When the Media is the Marketing Message

Marketing handouts and promotional gimmes exhibit the Pilot’s visual branding, which relies on fashionable colors and bold design.

How does a news medium market itself? That’s the question The Penobscot Bay Pilot faced before it launched in September, becoming the Midcoast’s newest news source and advertising venue.

Almost any other type of company would send news releases to the local media, and run a few ads saying “We’re here!” In addition, those ads might promote a “Grand Opening Special!!!” (can’t forget the exclamation points!) to get people through the door and overcome the natural resistance among potential customers or clients to changing suppliers.

But that approach obviously wouldn’t work for the Pilot: sending news releases to the VillageSoup newspapers would be an explicit acknowledgment of their importance as a news medium in the region, and it’s questionable whether the Soup would run the news in any case. And it would be a bitter pill indeed to purchase ads from a direct competitor for local advertising dollars.

Instead, the Pilot based its launch strategy on a combination of distinctive branding, social media marketing, and personal contacts. Sales Directors Terri Mahoney and Janis Bunting say that they didn’t solicit advertising until the day the site went live. As soon as they had something to show potential advertisers, however, Mahoney and Bunting began an aggressive push, targeting 20 organizations with whom they had done business in their previous roles selling ads for Village NetMedia, the former owner of the VillageSoup brand. “Just getting out and meeting people face to face and showing them what we have available” has been one of the new company’s most productive marketing strategies, says Mahoney.

By offering free trials of the Pilot‘s Affiliate program to those former clients, they overcame initial resistance and had all 20 come on board. This leant the site credibility and in turn encouraged other advertisers. (Many of the original 20 organizations have been successfully transitioned into paid Affiliate status.)

Online marketing has taken off in several complementary, directions. Of course the Pilot maintains a Facebook page (current “likes,” about 3,600), and has a Facebook “Main Street” page for its advertisers “designed to make it fun, easy and rewarding to put your money where you live,” according to Mahoney.  They’re also active on Twitter, and their Pinterest account has followers who appreciate the separation of content into various pin boards for news, sports, recipes, etc. The most popular board is Contests, Giveaways and Free.

Perhaps the most strategic element of the Pilot‘s social media program is to make the site itself a social medium. Readers are invited to submit stories and upload their own photos. With the website’s tight integration of all common social media platforms, readers can then easily forward their own photos to friends and acquaintances and share them on their own Facebook walls. This goes beyond simple reader engagement and helps create emotional investment in the medium. Reader uploading took off in a big way during the recent winter storm that was named for a cartoon fish (Sorry, Weather Channel, but we’re not on board with you branding public weather events.), and it got another boost a day or two later during the National Toboggan Championships.

Photo uploads are further encouraged by the QR code on a giveaway tote bag, and by another, more unusual gimme: an “egrip.” These are little imprintable rubber pads that you stick on the back of your mobile phone to prevent it from sliding around on your car’s dashboard. The Pilot‘s version is imprinted with the message “See Something? Shoot it/Share it” with an upload address.

Branding, too, played an important role in the launch. Working closely with Adventure Advertising, the Pilot developed a striking visual identity that relies on large blocks of contrasting, contemporary fashion colors, lots of “white space” (which isn’t white), and unusual but not inconvenient organization of content. Business cards and rack cards were printed in non-standard sizes which, while distinctive, may involve some functionality tradeoffs (for example, the square business cards don’t fit in a wallet). But aggressive face-to-face efforts by Mahoney and Bunting have been successful in getting the 7″X7″ rack cards placed in many stores, restaurants, cafés and even libraries, even though they don’t fit in a typical literature-rack pocket.

The Pilot’s graphic-wrapped car is a can’t-miss-it moving billboard

Whether seen individually (each staff member has a different color business card) or together (as on a car wrap), the designs and colors are eye-catching and memorable. “Adventure Advertising was extremely helpful,” says Mahoney. “They were instrumental in a lot of our creative concepts and were a great organization to work with.” And the sales directors have some attractive, high-value goodies at their disposal, including color-coordinated travel mugs, tote bags, and a logo-inscribed yellow rubber “cause bracelet” that conceals a USB drive. (Disclaimer: this blogger received all of these goodies, and they are awesomely cool.)

