Marketing, Advertising, & Branding Our Childrens Clothing Line
Marketing, Marketing, Marketing. Once you’ve tackled one big hurdle, like learning product development, there’s another one rearing it’s BIG GIANT CHALLENGING head. Marketing, Advertising. Similar, connected, but not one and the same.
Here’s how I’m keeping them straight in my head: every contact with a customer, ex-customer, or future customer is marketing. So, your marketing is what brands you. Your emails, your web pages, your stationary, your product, YOU, - all of these are part of your marketing, which is why you strive for a co-hesive look and feel to everything about your company.
Advertising (this might be over-simplification, but it’s working in my head right now) is paying for marketing opportunities with prospects. Basically, paying for a shot at a contact.
Guerrilla marketing - tactics such as posting on message boards & leaving your business card everywhere you can, are examples of “guerrilla marketing”, but I think that it better referred to as “guerrilla advertising”; you pay in time for a shot at a contact. The marketing part should already be there by the time you’re looking for traffic.
For our clothing line, one of the biggest branding things we’ve done is the use of an identifiable symbol in our logo. Think Nike, think Guess. You can recognize them by a symbol alone. That’s what we want. I think of our happy star, “Pinch” (named by my daughter and appropriate for us in so many ways), as a stamp into our customers minds. So he’s everywhere. Then there’s color. Green and blue for us. Think Tiffany’s for an idea of the impact of a color scheme.
So, I think we’re doing ok on the branding part, but we have to get our marketing messages clarified and figure our how best to target our advertising. We need to let people know we exist!!! Here’s a couple of our advertising efforts:
- Purchasing advertising space on a few mom sites; working on ads for www.jamesgirone.com
- Purchasing an ad in an expectant moms guide which will be distributed to local obgyn offices and put into the expecting mother welcome packs
- Yahoo, pay-per-click
- Direct Mail campaign (of which I need to create the next newsletter for both retail and wholesale again already, so this one is a time consumer).
I also just read that a refer-a-friend script on your site (with an exclusive offer or benefit for doing so), can be HUGE for building your mailing list and spreading the word.
Well, my kids are rising with the sun. I have SO much that needs to get done, and my husband is gone for the day - yikes.
OH!!! A PS: I’ve been contacted by so many people over the last couple of weeks who are in this whole crazy starting a clothing line experience with me and I think it would be a great idea for us all to help each other work towards the Fall market. We could at least help with where we’re supposed to be in the schedule, trade show prep, that sort of thing. I’ll work on this idea a little more..but feel free to let me know what you think.
1 comment November 12th, 2006