their computer “surfing the net” with friends on instant messenger. The strategy, the same, has adjusted for where to gain that exposure. These silver ball branding efforts taken online have so much more outreach than the traditional counterpart.

So we will define silver ball branding as such:

Silver Ball Branding: The marketing strategy originally implemented largely by Entertainment firms in the golden age of video arcades (pinball especially) to generate branding efforts targeted at an adolescent age group. Games were created with the theme of latest films and bands to generate buzz and excitement about upcoming products. This strategy is largely used by the same companies today in different channels of home video games but the main transferal of the strategy is to the Internet, in which quick and simple games programmed in Flash or Shockwave accomplish the same feat of pinball machines of yesterday.

I am currently in the mid and late stages of development in dealing with a couple of E-Commerce projects. These projects are clients whom are looking to take their product to the Internet for increased exposure and to gain more sales. With everything that goes into these projects, from branding to programming, the creative end of things is indeed very important.

I just recently read a case study put together by a Michigan State University graduate student, in which they studied the differences of colors that were used by brick and mortar retailers and compared those color schemes with those of their online counterpart. It was indeed very interesting and I intend on in the future possibly conducting a mini-research project myself looking into this subject matter.

Read the previous study here. [In PDF format]

In running a marketing firm that specializes in establishing an organization’s identity on the internet, branding is on the forefront of my brain everytime I enter the role of project manager. When you own a business, your name and all the mental and physical images that individuals associate with your name are your bread and butter.

In the past, clients have contacted me when they are embarking on a “re-branding” adventure. They are interested in completely morphing their corporate identity. Maybe they feel that they have been lack-luster in their presentation of their company. Maybe they feel that as the company is growing, the strength of their identity through logos and so forth should be on an incline as well. In communication science, a tactic of intuitive public relations crisis management is rebranding.

What happens when rebranding to improve business prosperity leads to a proverbial tidal wave of negative press? What happens when you feel your company took the steps to build the typhoon shelters to avoid such a disaster? Your team took the precautions to cover first, second, and third base, but the mud-slinging made its way home with an unimaginable home run…

Quark, one of the leaders in creative communication design for businesses, has found its way into the mud pit.

By revitalizing the distinctiveness of the company, the higher-ups at Quark felt they could represent the company’s growth and rebirth. With a competitive market of desktop publishing applications moving in on the turf once soundly held by Quark, this move toward a new identity appeared to be a great idea and way to capture a new audience.

The results, however, weren’t as exalted as the design firm behind the company’s new logo, SicolaMartin, would have hoped.

As iterated in Gene Gable’s article, Sometimes a Logo Is Just a Logo. there are a number of ways to head off a debacle like the one Quark’s PR team is faced with currently. And just like in this case, sometimes researching a new identity against withstanding trademarks isn’t going to dig up all the dirt.

Before coming upon the part of Gable’s article in which he gives great insight on how to avoid a branding issue like this, I had a number of ideas floating in my head that would make for good criteria / rules in developing a new identity or rebranding. One thing I kept thinking aloud was… aren’t the days of a simple letter, one letter only, to represent your company over? There are only 26 letters in the alphabet and I guarantee that there are more than a handful of identities out there utilizing that one letter. I understand there are a million and one ways to morph or represent a letter, add specific colors or shapes within the lines, but the saturation of the idea as an identity is quite high.

I recommend reading Gable’s article, Sometimes a Logo Is Just a Logo, whether you work in a design firm or run your own business. He does a great job of explaining that these things do happen, but there are ways to avoid them, and really just what does it mean if you invest in a new identity, only to find out that it is one already established in a different arena.

An interesting and well-written blog entry outlining the decision making process behind which MP3 player to purchase (in a very competitive market).

Oh, I bought it at www.zipzoomfly.com for $129.99. That website is great. Free 2 day shipping…and low prices. No sales tax!

Interesting the things that consumers look for in online merchants!