The Pilot still faces better-established competitors, most notably, the VillageSoup newspapers and website, and their cousin publication The Free Press. But the Pilot‘s innovative marketing efforts and its proposition of free news for all readers look to be a combination for success for this new local medium.

The Pilot: New Ad Game in Town

The Pilot’s crew (clockwise from left): Lynda Clancy, Editorial Director; Ethan Andrews, Writer; Kay Stevens, Writer; Terri Mahoney, Sales Director; Janis Bunting, Sales Director; Holly Edwards, Editorial Director; Ron Hawkes, Writer

The past year has been a roller coaster for Midcoast advertisers and news consumers. At the beginning of 2012, there was a single entity – Village NetMedia –publishing newspapers and news websites for Knox and Waldo counties under the VillageSoup brand. Village NetMedia folded abruptly in March, leaving the region without a local news source, but the company’s news assets were swiftly acquired by a new owner and resumed publication after a gap of about three weeks. Then in September, former Village NetMedia employees launched a new competitor, the Penobscot Bay Pilot. From one news source, to zero, to two, all in a half a year. (Read more on the demise of Village NetMedia and the rebirth of the VillageSoup brand.)

The most obvious difference between the two competitors is format: the Pilot is strictly web-based, while Courier Publications (i.e., the VillageSoup group) publishes both news websites and traditional print newspapers. But perhaps a more fundamental difference is one of access: the Pilot is free to consumers, while the Soup‘s readers must pay to read both the print and the online editions.

“Our readers can navigate freely on our site as well as share any story,” says Terri Mahoney, one of the Pilot’s two sales directors. “There’s no barrier between our website and the reader. We want our readers to have the best online experience.”

Janis Bunting, the Pilot‘s other sales director, agrees, adding that Penobscot Bay Pilot is compatible with social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. “Why would you want to ‘share’ something when you know that others may not be able to read it on the other end?“ she asks, noting that when Soup readers post news feeds to Facebook, only the first few lines are visible to others. (VillageSoup readers must either subscribe to the website or pay a per-article fee to access the full text. And while any reader can post comments on Pilot stories, only paid subscribers can do the same on the VillageSoup sites.)

Both companies offer programs in which advertisers can post unlimited news items in a special section of the site and link their business to a hosted web page. Among the advantages of the Pilot‘s Affiliate program, according to Mahoney, are larger photo galleries, the ability to upload video, tighter social media integration, and no long-term contract. Pilot Affiliates can participate on a month-to-month basis, while the Soup‘s “bizMembers” must subscribe for a minimum of three months. A monthly arrangement, says Mahoney, can be especially attractive to organizations whose promotional needs are seasonal or center around discrete events (for example, theater groups).

Affiliate membership was initially deeply discounted to prove the concept, but as the new year progresses, the Penobscot Bay Pilot is gradually inching up to its published rate card. Full rates, however, aren’t projected to apply until May, giving advertisers an incentive to come aboard during the remainder of the slow, dark winter and early spring.

According to Bunting, industry statistics show that 82% of readers find somewhere else to go if they hit a pay wall, and the Pilot‘s readership statistics suggest that it is satisfying a need for free local news. The site gets about 60,000 absolute unique visitors and 300,000 page views per month, and both figures have been increasing by 10-15% monthly.

Mahoney cites the organization’s “Truth in Advertising” promise regarding traffic numbers: “The counts on our Affiliate posts reflect actual human readers and not the additional traffic generated by automated bots, spiders, and other web crawlers,” she says, noting that robots still crawl the site and gather content to share across the internet, providing search engine marketing benefits. “We strive to be completely transparent with our business partners, our Affiliates, about the business of advertising online, and with the community that turns to us as a resource,” she says.

And the Pilot plans to continue innovating and growing. The organization is teaming up with the Hutchinson Center, the Belfast Area Chamber, and Our Town Belfast to revive the popular Best of the Best of Waldo County, adding online voting and a larger business expo element to what was previously a VillageSoup-sponsored program. The Pilot will also partner with local public safety organizations to help promote the first Run For Your Life Emergency Services Challenge in May, and will soon be compatible with mobile devices, making it more convenient for shoppers looking for information on local businesses.

For more details, contact Terri Mahoney or Janis Bunting.

Direct Mail Fail

This direct mail piece is a good example of how not to do direct mail.

