Working to Help the Hungry

Good day everybody! Welcome to another post from the WIN Firm brought to you by me, Chris Teague. Today's post is especially important for us at the WIN Firm! We are taking time out to recognize the importance of helping those that are less fortunate than us. I want to tell you a story about one of our clients, Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee and partner, Feeding America. This story is not about our firm today; rather, it is about our client doing an AMAZING job helping hungry residents in our Northeast Tennessee community and the country as well. We at the WIN Firm would like to introduce you to Roger's Story.

Roger, a child that lives in Bristol, TN, participates in Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee's Food for Kids program through the Bristol City Schools. Roger’s mother was laid-off from her job and faced some challenging situations that included the difficult choice many parents in our region and country must make, whether to pay for utilities or food. Roger’s mother chose to provide food for her son and pay for the utilities to the best of her abilities, but soon found herself behind in paying the bills. As money decreased, Roger’s mother was forced to leave the apartment she lived in and move into a tent. Roger’s only shelter at night came from a nylon piece of fabric and the only food he ate was for lunch at school. Roger’s situation was discovered by his school and action was taken to enroll him into Food for Kids. Thanks to Second Harvest and Feeding America, Roger was able to immediately receive food from Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee to take home, so that his mother would not have to make the choice between feeding Roger and using her limited income to find housing for her family. Roger’s story is unique, but many children in our region and America suffer from malnutrition because of their impoverished living conditions.

Please take a moment to support the hungry. We at the WIN Firm make sure our work goes to raise awareness for issues that touch our lives. You too can help be the voice for our country's hungry, impoverished residents. We at the WIN Firm invite you to go to www.hungeractioncenter.org, sign up to be a voice for hunger support, and help feed the less fortunate people around you. As a perk, there is a contest that helps your local food bank. When you take action on hungeractioncenter.org, minutes are logged for your work and counted. The food banks that accumulate the most minutes by the end of September win a free tractor trailer load of food for their community. Please help us!

Blessings,
Chris Teague
V.P.
WIN Firm
"We create ideas that WIN."

Going Beyond Your TV

It's Friday! Today is great for us at the WIN Firm because we have the opportunity to share another marketing tool we have been using to much success. Today's post is going to be short, but ENGAGING!

Have you been in restrooms where there are advertisements posted on TV's or above bathroom stalls? Did you pay attention to these advertisements? For me personally, I was just in a restroom today and can't even remember the ads I saw! However, this doesn't mean that others forget them. I am not quite sure either what the advertising company pitches when it comes to ROI and traffic. I think it may go something like: "There are 500 people eating at this fine establishment every weekend, which means you have the opportunity to reach 500 people as they take a..." I'm sorry, but this pitch wouldn't fly for our clients.

Marketers and advertisers especially, do there best job to reach us. With the realization that YouTube is more powerful than TV, more and more marketers are utilizing their media budgets online and seeking to find consumers wherever we go, including the bathroom. To break free from the madness, I have developed various tools to get in YOUR face that I would like to share. I call these tools: When TV Blows, Try This!

Instead of posting advertisements for a company in bathrooms, we put stickers with taglines right on the urinals in men's stalls for a boating company. Guess what! It worked too! You see, men like boating and the whole water thing goes well when you're in the restroom. One thing we did was make sure that you saw the tagline and created a call to action that simply read: "We dare you to tell someone that I was caught thinking about boating in the bathroom TM." This call to action prompted men to be bold and worked well when the company promoted its tagline asking: "Where do you think about boating TM?" We went beyond your tv and caught you in the bathroom with a simple, yet effective strategy.

I hope that this "SECRET" strategy helps you think of being more creative than the TV permits you to be. Remember, people are watching less TV these days despite the Nielsen Ratings. Please, please, please! Don't trust the box!! I hope you have enjoyed WIN's session on: When TV Blows, Try THIS!

Blessings,
Chris Teague
V.P. Marketing
WIN Firm

Product Integration Part 2

Good Friday everyone! I wish all of those following WIN's work a wonderful Easter. Today has been an incredible day for us at WIN. We are all taking time to be with family, but we do have one brief conference call today before all work is finished for the weekend. Since our call is in about 10 minutes, this blog update will be brief, but complete. 

Let me start off by thanking our local business community, especially the World Trade Center and Regional Alliance of northeast Tennessee. For those of you new to our firm, our main office of operation is in Johnson City, TN, but we have production offices in Philadelphia, San Diego, Atlanta, Nashville and Chattanooga. Our strategy team actually transplanted here in northeast Tennessee from all over the country and world and are proud to live here! Okay, enough said about where we live; you came to see what we have been up to since Wednesday. 

Phase I continued:

We have received a lot of feedback for boxing/package designs for the shoes and will be exploring some of those in more detail than we have presently. We would like to thank Andrew Darlington from Heritage Insurance Group, Javier Soriano (independent) and J.R. Augustene (independent) for their input. 

We currently are working on developing the Keep Brazil Beautiful Campaign that consists of creating a way for consumers of our shoes to actually see where their money is going. People no longer trust a company being "green" merely because the company says they are. Therefore, we are developing a relationship with folks in Brazil to create a fund that supports the Rain Forest. 

To show you where your money is going, we are going to have funds sent every month from the shoe sales directly to the Keep Brazil Beautiful fund. As stated before, we are donating $15 from every sale to preserve the Rain Forest, but we want you to know where the money is going. We are developing a page on our site that posts all the names of people who purchased the shoes during a month and updates them on the campaign's growth. 

We will tally up all of the funds at the month's end and send the money over to Brazil. Each person who bought the shoes will receive a certificate of purchase and donation to the fund. We will authenticate the purchase even further by a check donation covered by U.S. and Brazilian media, so you will see your money going where we say it is going. 

This is all I have for you today due to my time constraints. Please check us out on Wednesday for more updates. As always, please comment if you have any suggestions. 

Happy Easter and Bless You! 

Chris Teague

V.P. Marketing

WIN Firm