We would like to send out a big welcome to Ulrich & Associates firm. This is a unique CPA firm that helps businesses with all aspects of accounting, taxes, book-keeping and their associated services.

What makes this firm unique is the fact that they not only really know what they are talking about, but they say it in such a way that anybody can understand. They are experts in their field (recently recognized as one of the best CPA firms in the country from Forbes Magazine) but they are also approachable, reachable by phone and a lot of fun to work with. That seems to be quite unique within this industry and we are proud to be working on formulating a new online presence for them with a new website.

There is much speculation out there about how our economy is actually doing and where it will be in the coming months and years to come. As a small business owner, i myself have kept a close eye on this to ensure that Wold Creative Group will not only survive but thrive within these financially tenuous times. 

As with all economic shifts, there are two sides to the coin. When some companies are struggling, others are booming. Is this just industry specific? I think that has something to do with it but the companies that are booming right now also know that this is a time of opportunity. 

With some organizations cutting back their spending on advertising or marketing strategies because they think that will save their company some money, other organizations are able to create waves within their industry through advertising and marketing strategies. Cutting back on marketing to save money is often a fallacy due to the fact that it only saves money at present but certainly hurts the potential future revenue stream. As some say, “stepping over dollars to pick up pennies”. 

I am not advocating spending a bunch of money on advertising or marketing, rather, keep on spending something, anything, on advertising and marketing. In addition, i am also advocating to spend your money wisely and not put your advertising dollars in one area (publication, medium, campaign). Keeping up or starting to have a presence within your industry during the time where other organizations may be cutting back is a win-win situation and should allow you to get a leg-up on the competition. In other words, your dollars spent on advertising or marketing will go farther and do more within our economic climate. 

The current state of the economy can be an opportunity for your organization to stand out and get noticed. All you have to do is to make sure that your brand is still out there and wisely placed.

-jeremy

We have just completed the logo (brand) for the Refugee Outreach Partnership. This is a California-based organization that brings together like-minded non-profit organizations to assist refugee placement, housing and jobs. In my opinion, this organization is cutting-edge in the fact that it crosses normal organizational boundaries to focus on the greater good that no individual organization could handle on their own. We are proud to be a part of it.

With any logo, their brand needs to properly represent who they are as an organization as well as incite confidence/trust of that organization. The Refugee Outreach Partnership incorporates the idea of being connected around the world with a sense of movement. In order to give the perception of movement, we purposefully designed outside of the lines. In other words, the people holding hands extend outside their own borders and, thus, fulfill the idea of movement and life beyond their country’s borders.

We have another new website up and running. This is an educational video company that we created an e-commerce website for. In fact, the only way to purchase their videos is through the website where you are able to immediately download the videos after purchasing. We were able to compress and format the videos where they are still high-quality and yet are able to download within a minute. 

We developed their branding (logo), their website and messaging and now have also done some advertising and marketing consulting for RJ Connections.

Check their website out here at www.rj-connections.com

It has been a long time coming but we finally have a bit more breadth to our portfolio section. As much as i wish that the portfolio section is now definitive, the fact is that this is still the tip of the iceberg of work that we have done. It shows some of our work from ads to websites to logos to print to…well, you get the idea. Enjoy.

click here to check it out

When thinking about running an ad or formulating a comprehensive marketing campaign, you have to remember that what you are doing is not a complete facsimile of the product or service that you are marketing. In other words, you have to be selective on what exactly you are using for text, image and messaging.

I like to think of marketing and, specifically, advertisements,  as reflections of what you are trying to sell. These are not complete images of your product or service, but a just a glimpse of it.

Part of our job as marketers is to make sure that reflection shows off the best possible features of the product or service so that the reflection is enough to cause the viewer to want to turn their heads and look directly at the product or service. That is the advantage that we have, is that we can pick and choose exactly what to reflect.

We have been working on a logo for a contemporary and diverse church in California. This is a new organization that is just getting going and so they needed to say all that they intend to be within their brand. Given their diverse market of potential church-members and the fact that they would like to have a slightly modern logo, we have come up with an abstract cross that doesn’t look very “churchy” while is reminiscent of patchwork that comes together to form this cross. This allows for the message to remain consistent while still being, what we deem as, “approachable” to a larger audience.  Enjoy.

Whether you are a small business or a large business there are ways to approach marketing that should be standard. Here are a few of the basics.

1. Actually do marketing. A surprising amount of business folk out there still see marketing as a waste of money. These same doubters often rely on their own larger-than-life personality to sell and have not given marketing a chance to increase their business potential beyond what they can accomplish by themselves.

2. Look at the long-term (strategic approach). Marketing is not just about immediate sales but it can create the framework for a client/customer base for years to come.

3. Look at the short-term (immediate sales). Whether this is promoting a sale or it is the day-to-day sales, this cannot be overlooked so that both existing customers are not forgotten and potential customers can be added to the customer base.

4. The brand is sacred. Treat your brand with as much consistency and reverence as possible. It is not something to change on a whim or something that should be degraded visually or verbally for the sake of any immediate sales.

The ultimate goal of marketing should be growth for the business. No matter what size business you are, if you are not growing then one reason could be ineffectual marketing.

Market well,
-jeremy

As an undergrad art student, I remember being introduced to the minimalist art movement for the first time. These artists were made famous for such things as putting just a few squares on the canvas or leaving the canvas entirely blank. My first thought, like most artists who see them for the first time, was that I could have done that. Now, I’m not so sure.

For simplicity to work in art, there has to be a conscious decision to leave out elements. When faced with a blank canvas, it feels good to put all of your thoughts, energy and passion into making that canvas not blank anymore.

TIP: The goal of art is to express while the goal of marketing is to sell. Therefore, with marketing and design, simplicity is crucial for the viewer to focus on the message at hand. To do this, there needs to be a conscious decision to focus on a couple, or one, key element(s) and to leave out the extraneous information.

EXAMPLE: Let’s say you have a tee-shirt company in Oregon and you want to establish yourself in the market. You sell slim-fit shirts with age-old sayings on them. You only use organic cotton. You are a woman-owned business. You manufacture over 10,000 shirts a year. You sell to the western US. So, with that situation, what do you say in your marketing materials?

There are a few ways to slice this one, but you could say “Oregon Shirts, Organic Wisdom”. In other words, focus on one or a couple of items to put in the forefront of the marketing and put the other information as the secondary line of marketing (further within a brochure/website). The idea is to draw in the audience by the first marketing piece, thus, getting the audience onto further information to fully gain their trust in your product/company.

-jeremy

As avid skiers (though there is a snowboarder among us), we are very proud to welcome Powder Mountain to the Wold Creative team. Working with some web development, branding and marketing strategies for Powder Mountain, Wold Creative Group is assisting with the guidance of growth of the ski resort so that it grows appropriately while still appealing its current customer-base.

We are very excited to be assisting Powder Mountain with its web development and marketing. If we must also have meetings on the slopes periodically this winter, then that is just a sacrifice that we are willing to make.

Here are a couple of Powder Mountain pics from this summer.

- jeremy