Are the Yellow Pages turning green? And no, I don’t mean green from the amount of money that comes into their hands every month as business’ look to advertise their products in the grand-daddy of all print directories. I mean green in the regards that they are not feeling quite so healthy right now. Kind of the same feeling you get when that new Burger King Chicken Bacon Ranch w/ Onion Rings looked really good when you first ordered it, but then you regretted the decision for the next three hours of your life.

When meeting with clients, who are trying to break free of the grips that traditional marketing practices have placed on their strategies, I find it necessary to use stories and examples to establish the importance of having a sound internet marketing plan. While there are so many directions a business can take in their internet marketing–online advertising investments, establishing calls to actions (looking to convert on-line or off-line), implementing a strong keyword campaign–the simple fact as an individual educating others about the power of online marketing is this–it works!

One of my favorite stories, written in an article by Fredrick Marckini, illustrates the ROI (return on investment) differentiations that can be successfully accomplished in the online world [versus the print counterparts]. This story is geared toward local search marketing.

My dad now spends about $130 per month. That’s it. The campaign runs on Google’s and Yahoo!’s local search products. It’s limited as closely as possible to searchers within Massachusetts Zip Codes or queries that include a local town’s name. The campaign’s average CPC is around $0.65 and generates about 200 clicks a month. The CTR is solid for a search ad campaign at 5 to 6 percent.

Local Search: Convert and Win

Seems that the family of business communication is taking an interesting turn according to Michelle Conlin in this article entitled E-mail Is So Five Minutes Ago. This article, featured in Business Weekly, makes some excellent points about the downfalls of email as a collaborative communication medium in a corporate environment. Conlin exclaims that Wikis and Blogs are becoming the new way for teams to practice an “open disclosure” protocol advised by Ivy League business schools. Excellent article filled with a lot of great points.

Personal Anecdote Tangent
One section of the article I found to be of most interest to me concerning a recent event, is that reference to instant messenger in the office place.

That’s what Darren Lennard is beginning to grasp at Dresdner. Instead of chatting via e-mail, Lennard now uses the bank’s own version of Instant Messenger.

Upon an office visit to a large business here in the Lansing, Michigan area, I asked the receptionist to speak to the owner of the company. The receptionist sat at her computer, typing away, nodding her head that she would see if he was in at the moment. A number of minutes passed, and she still sat in her seat. I figured that she was just being rude, but as I was being patient, I said nothing. Eventually (probably five minutes later) my patience began to wear really thin, wondering if she would ever see if I could have my appointment. Then she finally provided a response to me that the owner was currently not in. At first, I was a little upset with the receptionist, figuring her for blowing me off and not acting as a friendly face of the company. But then it dawned on me that she had been sitting there conversing with members of her office, finding out if that individual was around.

Now that is one efficient way to handle an office environment. Instant messenger.

Everytime we go grocery shopping, we’re faced with a tough decision. Buy the name brand, or save 30 cents and get the off-brand. Tonight I had a craving for some pizza rolls. Conveniently I was at Meijer (an overpriced version of Wal-Mart found here in the Midwest), so buying some wasn’t a difficult task. However, in going to the frozen food section of the store, I was faced with the common decision. Totino’s or Meijer brand. After my friend stood there calculating price / oz. for a few seconds in his head, we decided to give the Meijer brand a shot (they were on sale of couse). To the check out. To the oven.

Believe it or not the Meijer brand were actually really good. In fact, I want to say-for the record-that they were actually better than the more expensive name-brand competitor. Now let me beg the question. What edge does Totino’s have over my pizza roll purchases in the future? If I have become to trust Meijer as much as the great Italian cuisine of Totino/Jeno, why should I pay more? What happens to a name brand company when they are being undercut by generic-ism, generic-ism that is, in fact, meeting their quality of product? May seem like a silly point to make, but you can see why this could be an important subject to Betty Crocker.