Magenta Advertising

Mailer a huge success!

Tamworth based hinge specialists Gold and Wassall were delighted by the healthy response generated by a recent direct mail campaign to promote its bespoke hinge design service.

The mailer was creatively based on a made-to-measure tailoring theme, and was accurately targeted at an audience of carefully selected recipients from a wide range of manufacturing and industrial sectors across the UK.

Sales Director Tim Fellows commented: “Straight after the mailer went out we noticed a significant upturn in the number of sales enquiries we received. On the strength of this first venture into direct mail we will definitely be considering further campaigns in the near future.”

Gold and Wassall’s mailing campaign was the latest in a series of sales and marketing support collateral produced by Magenta over the last two years, which has also delivered a new product catalogue, interactive website and on-going press advertising.

Mind the GAP
– but don’t be scared of re-branding

Major clothes retailer Gap hit the headlines in the US recently when they decided to ditch their 20-year-old iconic ‘Blue Box’ logo in favour of a new one – only to be bombarded by thousands of irate comments on social networking sites and online forums, demanding the return of the original logo.

Gap soon conceded that it “had not gone about this the right way”, and after much criticism – mainly on Facebook – admitted that it “had missed the opportunity to engage with the online community.”

In short, the introduction of the new logo had not been adequately researched, and Gap had not consulted its customers first. Within a week of the new logo launch, it was abandoned and the old logo was reinstated.

The situation Gap experienced demonstrates how customers build up emotional attachments to certain large brands, in many cases engendering very strong loyalties. A brand goes far beyond a company’s logo; it creates and maintains reputations and is effectively an organisation’s personality. Little wonder then that Gap customers were so incensed by what amounted to a sudden, unannounced personality change.

The episode was finally summed up with Gap commenting: “There may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes we’ll handle it in a different way.”

It’ll Never Last

Now you can have good-looking packaging that causes no harm to the planet. An Ipswich company has developed starch-based materials that can replace conventional paper and polythene for use in a range of packaging items including carrier bags, cartons and mailing envelopes.

Once they’ve done their job, products made from these natural resources can then simply be composted, leaving no polluting legacy to worry about. harmlesspackaging.co.uk