Tony Hedger from First Friday Club receives bottle of our Bubbly

We were recently invited to give a talk at the Worthing and Adur Chamber of Commerce Chamber Chat evening. Vicky spoke about the importance of brand promise and the 40 attendees got an inside glimpse into Vicky Vaughan’s new book which is all about marketing your business and delivering what you promise. The book is called Brand and Deliver, which is out very soon.

One of the chapters in Vicky’s new book is about creating the right emotion for your clients. For example, Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference range have created upmarket packaging for their high-end food products. If you were to open a Taste the Difference packet and discover inferior food, you would be disappointed and probably wouldn’t buy that brand of food again.

Similarly, if your business promises to deliver something within a certain time, you need to ensure that you surpass that expectation. For example, if you promise to deliver within 7 days – you should deliver within 5 days instead. Guaranteed happy customer, so long as the product is as promised.

All seminars given by The Brand Surgery® come with a twist, as well as offering excellent advice for Chamber members. We always have a draw prize. This time we offered a ‘bottle of bubbly’. The lucky winner was Tony Hedger from the well-known First Friday clubs. Imagine Tony’s surprise when he opened the packaging and found a bottle of Babedas bubble bath! We believe that Tony’s wife was very happy though

This goes to prove that if you promise something to your customers, don’t ruin their expectations!

If you know of any networking events where a talker is required, please give Vicky a call on 01903 824229.

We are absolutely delighted to have been awarded the Best Business Marketing and Promotion Award in the 2009 Worthing Business Awards. We have so many people to thank: Firstly, we thank everyone that nominated us in this category, we are really chuffed. Secondly, Arundel Trophy and Engraving Centre who kindly sponsored this award. We thank all the organisers of this year’s business awards – they were spectacular and Fred Dinenage was very funny when presenting our award. Finally, thank you to all my friends and family for supporting me during these testing times.

Our Marketing Philosophy

This has been a tough year for many businesses and this prestigious award has really strengthened our belief in the old but excellent philosophy of Givers Gain. Our tried-and-tested formula to marketing is HONESTY and HELPING OTHERS. We help businesses and we put ourselves in their shoes. We believe that using honesty when helping our clients with their marketing and promotions automatically raises our profile. This is perfect marketing! Clients we have helped have passed our name to businesses that want to grow and need marketing help.

We have advised all of our clients that good marketing and promotions is key to standing out, especially when the economy is tough. Customers are going to buy from businesses that look professional, well-known and trusted. All of our customers that have taken our marketing advice are thriving through the recession. We advise them to invest what they can afford, and ask the question: Can they afford not to invest? We are honest and independent, and if we think a client should invest either in radio advertising or telephone canvassing or a
PR stunt, then that is what we recommend.

Charity Events and Organic PR

The Brand Surgery have always re-invested their profits back into self-marketing and promotions – albeit in the form of corporate sponsorship (we design graphics pro bono for the End of the Pier Film Festival), or by throwing the boss throwing herself off of Worthing Pier in Worthing International Birdman (for charity and in turn good PR).

We have also created stunning exhibition graphic design which has won us ‘Best Stand’ at business exhibitions, this in turn has secured us some large business deals. Perfect marketing!

We believe that we need to lead by example. Everything we advise our clients to do, we do for ourselves. In fact we test all of our advice out on The Brand Surgery before we let loose on our clients – from customer care to the envelopes we post our marketing packs in – marketing and promoting oneself – give as you would like to receive is our motto for marketing success.

If you would like to discuss how our award-winning marketing and promotions services could benefit your business, please call us on 01903 824229 or email vicky@thebrandsurgery.co.uk.

The Brand Surgery and Fred Dinenage

The bruises and the pain from Worthing Birdman were all well worth it because you can see that we raised a nice sum for Chestnut Tree House! Thank you to everyone that sponsored us, Chestnut Tree House and The Brand Surgery are very grateful.

It seems like an age ago that we were busy designing our costumes and rehearsing our dance routine! In fact it way way back on Sunday 23rd August that Doctor Vaughan, Nurse Neeru and Matron Sparsis dressed up in their naughty nurses outfits.

We are wondering weather to go for it next year – next year we would certainly wear the padded cycle shorts which were recommended by Sharon Clarke, Worthing Town Centre Initiative who organised this great event.

Anyway, that’s all from us for now. We’ve off blogging for some excellent Sussex businesses who we are proud to call clients!

Have a great weekend – and good luck to everyone at Worthing Business Awards. We’re keeping our fingers crossed!

Marketing and Promotions

We are delighted to have been shortlisted for the Business Marketing and Promotions award 2009. The Worthing Business awards have come at a time when marketing budgets have been
slashed and the creative sector has been severely affected, because unfortunately some businesses still believe that marketing is a luxury.

We think we have been nominated because we believe that marketing is much more than pushy telesales.

We practice what we preach and test our marketing ideas on The Brand Surgery before even thinking about testing them on our customers.

