Monday, October 20, 2014

Selling to Customers - Use Visuals !

Picture courtesy of www.pamorama.net/
Although posted some months ago,  's post on "Are You Using Visuals to Communicate to Your Customers?" is still very relevant.

Too often companies tend to fill up their presentations and collateral with too many words. In this world where time is so precious and "time is money", who has time to read and assimilate the abundess information one tries to convey ?
The best way to teach one about your products, solutions and services and make an impact with the audience is by using visuals.

Some more tips for building eye-catching presentations:
  • Regardless of the quantity of slides you use, don’t be afraid to leave white space (leaving areas without text or images on your page). Crowding lots of information in little room you have may cause your audience visual overload. A presentation which is too crowded with information loses its impact and runs the risk to daunt viewers. Instead, take advantage of white space by showing for example only a single slide of a pie chart or use it as a means to highlight information; leave a headline with lots of white space around it, and it will catch the viewer’s attention immediately.
  • Also take into consideration the color schemes you use, whether they are used as background color or font color. Companies should create and use branding guidelines, in order to strengthen the company brand. A good way of doing that is by creating easy-to-use  templates with build-in slide layouts accompanied by icons and pictures.
Good luck !

Monday, March 24, 2014

Child-Targeted Marketing Isn't A Kid's Game

Image courtesy of
Every year 100s of billions of dollars are spent by advertisers on inspiring, persuading and manipulating people into a consumer routine which has desolating effects on the environment through its indulgence and improvidence. Advertisers play on our insecurities, create deceitful needs and offer fake solutions. They succeed in raising a certain level of dissatisfaction which directs into consumption and kids especially are defenseless to this sort of manipulation.

To marketers children represent a solid demographic as they are huge customers or potential ones; they influence their parents' buying decisions, spend money themselves as teenagers and will continue to do so as they become adult consumers.

As opposed to preceding generations, young children have more autonomy and a decision-making power within the family which can clearly be observed in a family's purchasing patterns. They uses to  influence which sweets and toys to buy, but these days it goes far beyond that;
they show their preference when buying cereals and other standard groceries, clothing, software and computer products, family entertainment, restaurants and family trip locations and even cars.

Consequently, children's "influence" is recognized by advertisers who nurture this situation and "use" kids as their marketing target.  Nowadays parents are prepared to buy more for their kids as they might have dual incomes and more disposable income in addition to guilt which can play a role as well;  time-stressed parents make up by purchasing material items for time spent with their offspring.

One of the strategies marketers use to target children is by relying on the kid to pester the parents to buy the product, rather than going straight to the parents. The "pester power" marketing strategy creates exactly what advertisers are after as parents easily give in into their children's persistence nagging; it is extremely powerful and works.

Building brand name loyalty
Large enterprises such as Nike, Adidas, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, to name a few, discovered that brand recognition can be established already in very young children and purposefully changed their primary corporate efforts from making products to creating a brand name image.

Brand recognition fundamentals are created by marketers in very young children, in the hopes that lifetime bonding with the brand is established, from the cradle to the grave.
Brand loyalties can be established as early as age 2, and by the age of 3 or 4, before they can even read, usually distinguish brands and status items

Image courtesy of
The Internet
Unquestionably this is an extremely desirable medium for child-targeted marketing by marketers.

Kids surfing the internet doesn't go without dangers and unethical advertising; often without parental supervision, children spend hours on unregulated sites and sophisticated technologies enable companies to easily collect information from the children for marketing research, and to target them with personalized advertising.

In my opinion this is unethical as kids do not quite comprehend the commercial and persuasive intent as well as the manipulation behind advertisements until they are 8 or 9 years old.

It is for these reasons that child-targeted marketing should be sensibly restricted, particularly the ones aimed at children under 9 years old. And this should include censored internet sites, television programs, and advertisements.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Hard-Core Marketing – Israel's Coffee And Alcohol Revolution



Image courtesy of www.businessinsider.com


Cofix, perhaps one of Israel's most ambitious and certainly most recent coffee-to-go chains, announced to open Cofix Bar nearly 5 months after having launched its first branch in October 2013.

Cofix's unique concept of selling all of their products for 5 NIS only (approximately  1) is intended to compete against convenience stores, coffee chains and bars where one can enjoy a warm, healthy or alcoholic drink, snack and sandwich for a most reasonable price.
Naturally the opening of Cofix caused an upheaval in the market as it hit hard on its competitors such as Aroma who quickly lowered the prices "as gesture" of some of their products.
Having done so, in most cases the competitors still offer their products for twice as much, in the best case…..

To read the entire article, please click here


Image courtesy of http://jewishbusinessnews.com