First, the envelope:

“Time Value: Do Not Delay” + presorted standard postage = ERROR/ERROR/DOES NOT COMPUTE.

This error is compounded by the “Please Open Immediately” and the “Urgent” tag. If you’re sending something by bulk mail, it’s de facto not urgent — or it sure shouldn’t be, since even when mailing in-state, it can take a week or more for bulk mail to arrive.

Then they refer to the recipient as a “customer” when, in fact, no one in this household has ever been a customer of this store, AND the address includes “Or Current Resident.” There’s enough right here on the envelope to tell me that this is true junk mail. There’s so much nonsense going on that I’d wager the open rate is awful, and that means a lot of wasted money.

But I opened it because I’m interested in marketing, if not furniture, and here’s the contents:

Okay. I was surprised to find that the “urgency” on the envelope actually had some basis in fact: if it’s a going-out-of-business sale, then indeed it’s my last chance to buy at this store. The copy reads okay — the standard amount of hysteria, but no more. I found it interesting that this is a “private sale” to which the recipient, as a “past and present customer” (NOT) is being invited, and that the general public won’t hear about it “at this time.” Of course, this doesn’t mean that the general public won’t be allowed to attend — only that the newspaper and radio ads will probably hit a few days after you receive the mailer. The recipient isn’t really being offered anything special, but Rollins would like him to think he is.(To Rollins’ credit, the sale doesn’t appear on the company’s website at this time. It’s also absent from their Facebook page, but that’s no indication or anything, since they hardly ever post there.)

But the best error, the real prize-winner, is that there’s NO DATE FOR THE SALE! Thursday through Sunday. Right. This weekend? Next? I don’t know.

We see this all the time on marketing devices of all sorts: the omission of key information that totally nullifies the entire marketing effort. (Newspaper ads are easy pickings for this kind of error: they often neglect to include addresses, as if everyone knows where the store is located.) What a waste of money!

In a sense, this is an example of knowing too much: the person writing the letter knows the date (or the address, or what the business offers), and forgets that the audience doesn’t necessarily have the same information. For any marketing effort, it makes sense to go through the journalist’s “five Ws” — who, what, when, where, why. They don’t all necessarily apply to every marketing piece, but you should consider each one, decide whether it belongs, and then make sure that the ones that do belong are, in fact, included. Then pass it around to as many people as you can stand to accept input from (or give it to one marketing professional), and get feedback before you waste money printing and mailing a piece that will likely do you no good.

Evangelism

“We are fiber evangelists,” says Mim Bird, owner of Over the Rainbow Yarn in Rockland. “We want everybody to have a fiber component to their lives.”

Mim Bird, owner of Over the Rainbow Yarn in Rockland

Over the Rainbow (OTR), which opened in June, 2012, stocks tools and supplies for fiber arts, including knitting, crocheting, spinning, weaving and felting. But for the owner of what appears on the surface to be a straightforward retail store, Bird views her business in unusually strategic terms.

“We are not here to sell yarn. Selling yarn and needles and patterns and books is a byproduct of what we’re really doing here, which is promoting a lifestyle,” she explains. “How we market that has everything to do with ‘how are you going to support your lifestyle?’, not ‘how are we going to make you buy more yarn?'”

Central to the fiber arts lifestyle is its social aspect: participants often pursue their craft in social groups, made possible by two characteristics common to many of the fiber arts: they are portable (one can readily stick one’s knitting project in a bag and take it anywhere) and – not to demean the skill or artistry involved – they can be done without a great deal of concentration. Consequently, says Bird, knitters, crocheters, et al, enjoy getting together for pure social chatting, as well as “helping each other over the rough parts, and teaching and learning new techniques, and giving each other pattern and design inspirations.”

OTR supports this lifestyle by offering free events and programs that bring fiber artists together to share their craft and their company. Two evenings and one morning each week, the store holds a “Stitch and Spin Circle,” in which women (it’s predominantly women) simply gather at the store to work on their projects and chat. The event takes place in a circle of comfy chairs and sofas right in the front of the store, where it can be readily seen from outside. There’s no program or sales pitch: just a hospitable place for the participants to get together with easy access to tools and materials (should they need them) and expertise.