Here’s how our marketing services can help you.

All of our marketing services are designed to stretch your marketing budget further so you are not tempted to stop marketing. It is now more important than ever to be seen, so let us increase your product and/or service market positioning. Why not book a marketing consultation now.

Our philosophy is that prevention is better than cure. When you book a marketing consultation, we will give your business a diagnosis, and will prescribe treatments to ensure you business stays healthy. Once it is in tip top shape, we will give it regular health checks to check for any ailments. So now you can concentrate on the abundance of new clients that your business will be dealing with.

Call 01903 824229 to give your business fast soothing relief! Our marketing services include:

Powerful Copywriting

Whatever kind of hook you need, we will help you to catch a prize winner! Copywriting is much more than good punctuation and vocabulary. We will help your product or service appeal to your target market by creating memorable words that will evoke a positive emotion. Whether you need pages and pages or simply a strong headline, we create sharp effective words for:

• Websites
• E-marketing campaigns
• Direct mail
• Press releases
• Exhibition graphics
• Brochures and leaflets
• Packaging
• Posters
• Magazines (trade and newstand) and much more …

E-marketing campaigns

There are many different reasons for implementing an e-marketing campaign.

• Announcing your company updates and news flashes
• Promoting your new products
• Improvements to your services or products
• Changes to your services
• Newsletters (monthly or quarterly)
• Advertising to new customers

Part of e-marketing is establishing who your target market is. The benefit of working with us is that this technique is one of our key areas of expertise. Once we have done this, we will create a hook, through clever design and copywriting, to entice your target customers into taking positive action.

These are just a few of our services. Don’t leave it until tomorrow. The early bird catches the worm.

Call Vicky on 01903 824229 for further information.

Branding magic

We started working with magicman® last year. The brief was to take this amazing company to the next level whilst sticking to a realistic budget. We have now finished the logo, stationery and are currently working on the brochures and website which are due to be launched shortly. You may well of driven past the striking magicman® livery which we also designed.

magicman® are a repair and resurfacing specialist company and are the UK’s only ISO-9001:2000 registered construction repair company. So if you have any chips or dents in your doors, flooring, kitchen units & worktops, baths showers basins, uPVC, ceramic tiles, facades, cladding, powder coating, bath, magicman® are your solution.

magicman® work with both the domestic and commercial sectors, so the brief requested that we create a logo which would appeal to everyone. magicman® work with many industries including construction, insurance, government and residential markets across the UK. magicman’s® purpose is to repair damaged items in situ by our nationwide team of technicians – so you can save money by avoiding replacing items of furniture.

If you would like The Brand Surgery® to take your business to the next level, let us evolve and refresh your logo, marketing collateral and website. Call us now for a free confidential chat on 01903 824229.

Autumn offers from The Brand Surgery

Can you believe we are into September already? The Brand Surgery have cooked up three amazing offers for Autumn 2009. Choose from:

• £100 off bespoke logo design which includes FREE stationery design.
• Amazing blog offers at only £40 per blog entry per week. Price guaranteed for one year if you book in September.
• 50% off of our standard page rate for brochure and leaflet design if you book in September 2009.

Terms and conditions do apply to all of our offers, but they are very reasonable!

Just in case you’re wondering what all this blogging is about? Blogging helps to keep your website fresh which Google and other search engines love! If the correct keywords are used, then your website can make it to the top in a matter of hours! You should keep your blog up-to-date and write it on a weekly, or even better, daily basis.

We write blogs for a number of businesses including:

• AVS Fencing
• Countryman Inn, Shipley
• Proto Restaurant Group

AUTUMN OFFER! Just incase you missed the above offer. We are offering a creative blog writing service of £40 per entry – approx £160pm. This service includes us researching keywords relevant to your target market. This tells us what keywords your customers would type in to find a business such as yours.

This offer is available until the end of September 2009. Call Vicky now on 01903 824229 for a free confidential chat about blogging or any other creative service you are interested in.

SMS marketing service from The Brand Surgery

We are now able to offer our customers an amazing marketing tool. SMS is an excellent form of marketing because most people take their mobile phones everywhere, and most people read virtually all text messages! Therefore, SMS is an excellent marketing tool for time sensitive messages – with texts starting from only 5p per message.

Industries that can hugely benefit from SMS marketing are:
• Beauty & hair salons, dentists, doctors, hospitals (individual SMS reminders)
• Recruitment agencies (bulk SMS – send jobs to candidates – much cheaper than phoning!)
• Retail (latest offers and events)
• Restaurants (entertainment and offers)
• Schools and colleges (school shut downs and reminders)
• Local government (Don’t forget to vote!)
• Software developers (build SMS marketing directly into your software for impressive seamless solutions)
• Cinemas & theatres (events and promotions)
• Travel & transport (service updates / delays etc)

A few interesting facts and figures from Mobile Data Association:
• 212,616,000 SMS texts are sent person-to-person in the UK each DAY!
• The UK has seen a 30% growth year-on-year on SMS messaging
• MMS are gradually replacing postcards with the introduction of cameras – Wish you were here!

