Brand messaging is (almost) always going to have more visual appeal than promotional messaging. At least, that's been the trend, but it's my experience that there there are enough good people working in promotional advertising today who feel promos deserve attention to design and well-crafted visual story-telling that promos have come a long way. There are those clients who feel as nice as it is, this only slows the in-take of the "what's in it for me" message, but I beg to differ.Store environments are highly visual places loaded with thousands of square feet of competing brand messages and product images. Throw signage and promo materials into the mix, unfreeze a caveman and watch his head explode. The hunter/gatherer part of the modern human brain has the ability to treat grocery store aisles like wallpaper, only really focusing on the occasional tin of soup or bag of dog food.
By my math, and this is really conservative, if you throw promo materials or display in someone's path you have three seconds or less to engage them or they're gone.You can easily test this yourself by people watching in a store. Watch how their eyes fall on it, do a quick backwards Z from top to bottom and either engage or keep walking. They need a reason to want to keep looking; to read beyond your clever headline or value proposition, to decide to take part in your promo and somehow commit your URL to memory. That's another story.
The reasons? First: craft a value-add or promotion so strategic and irresistible to your demographic that they think it would be stupid not to take part and you've already cleared shelf space for that next award. And second, strategic design; well-crafted visual story-telling that engages the consumer.
If your program has no lead time or money to put against it, I know it can be hard to deliver the bacon, but if you can't find a way to use strategic planning and design to do this, you're letting opportunity and money slip through your fingers.
Posts
