Keeping Marketing Simple

Good evening! It is evening for us in Tennessee, and I wanted to post a short blog on some excellent marketing strategies I witnessed over the weekend. The best part about these strategies is that they were all simple! There were no flashy creatives or trendy web 2.0 gimmicks involved. This was just plain, simple and beautiful marketing at its core. It was brilliant!

First off, I ate at a restaurant that had the best call to action I have seen lately. In fact, its tag line was the call to action. I had the privilege of returning to my home city of Chattanooga, TN this weekend for a music festival, Riverbend. While in Chattanooga, I went with my sister to have some brunch at the Blue Plate Special downtown. When I first walked into the restaurant, I read "EAT HERE NOW" in all capital letters. The letters were very big and caught your eye immediately. What a great tag line! Seriously, it was great because it was so simple, yet powerful. There was no talk about how long the restaurant had been making tasty food (it was very tasty!) or anything like that at all. I thought of asking to speak with the owner to discuss his or her strategy, but decided I would just let it be (maybe next time). I am not sure how well sales are going, but I know the place was busy!

Next, at the festival there were all sorts of people handing out free samples of new products, but the the unique thing that caught my eye was a fan. There were several colleges present at vendor booths during Riverbend, but two made it a point to interact with the crowd. The local university, University of Tennessee Chattanooga, and a local private school, Covenant College, both were in full force passing out fans for those seeking to cool off. However, Covenant College was ready to take their fan giving a step further and completely out marketed their counterparts at UTC. Covenant's foot marketers not only handed out fans, but told us to look at the fan and go to their web-site to win a free MAC. I know that this strategy is nothing spectacular, but it was simple and worked! Covenant created a special URL specifically to measure its impact at Riverbend. Again, simple and sweet!

What's the point of this post. The point is that we as marketers tend to overlook the simple things of marketing like merely adding a call to action with whatever we are promoting. Just take a look at the top creative ad campaigns today and tell me what they are asking us to do. Are they saying "EAT HERE?" Some do, some do not. We as human beings need to be guided. We desire some sort of direction. Direction that is simple and easy to follow. Therefore, to end my post I am going to leave you with a call to action: Come back tomorrow to read about how Keep Brazil Beautiful is progressing.

Blessings,
Chris Teague
V.P. Marketing
WIN Firm