Setting up an account is so easy! Call Vicky on 01903 824229 NOW or email vicky@thebrandsurgery.co.uk.

Budget website service from The Brand Surgery

Are you, or do you know someone who is setting up in business soon? They need to get it right from the start, and we can help them with our new budget website service designed to help smaller businesses during the recession. A simple 3-page website will cost from just £399 and will give your business the essential web presence it needs. You will receive a bespoke design – we don’t do templates!

These simple sites will include a:

• Home page
• About us page
• Contact  form

You can choose from a range of bolt-ons such as:

• Logo update - does your logo look a little tired? Need a revamp? We will give your logo a new lease of life. Prices start from £250.
• Marketing advice – have you lost your way? Or have you forgotten what your customers want? We can help you get back on track. Marketing plan consultancy health check from only £75.
• Blog set-up - we will set you up on blog so can get started straight away. From only £99 setup fee.
• Blog creative writing service – our copywriting team research the keywords your customers would use and create a blog which is interesting to read and will keep browsers on your site for longer. From only £40 per blog entry.
• E-newsletter writing service – to keep customers informed of your latest offers. We can purchase a database or work with your existing list and create an email to promote your offers and promotions. From only £75.
• SMS marketing – simple solution which instantly updates your customers when they’re on the go. From only 5p per message. Our new SMS service will save you time and money.
• E-commerce – do you have products or music to sell online? No problem. So do our other customers. Give us a call on 01903  824229.
• Legal check - Failure to display the correct information on your website could result in a £1000 fine. We will ensure your website is legal. From only £75 for a legal check to give you peace-of-mind.

Call us on 01903 824229 for a confidential chat. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

The judging and reviews will be as follows – all out of 5 points.

• Eye-catching design? The overall graphic design of the packaging. Did the packaging design make us impulse buy? Was the packaging eye-catching and easy to read?
• Useful packaging design? Did the graphic design include the most important details of the product. Were any warnings printed on the outside of the packaging? There is nothing worse than buying a product and getting home to discover you need another product to use it, or that you cannot use the product on a certain kind of skin/carpet/fabric etc. Exclusions should be printed on the outside of a product’s packaging.
• Customer interaction? Does the graphic design create a customer dialogue – eg competition, feedback, prize draw etc.
• Can the packaging be recycled? Most manufacturers are printing/producing packaging which can be recycled. We, as a planet-friendly company, try to only purchase products with recyclable packaging.
• Minimal packaging? Does the product use unnecessary packaging or it is planet-friendly?
• Delivers the promise? Does the product live up to the claims on the packaging?
• Product pricing? Is the product price good value compared to it’s rivals?
• Easily available? Is the product easily available in a large number of stores to purchase?

Kitty Hoots Organic Catnip

PRODUCT NAME: Kitty Hoots Zoom around the Room Organic Catnip

• PRICE: £1.99 from Pets at Home, Worthing
• Eye-catching design? I was not looking for catnip, but the mad, bright pink, orange and lime green packing screamed BUY ME!!! The bright packaging was minimal with a crazy handwritten font – and has an organic feel about it. When you look at the packaging you are ‘living the experience’. Great graphic design in our opinion. When you open the product up, the experience continues. There are instructions to ‘watch your cat go crazy’. My cat did! You can send movies of your cat going (nice and funny) crazy to the manufacturers website: www.kittyhoots.com. Please note that you do get directed to a new website called www.fatcatinc.com. This is the only reason we gave the product 4/5 as it should be updated. Guess the manufacturers are using old stock up first. Great graphic design fused with minimal packaging proves impulse purchases are possible.
• Useful packaging design? Handwritten font is all-over-the-place-mad-crazy, but it works! No warnings necessary on the packaging design, as catnip is a natural product and it is organic of course.
• Customer interaction? You can send your mad movies and photos to the manufacturers at www.kittyhoots.com.
• Can the packaging be recycled? The outer cardboard packaging can be recycled. The plastic pouch the catnip is can’t be recycled, but the pouch makes up 5% of the overall packaging so we approve.
• Minimal packaging? Yes!! Clever minimal packaging, yet does not compromise from the attraction of the product.
• Delivers the promise? Our cats went crazy for this product. They can even smell it when it is locked away in the draw.
• Product pricing? £1.99. Average price amongst its rivals.
• Easily available? This particular product is in Pets at Home, however, www.kittyhoots.com products are available online at a number of other online stores.

Kitty hoots packaging

The Studio IV website has got some fantastic shots of the day – including one of the Boss – not very gracefully entering the rescue boat! Click here to see Vicky smiling how you have never seen her smiling before!

Vicky flying high by Sarah Headworth

Andy Sparsis, Neeru Kareer and Vicky Vaughan