Coca-Karla: Lagerfeld Dresses Coca-Cola (via brandchannel)

Coca-Karla: Lagerfeld Dresses Coca-Cola (via brandchannel)

From Seth Godin's blog- posted on 7th April 2010

Secrets of the biggest selling launch ever

Apple reports that on the first day they sold more than $150,000,000 worth of iPads. I can't think of a product or movie or any other launch that has ever come close to generating that much direct revenue.

Are their tactics reserved for giant consumer fads? I don't think so. In fact, they work even better for smaller gigs and more focused markets.

1. Earn a permission asset. Over 25 years, Apple has earned the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to their tribe. They can get the word out about a new product without a lot of money because one by one, they've signed people up. They didn't sell 300,000 iPads in one day, they sold them over a few decades.
2. Don't try to please everyone. There are countless people who don't want one, haven't heard of one or actively hate it. So what? (Please don't gloss over this one just because it's short. In fact, it's the biggest challenge on this list).
3. Make a product worth talking about. Sounds obvious. If it's so obvious, then why don't the other big companies ship stuff like this? Most of them are paralyzed going to meetings where they sand off the rough edges.
4. Make it easy for people to talk about you. Steve doesn't have a blog. He doesn't tweet and you can't friend him on Facebook. That's okay. The tribe loves to talk, and the iPad gave them something to talk about.
5. Build a platform for others to play in. Not just your users, but for people who want to reach your users.
6. Create a culture of wonder. Microsoft certainly has the engineers, the developers and the money to launch this. So why did they do the Zune instead? Because they never did the hard cultural work of creating the internal expectation that shipping products like this is possible and important.
7. Be willing to fail. Bold bets succeed--and sometimes they don't. Is that okay with you? Launching the iPad had to be even more frightening than launching a book...
8. Give the tribe a badge. The cool thing about marketing the iPad is that it's a visible symbol, a uniform. If you have one in the office on Monday, you were announcing your membership. And if it says, "sent from my iPad" on the bottom of your emails...
9. Don't give up so easy. Apple clearly a faced a technical dip in creating this product... they worked on it for more than a dozen years. Most people would have given up long ago.
10. Don't worry so much about conventional wisdom. The iPad is a closed system (not like the web) because so many Apple users like closed systems.

And the one thing I'd caution you about:

1. Don't worry so much about having a big launch day. It looks good in the newspaper, but almost every successful brand or product (Nike, JetBlue, Starbucks, IBM...) didn't start that way.

A few things that will make it work even better going forward:

1. Create a product that works better when your friends have one too.Some things (like a Costco membership or even email) fit into that category, because if more people join, the prices will go down or access will go up. Others (like the unlisted number to a great hot restaurant) don't.
2. Make it cheap enough or powerful enough that organizations buy a lot at a time. To give away. To use as a tool.
3. Change the home screen so I can see more than twenty apps at a time (sorry, that was just me.)

As promised, the folks at Vook made their deadline and were ready on launch day. It's early days, but it's pretty clear to me that the way authors with ideas will share them is going to change pretty radically, just as the iPad demonstrates that the way people interact with the web is going to keep changing as well.

From Seth Godin's blog- posted on 8th April 2010

The Levy flight

Clay Shirky taught me this very cool mathematical concept that shows up in nature, and now in marketing and social media.

An animal that forages will hang out in a small area, looking for nuts or berries, then will realize it has used up all the likely sources in this spot. It will then head off in a random direction, walk many paces, and start foraging again. When you plot the Levy flight, it looks like this:

Someone discovers your site. They poke and prod and join and return and return again. Then they feel as though there's no more benefit and they move on, surfing until they find another place to forage.

Someone finds your restaurant. They love it. They return with friends. They hang out and become regulars for a while. Then they get bored and start browsing again.

Adding the Levy flight to your understanding is a much more nuanced representation of consumer behavior than solely thinking about the ideas of brand loyalty or random web surfing.

From Seth Godin's blog- posted on 13th April 2010

Have you thought about your margin?

Gross margin is an often confused concept but a powerful tool in figuring out how to market your business (and decide what to make, who to hire and how to fund it). Few people understand it, while others use a definition I don't find very useful.

I like to think of margin as the money left over after you've paid the direct costs for making an item, the last one of the day.

If you run a pizza place and a large pie costs $10, your gross margin is $10 minus the cost of flour, water, yeast, tomatoes and cheese. And maybe salt. That's it.

If you're not operating at capacity, the key word here is margin. The marginal profit of one more pizza is high. You've already paid for the rent, the oven, the sign, the ad in the Yellow Pages, the hourly wage, the uniforms, all of it. Whether you sell that last pizza of the day or not, all those costs are fixed. So, if your ingredients cost $2, your gross margin is $8.

This is vital to understand, because it tells you how flexible you can be with a promotional strategy. Some people (like me) prefer businesses with high gross margins, even if we're less busy. Others make billions on companies that run on the tiniest of margins.

If someone offers to run a coupon in the Welcome Wagon envelope that goes to new residents, and the rules are, "one per customer, new customers only", and the coupon offers a large pizza for $2, is it worth it for you to run it? That's 80% off! Surely, this is too expensive. You can't afford 80% off.

On the margin, of course you can. You got a new customer for free. Unless your store is at capacity, with people waiting in line, one more pizza sold at cost is a great way to build your business (unless there are too many coupons and unless it changes your positioning as a high-end place, but that's a story for a different day).

You probably already guessed this part: for digital goods, the gross margin is 100%. Cell phone calls? The same.

One more customer costs you nothing. That doesn't mean you should price accordingly, but it surely means you should understand how high your margins are.

Our BUSINESS CARD with our BRAND LOGO

We also designed the POP-UP BOOK to be kept in the concept store along with each user-interface screen to make the selection for the customers an easier process.

I was reading this book- The World of Fashion(Third Edition) by Jay and Ellen Diamond and I found something on press releases and press kits:


PRESS RELEASES- Most companies use press releases to communicate with the media about interesting fashion activities. The standard format is letter- sized paper bearing the company's logo, name, address, telephone and fax numbers, and the contact person for additional information.

PRESS KITS- The major publicity tool a designer, manufacturer, retailer, or trade association use is the press or media kit. Press kits are used to entice media coverage and alert the potential market to a special event or happening.
To attract the press to an opening of a designer's collections, in-house publicists or public relations specialists develop press kits and coordinate the activities that are necessary for its production. Retailers use press kits to announce the opening of a new department or a new branch store, introduce a philosphical change in the company's direction, or publicize a special event or celebration.

WEBSITE PAGES

www.denimyourself.com

For our marketing materials presentation, we had to prepare the following:


- Business name and identity reflecting company brand positioning
DENIM YOURSELF logo design (Colour theme, image) Keywords brain storming


- Website format/social media page
Colour & Layout Keywords brain storming


- Stationery, including business card
Design business card, invitation card, event pop-up book, brochure, and catalogue


- PowerPoint presentation format
What makes us unique? -> Invent creative presentation method (video, music, graphic images, interviews. etc...)

- Press release
Fashion show, Exhibition, Fashion fair (pure London...etc)

We designed a lot of logos for our brand DenimYourself.

We mixed our logos and came up with this final logo which will be used for all our marketing materials in the future.