Although participants are not obligated to buy their supplies from OTR, the store will often place an interesting new product on the table in the midst of the circle. “It’s gentle marketing,” says Bird. “There’s no sales pitch or call to action — it’s just there. Sometimes they ooh and ah over it and nobody buys it that night, but the seed is planted.” And sometimes, she says, people love it and buy it on the spot.

OTR offers similar weekly sessions for youngsters (After School Stitch and Spin) and for mothers with very young children. In the latter, the store provides a safe space in which infants and toddlers can play, and toys to keep them occupied while the mothers have a chance to chat and knit with their peers.

At the 2012 Maine Lobster Festival, a mere six weeks after OTR opened, Bird pulled off the first Maine’s Fastest Knitter competition, with eight contestants and dozens of spectators. The event attracted interest from knitters in Connecticut, California, and Nova Scotia, all of whom asked for Bird’s permission or guidance to use the concept in their own areas. This she readily granted, urging the hopeful organizers to stay in contact after they run their own events. The objective is to arrange competitions between the respective winners, so that national and even international “fastest knitter” contests can be held in the future.

In connection with the national I Love Yarn Day sponsored by the Craft Yarn Council of America, OTR organized a Community Blanket Marathon in October, in which shifts of four knitters worked around the clock, for 24 hours, in the small park in front of the Brass Compass restaurant, at Rockland’s key downtown intersection.

The event originally had a simple charitable objective: to produce a knitted blanket that a local nonprofit organization could raffle off as a fundraiser. But Bird found a way to extend the benefits in several directions. As a means of selecting the single nonprofit recipient of the blanket, she invited all local nonprofits to a friendly competition to donate the most nonperishable food items. Ten or so organizations brought empty boxes to the knitting event and spread the word among their own constituencies, urging them to “vote” for their favorite organization by donating food in the appropriate box.

The event produced “winners” all around. Over 200 pounds of food were collected and donated to the Area Interfaith Outreach food pantry. New Hope for Women, as the biggest vote-getter, won the blanket. Bird then displayed the blanket and sold raffle tickets at OTR, raising $530 for New Hope for Women. One individual won the blanket for the nominal cost of a raffle ticket. The knitters – 43 of them – had such a good time that almost all of them have already signed up for this year’s event. The yarn distributor, who donated the yarn and knitting needles, got excellent exposure, including getting the materials into the hands of 43 serious fiber artists. And sales of the yarn used during the event saw a dramatic spike of three week’s duration at OTR, benefitting both the store and the distributor – and, presumably, the knitters, who were pleased with the product.

While all of this makes for great YouTube and FaceBook content and local publicity, it’s a lot more than your standard “event marketing”: it’s a truly strategic approach to business. By helping anyone who’s interested in the “fiber lifestyle” to live and enjoy it, Over the Rainbow Yarn is primarily engaged in pursuing its mission. And the fiber artists who benefit from these events that support their own passion are almost certain to become evangelists themselves for the organization that makes them happen.

Annals of Bogus Marketing

This sticker appears on the gas pumps at Maritime Farms by the border of Camden and Rockport. I think it’s on all their pumps in the region.

Maritime Farms: Winner of the First Ever M3R Marketing Bullshit Award.

Keeping my business local? It’s a convenience store for god’s sake! What else am I gong to do? Drive to Bangor to pick up a hot coffee? Order my gasoline on Amazon?

Shopping locally is a good thing. But don’t think that bullshit is an acceptable substitute for a sincere thanks for my business.

Birds, Pies or Nothing

Christmas is past, and the consumer gift-purchasing frenzy along with it. We wondered what local consumer/retail businesses are doing to keep the ball rolling in the post-Xmas season, so we asked a few stores in Camden and a couple inns in Rockland.

At Surroundings, a small sign in the front window trumpeted a 30%-off sale. This was an exception: we didn’t see similar sales at other Main St. Camden retailers.

A couple doors down at Once a Tree, owner Bernice Berger said “I am staying open seven days a week as my major attempt at keeping the ball rolling.” She added, “We do have sale items,” but no store-wide sale at the end of December. Come January, she’ll put some areas in the store on sale, but, she emphasizes, “Once a Tree is not a seasonal store,” and the merchandise retains its shelf-life indefinitely. December, she says, is only her fifth-busiest month.

