Kevin Harrington // marketing // blog

Posts Tagged ‘agency’

Volvo, at the recommendation of their agency Mindshare, have started a campaign to annoy potential customers right across Europe. Well done.

I say this based on my experience. The essence of the campaign is a Quick Response (QR) mechanism. This uses a 2D barcode on print advertising.

The Swedish car maker’s Ice White campaign has been built around the theme “open up and come alive”, and uses the print ads to provide readers with instant access to additional web content on their mobile. >>> more

My experience of Volvo QR: text the number on the page, download a reader, do it again as it didn’t run, do it yet again as it didn’t run, then get told my phone ( a 12 month old BlackBerry…hardly a Nokia 3310!) was not compatible.

So I have no idea what I would have been told if Volvo had been using technology that was accessible from my phone. Perhaps when they do an agency review I may find out.

At a guess 40% of my marketing career has been B2B and 60% B2C.

Recently I’ve been casting the net to find new suppliers/partners for a broad range of activities that are absolutely in the B2B area. And I’m thrilled to say that I’ve been meeting some very interesting people. Some of these were on the Marketing Forum 2008.

I’ve been amazed at the difference in styles. The B2B folks have been very considered, narrow focused and tentative. By contrat the B2C people have taken more of a broad, we can do anything, full service approach.

These are of course sweeping generalisations, so apologies if I’ve offended anyone. The thing is I cannot really understand why the agency approaches are so different. From my perspective the steps that need to be followed are the same.

In fact my intention now is to work on delivering the B2B project that I am dealing with by utilising a healthy layer of B2C. I’m sure I’ll upset someone on the way but 1) sorry and 2) hey ho!

This post is not an invitation to suppliers/agencies to pitch their wares and services. Comments are more than welcome though.

I quite like the look of this business, Logomarket

On Logomarket.com, 120 designers present more than 5,000 logo designs to potential customers. The showcases contain logo designs for sale at fixed prices. The fixed price includes delivery in the file format of your choice, as well as unrestricted usufruct rights for all possible uses. All logo designs on offer are exclusive, i. e. once purchased they are no longer available for sale.

Usually we brief an agency or designer, wait three weeks, have an idea sold to us and then we get an invoice for thousands. Can you sense a little cynicism here?

Logomarket turns it on the head. You can choose a logo, from a vast choice, for prices starting at about £100. For a lot of start-ups this could represent an excellent service.