99 ways to catch a customer’s eye.
99 ways to catch a customer’s eye.
by Anne Fisher
Take a stroll down the pain-reliever aisle in any drugstore, and you’re bombarded with advertising buzzwords (super, extra, ultra, maximum, faster ) and scary warnings about possible side effects. (Clearly, the product-liability lawyers have been busy.) If you didn’t already have a headache, reading enough of these packages might give you one.
Richard Fine, founder of Help Remedies on West 28th Street in Manhattan, decided to go a different way. The son of two doctors, Mr. Fine began in 2009 to market 325-milligram acetaminophen tablets in plain little white biodegradable packages that read simply: “Help. I have a headache.”
The minimalist design caught on with hype-weary consumers, and the brand quickly spread from small specialty shops to mainstream outlets like Duane Reade and Target. The resulting burst of revenues led to nine new products, for minor ailments like blisters, allergies and insomnia, in just two years.
Help Remedies is one of the short, vivid case studies in a new book, Visual Marketing: 99 Proven Ways for Small Businesses to Market with Images and Design.
“Technology puts it within the reach of small businesses to use the kinds of visuals in our marketing that were previously cost-effective only for large corporations,” said co-author David Langton. “Not only does the Internet make it convenient to find and hire design professionals, but online design tools make it easy to experiment with creating great visual elements on your own.”
Mr. Langton, co-founder of Manhattan design firm Langton Cherubino Group, works for huge clients like Ernst & Young, HBO, McGraw-Hill Cos. and MetLife, but about half of his customers are small businesses. For this book, he, his partner Norman Cherubino and co-author Anita Campbell combed through hundreds of striking small business visual campaigns including packaging, print and online from all over the U.S. and Britain, to find the ones that are not only eye-catching but have yielded real business results.
“We started with more than 500 candidates and spent about a year narrowing them down to the 99 best,” Mr. Langton said. “So being selected to appear in the book was almost like winning an award.”
The judging seems to have been remarkably impartial: The authors laud standout work by rival design houses like The Art Department on East 12th Street, as well as marketing campaigns like Mr. Fine’s that were entrepreneurs’ own inventions.
“We wanted to be as inclusive as possible,” Mr. Langton explained. “The point is to show small business owners some things that have worked for others, and might spark some of their own new ideas.”
That’s not to say that Langton Cherubino ducked the spotlight altogether. Inspired by Oscar Wilde’s famous remark that one should either wear a work of art or be one, the firm created an online game called MasterpieceYourself.com that allows users to do both: Insert a photo of your own face into a painting by a famous artist like van Gogh or Michelangelo (Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is a popular choice), then email it to friends, tweet it, or post it on Facebook or on your own blog or website.
MasterpieceYourself is so much fun that it went viral, drawing more than 100,000 users worldwide. Like the other 98 great campaigns in Visual Marketing, it also boosted the bottom line. A crowd of new clients told Mr. Langton they chose his firm to do their online marketing because the game made them say, “Wow.”
Read more: Crain's NY.