Across the street at Ducktrap Bay Trading Co., I was nearly dragged off the sidewalk by a friendly lady excitedly urging me to visit to see live kestrels. You bet! That would have brought me in regardless of my mission. Inside, two members of the raptor rescue and education group Wind Over Wings were showing two of these lovely, diminutive and well-behaved birds of prey.

Wind Over Wings visits Ducktrap Bay Trading Co. in Camden with a pair of kestrels.

According to owner Joyce Lawrence, Ducktrap Bay is not a gift shop but, rather, a “serious gallery of wildlife and marine art.” As such, Christmas is not her key season either, and the birds were not a post-season marketing device, per se. She hosts Wind Over Wings more or less monthly, and does so because it’s mutually beneficial: it brings people into the store, she acknowledges, and it also helps raise awareness for Wind Over Wings, which she supports. Lawrence says she also sponsors bird carving classes year-round, but like Once a Tree, isn’t doing much marketing tailored to specifically the post-Xmas season.

In Rockland, P.J. Walker, co-owner of the LimeRock Inn, says he’s staying open but not doing any active marketing. “We’ve never really pursued off-season business,” he says, explaining that the inn operates with a staff consisting of just its two owners, and that they like things quiet at this time of year, to make up for working “flat out” for six months during tourist season.

In contrast, owner Cheryl Michaelson at the Berry Manor Inn says her marketing is a year-round effort. Berry Manor is a prime mover behind 9th annual “Pies on Parade” event (January 27) that also involves the other Historic Inns of Rockland (including the LimeRock), the local museums, several restaurants and other businesses. It’s a collaborative, city-wide effort to bring people downtown during the year’s darkest, coldest, and otherwise quietest days. To get the word out, Berry Manor relies on its newsletter, Facebook, and website updates, and these efforts all supplement those of Historic Inns of Rockland, which also blogs and does publicity.

So how are we marketing in the “quiet” season? It’s all over the board. A few are laying low, actually hoping that things will stay pretty quiet. Some pursue business as usual, just accepting that this is a quiet time of the year. And others are running sales or putting in a special marketing effort, trying to make the post-holiday season as productive as possible.

Eliot Cutler on Marketing the Maine Coast

Eliot Cutler, independent candidate for Maine governor in 2010 and chairman of the marketing consulting group MaineAsia LLC, was the keynote speaker at Maine Built Boats‘ first Global Outreach Conference on December 6 at Maine Maritime Museum. While many of Cutler’s comments were specific to boatbuilders and/or the China market, much of his talk was relevant to many businesses in the Midcoast and Maine in general. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

As we think about our Maine coast and try to solve the challenge of jobs and incomes that it presents, sometimes in unforgiving ways, we sometimes get confused . . . and confounded. We often make the mistake of thinking about this amazing resource – this ecosystem – in pieces independent of each other.

What do we need to do to keep the big ships rolling down the ways at BIW? (Well, they don’t roll down the ways anymore, but I like the imagery!)

How do we revive the ground fishery in the Gulf of Maine? How do we process more of our own lobsters for export to markets around the world?

What is the best way to promote the unmatched quality of Maine-built boats?

Tourism – exporting the Maine experience – is Maine’s biggest export product. Where can we find the money – now estimated at roughly $3-4 billion – that it will cost to repair Maine’s roads and bridges so that we can double the number of tourists who visit Maine?

In fact, all of these issues are elements – deeply interrelated to each other – of a single larger and deeply important question: How will we preserve Maine’s coastal communities?

As a state, what are the policies we need to pursue and the investments that we need to make that will help Maine’s coastal towns and villages, both those with working waterfronts and those without, retain young people and survive against the gravitational pull of larger urban areas?

If we fail to answer this question in a smart and strategic way, the consequences will be tragic.

Without coastal communities, from Eastport to Kittery . . .

• Maine’s largest industry – tourism – will be decimated;
• Our Gulf of Maine fishery – the third largest by dollar value in America – will be left to fishermen and women from southern New England and the Canadian Maritimes;
• Maine-built boats will become a lost art; and,
• We will have ignored our own DNA, abandoned our competitive advantage, turned our backs on our past and put Maine’s future in peril.

Yet, today we have no clear goals for preserving Maine’s coastal communities to which we are all committed.

We’re not focused, we’re not thinking, and we sure as hell are not investing.

We have no plan, no strategy, no shared idea of where we will be ten or twenty years from now. We have become fatally preoccupied in Maine with fighting over shares of a shrinking pie.

