This one is titled: Gill Asking the Dancers for More Attitude. On the court that means “push your bosom together.”

This one is titled: Gill Mentoring the Dancers. Having been in a few auditions I’m sure the dancers were feeling the mentorship.

This one is titled Gill Showing the Dancers Some New Moves, which could also be subtitled “Gill explaining how the Knick’s City Dancers flip off their opponents.”

To see the entire slideshow, click here. All respect to Gill, and the dancers, who are just making a living, and even to the PR folks who – let’s face it – got me to blog about this.

ALL PHOTOS CREDIT: Chris Batka and MSG

The job was entirely administrative. As a large independent press Norton had editors (my bosses) to do the editing, and dedicated copy editors to do the copy editing. My job was keeping all of the pieces moving in the right direction, which was not a trick for me. Part of my work – in keeping things flowing – was handling the photo calls. Authors might note in a manuscript that they want a picture of such and such at a particular place in the text, and I/we would send out a photo call for such and such, select options from what was received, scan the slides (this was ’99), and email them to the author for selection. Days doing this, in my little internal office with no window. I remember vividly when one of the slides was an image of the Snow Monkeys in Japan.

Here are images similar to the one I remember:

I have since learned that “macaques invent and pass on new behaviours. Scientists have observed macaques learning how to wash potatoes and make snowballs and these skills have spread throughout Japan.” They believe that this band of monkeys went into the water to recover floating soy beans, and realized that hot springs are just lovely.

The owner has been doing lots of the right things in marketing her business, but she wanted a little extra outside help. She didn’t want to change overall branding – colors, logo, name – but was seeking a tweek to motivate the new marketing push. We kept colors, images and shapes from prior campaigns, but re-worked many of the elements for placement within a variety of directed usages.

The first thing I saw was that the cafe was under-selling itself. It’s a great place, and the prices were far lower than competitors. In being overly focused on providing value, there was only a tiny margin on her products. The owner couldn’t afford to participate in certain kinds of promotions (two for ones, and give-aways) because the base prices had such small margins. Additionally, the growth consumer base – health food and cafe consumers – are used to paying some premium. In not collecting that premium the restaurant both loses out on the income, and fails to meet consumer expectation. We decided to raise some of the prices to be more equivalent to the competition. Flaxella still offers great value, but now there is some more room to play with in the marketing program. In order to implement, the owner required one page folded, printed menus, and a large wall-hung menu, which I designed and delivered as a pdf.

In order not to lose existing customers, some of whom might be motivated by the prices, we created a member program. This builds her e-list, her customer loyalty, and provides brand exposure. The key card – available only to customers prior to the menu switch – offers the bearer 15% off all food and beverages (essentially preserving earlier values for members.) You can see the front of the key card above. All of the new collateral materials implement a few consistent changes.

In terms of expanding the base, we decided that it would be appropriate to broaden her beyond Flax. She provides a variety of healthful food options, including Flax foods and beverages, but not limited to Flax foods and beverages. We moved from Flaxella – Flax Cafe and Gift Shop, to Flaxella: Bethesda’s Health Food Cafe and Coffee Bar. We created a postcard, which is being printed for direct distribution, and also a one page flier for her to run off as she needs. The flier is really a version of the postcard, formatted to print nicely from a business printer. The flier is what is on the left here.

There is no silver bullet in marketing. Success in the restaurant business means volume. Hopefully by broadening her marketing slightly the store will appeal to the health conscious, and not just the flax lovers. I’m certain once customers visit they’ll want to go back.

By collaboratively developing marketing materials freelance professionals can empower business owners to effectively represent their work. That doesn’t have anything to do with design work, but it has an immense amount to do with the return on investment that the owner will see. Small business owners are not in a position to staff their marketing work. In most cases small business owners are the implementers/organizers of their marketing programs. Freelance professional marketing help can reinvigorate the sometimes gruelling process of building a business.

There is no silver bullet in marketing, and the success or failure of marketing initiatives has a tremendous amount to do with the fit of design to implementation. Each business is unique. In order to bring in additional customers the restaurant is adding an events series, starting with a healthful gourmet cooking series – one Saturday afternoon a month to start. I’ll update about that as we have the details. I am also now in the process of creating a new website for the business.

Her old website did not represent well what she had to offer. In addition, any time she had a schedule change, or a new workshop added, it was labor intensive to make changes to the site. As we discussed what she wanted, she realized the benefits of being on a content management system, and we settled on WordPress.

I was clear with her that I wouldn’t be able to deliver on her entire wish list for the new site. (She had a very limited budget for creating a whole new site.) I gave her the metaphor of a house: that we weren’t doing a high end design/build job, but rather quick and dirty pre-fab construction. The goals of the new site were to have something that she could update herself, and to bring her look a little further into the millennium.

I picked out a free template, edited her old content, and put up the new site. The central navigation for her new website is a slide. I think this non-traditional navigation adds visual appeal and visual interest to the home page. We also added some basic search engine optimization into the new site, which is helping her placement in search responses.

I faced two challenges creating the site. The client had very few images to work with, and the slide required at least six. Also, visually, the slide was most effective (I found out from experimentation) with bold colors. In order to get the colors I needed, I ended up stealing images from the web and working with them to use on her site. While in the wish list the client would have a dark blue background, and a finer font, I wasn’t able to deliver that on this contract.

I’m very pleased with the value for the money that I provided. I’m still unhappy that she didn’t get her dream site, but I have noticed that she updates the site regularly, and I know she’s glad to be able to do that for herself.