Let’s set a new course. Let’s put our extraordinary competitive advantages to work. Let’s build a Maine brand, market the hell out of our products and start making the pie bigger.

Some might ask, why do we need to build an overarching, umbrella Maine brand? After all, lobster is already synonymous with Maine. And you boatbuilders have a great brand, “Maine Built Boats.”

But you know what? Too many people around the world think that Maine lobster really comes from Canada or Boston, and no one in China has ever heard of Maine.

Yes, we need to build and develop the Maine brand.

The latent power of the Maine brand is extraordinary; there are a few states that are mythic, that hold Americans in thrall, and Maine is one of them. Yet, a powerful brand for our state is an opportunity that we have ignored for decades.

Over the years we have moved from one slogan to another faster than our weather changes.

Recently, and for a few years, our slogan was It Must Be Maine, a brand that some Business Week analysts said isn’t well-known because “it is bland, dreary, and vague.”

Now our slogan appears to be The Maine Thing.

Really?? The Maine Thing?

We don’t have everything wrong – there are, for instance, some wonderful new videos on the Maine tourism web site with Maine folks talking about why we all love to live here – but there is no evidence that we have invested the kind of time, effort, expertise and, yes, money that is necessary to develop a brand that is meaningful and that casts its net over all of the products and experiences for which we want Maine to be known.

We need to develop a brand that motivates people to place a higher value on what we make and sell and on the experience of living and visiting here.

If Virginia can be for lovers (as it has been for decades), if you and I can love New York, if pork can be the new white meat . . . then we ought to be able to figure out how we want people to think about Maine, and develop a brand that will get them to think that way.

For a state where so many jobs – now and in the future – are and will be found in this Maine Coast economic cluster – in tourism, in seafood production, in boatbuilding – there aren’t many more important investments that we can make in our future and in our kids’ futures than the development of a strong brand. 

I’ll take the Camry. Wrap it please.

You don’t even have to read the text to know what this company does.

Until just a few years ago, marketing through vehicle graphics was pretty much confined to tradesmen’s vans and larger trucks. (OK, there’s NASCAR, but I’m going to confine this post to the vehicles that one sees on the street.) If you wanted to do some marketing on a passenger-style vehicle, you were practically limited to vinyl letters or rectangular magnetic signs to stick on the doors. But technology has made it increasingly practical to apply elaborate graphics to any vehicle. More and more conventional automobiles are getting the treatment, and they really stand out on the roads of the Midcoast.

Adventure Advertising wrapped this Nissan for Penobscot Bay Pilot.

“It’s an extremely effective marketing and branding tool,” says Joe Ryan, principal at Adventure Advertising in Rockport. “In terms of cost-effectiveness, nothing matches it. Every day you could be getting 30,000 to 40,000 impressions.” Adventure recently did a full wrap on a Nissan crossover vehicle for the Penobscot Bay Pilot, and their portfolio includes ATVs, cars, minivans, passenger vans, motorhomes, box trailers  and tractor-trailer rigs.

According to Ryan, a full-car graphic wrap costs about the same as a full-page color ad in the Portland Press-Herald. The print ad might make 60,000 to 70,000 impressions total. The vehicle wrap matches that in a few days, and continues to make impressions every day for a number of years.

“And in the newspaper, you’re competing with other ads,” says Ryan. “On the road, you tend to be one of just a few eye-catching vehicles that catches people’s attention.”

This straightforward design works because the colorful “lawn sign” element is readily recognized in our region.

Prices for full wraps can reach “into the three thousand range,” says Ryan, “but we have also done extremely effective vehicle graphics for as little as about $400” which, he says, might consist of a well-designed logo carefully placed on a door. “We do a lot of partial wraps, which can be more affordable for many smaller businesses. We use the lines, shape and color of the existing vehicle as design elements. It’s a nice challenge.”

The diagonal logo slash successfully ignores (or overcomes) the vehicle’s door and window shapes and establishes a bold dynamic element.

Ryan argues that the cost of even full wrap is quite reasonable if it’s considered in the proper context. “It’s not a vehicle expense. It’s a marketing and advertising expense,” he says. Very true. If you think of it as a vehicle modification like custom wheels, then a couple thousand extra dollars might not make sense. But that same amount may be easy to justify for a marketing tool that keeps catching eyeballs for years to come.

Wrapping the photo around the corner has the virtue of being unexpected, and gives it standout three-dimensionality.

(All photos courtesy Adventure Advertising.)

The Challenge of Dichotomies

Every audience is diverse. If you’re selling cola or sneakers, the range is vast: your target market consists of everyone in the world except (respectively) health-food devotees and double amputees. But even for highly niche products and services, the message always needs to reach across a range of attitudes.

If your product is a vegetarian health food, you recognize that some, but not all, of your audience are vegans. Some are additionally gluten-free; Hispanic; upper-income; Presbyterian; bald; saxophonists. Any of these characteristics might influence an individual’s response to your product. Most marketers attempt to span these differences in their messaging, to smooth out the hills and valleys, find the common ground, appeal to as many as you can and offend as few as possible.

Rob Dietz, Principal at Pica Design + Marketing

This assumes that variability is somewhat evenly distributed across the audience, but not all markets demonstrate this quality. Rob Dietz, principal and creative director at Pica Design + Marketing in Belfast, feels that a defining characteristic of the Midcoast marketing environment is the dichotomous nature of its population: most people fall into one of two groups with rather distinct characteristics.

“Many folks in the Midcoast are local, native, deeply rooted here, proud of Maine and proud to be Mainers,” he says. “Many others are from other places, to a large degree well-educated, with a variety of interests, passions, backgrounds, experience, and connections with other parts of the world.” In other words, Maine’s perennial From Here/From Away division has implications for marketers.

Dietz says that in helping clients reach local consumers, Pica generally leans more toward “From Here” attitudes, without excluding or alienating those “From Away.” After all, many émigrés are here because they appreciate the local values. As a result, he says, “The methods that might succeed in New York or San Francisco may not apply here.”

“We generally take an authentic, straightforward approach,” he continues. “We’ll reflect on what makes a client special in this market without trying to make him or her out to be more than what he is. It’s a modest approach to marketing that requires sincerity on our clients’ part and in our recommendations to them.”

Another dichotomy that Pica deals with is not strictly local in character: it’s the shift away from compromise and shared purpose that’s discernible nationally. This, says Dietz, tends to affect attitudes and confidence throughout our communities.

“Uncertainty among consumers can change attitudes rapidly and dramatically,” he says. “Everyone is on an emotional roller coaster. I’m all about change: you have to adapt. But it’s a challenge to market to people who might be euphoric one day and reserved or frightened the next.”

Sidewalk Signs in Rockland

Hello Hello Books: eye-catching graphics, but too much text IMO.

Rockland’s Main Street retailers and restaurants are approaching the holiday season in a generally understated manner. That suits me fine, since I do not like being bombarded with someone else’s holiday cheer — especially when it’s insincere or explicitly commercial. When you go Christmas shopping, you already know why you’re there, and a Santa window cling is probably not going to influence your decision to enter a store — or, at least, it probably won’t influence it in a positive way.

What Rockland retailers and restaurants do like for their storefront marketing is sidewalk signs — especially of the sandwich board variety. Some of them use the signs to good effect; others not so much. Here’s what we saw during a stroll along Main Street this afternoon.

Seagull Cottage promotes a special, without pricing or a holiday message. I’m not implying that’s bad.

PDQ Photo’s sign has a bold, simple holiday-themed message for a holiday product. The vinyl banner up above also promotes a holiday product, but the display is problematic.

Clan MacLaren’s pitches their lunch specials, with pricing.

Rock Coast Sports is bold and readable. It’s the same pitch as By George’s (below), but seems more appropriate here.

Side Country Sports puts the price right out there on the street. If this is a killer price, then it’s a great idea. If not, then it provides an excuse for people to call around and not enter the store if that’s what they’re looking for.

Loyal Biscuit’s sidewalk sign color-coordinates with their permanent signage. Nice.

Huston Tuttle’s sign promotes their range of products and services.

Grasshopper Shop uses its sign for cause marketing — a good move, IMO.

L&H Burger’s message is a concise holiday message, with no overt pitch.

Lawn signs promoting “cash for gold” in front of By George Jewelers seem somewhat “off” for an upscale establishment.

Lobsterman’s Restaurant promotes their specials, with prices. The big colorful header is good.