In Houston, people seem to understand this concept of pop gear. Every company's portfolio has, for instance, ConocoPhillips' logo up near the top. Sometimes they'll stick it right on top, but more often, they'll nestle it down between Carl's Bait'n'Tackle and Cozy Cottage Coverings, in a gesture of feigned modesty. Sorting Conoco alphabetically like Cozy Cottage Coverings, instead of up above the A's, where Conoco rightfully belongs, actually employs a subtle psychology. The reader, upon seeing that well-known logo, supposes that Carl's Bait'n'Tackle and Cozy Cottage Coverings are companies on par with Conoco in terms of size and global penetration. This portfolio appears to boast all sorts of gigantic multinationals that the reader, for some embarrassing reason, has never heard of. And the reader is no more likely to enquire after Cozy Cottage Coverings than the emporer was likely to confess that he couldn't see the new clothes. If the reader is shameless enough to ask about Cozy Cottage Coverings, the portfolio's owner will typically come clean, confessing that a lady from church sews calico dust ruffles she sells at the dessert auction to help dig wells in Mali. He once did a brochure for her, pro bono. "I don't treat this teeny tiny business any differently than I treat the sixth largest oil company on the Planet Earth! You'll get the same attention if you give me your business." So you see how Conoco adds enormous collateral weight to a client list. How, you may ask, does this funny little business even have Conoco on their books? We're getting to that...
It's a well-known fact that ConocoPhillips has no problem getting volunteers for their annual company picnic. Every half-ass financial planner and custom pen vendor in town throws elbows to get on the volunteer list for the Conoco picnic, so they can put that shiny red logo on their client list. "I manage wealth. Some of my clients include the Stevens family, Conoco, my cousin Sid..." It sounds impressive to the gullible, but get them on truth serum and ask a few questions and you'll learn the truth!
"What do you do for your cousin Sid?"
"Every month I purchase $500 worth of a Riversource A-Allocation mutual fund. It follows the S&P 500, but averaged 4% above benchmark over the last ten years."
"Do you keep the shares for yourself"
"No, they go in his Roth IRA. It's tax deferred. I told him at this rate he'd have $5 million when he's sixty five, but it's really more like $4.1 million unless something huge happens."
"And what do you do for Conoco?"
"Last year I served baked beans. I also hosed off the bouncy castle in the afternoon. I think this year I get to grill."
So there you have it. Pop gear. You need that logo to get more just like it. How often do you get the chance to administer truth serum to a financial planner?
So I was looking for pop gear in Texas, and to me, pop gear meant a large company with enormous name recognition and a lousy web site. And there was no better candidate this time last year that Blue Bell, the much loved ice cream compnay just up the highway in the small hamlet of Brenham. I won't go into detail on the state of their web site, but it was poor.
One day, after taking our two-year-old on a tour of the factory (about a tenth as cool as the Tillamook Cheese Factory tour in Tillamook, Oregon), I popped into the administrative offices and asked after their marketing director. After a few minutes I was greeted by a gentlemanly fellow who introduced himself as Carl. We discussed marketing tactics for a few minutes in their homey, yet post, reception area, and then got on the matter of the web site. When I brought it up, Carl grinned sheepishly and hung his head. He knew, he said, that it wasn't what it could be, but web didn't play hugely into their marketing strategy so it was rather low on the list. Of course, he acknowlegded, the company with the single best selling ice cream flavor (Home Made Vanilla) in the United States needed a vanity site, at the very least. "If you'd approached me three months ago, I would have been all over it," he said, but went on to describe a bad experience involving a hacker and some late nights. He seemed resigned in regards to the web site.
"Having Blue Bell as a client would mean loads to my business," I told him. "I know you aren't hurting for money, but I'll design you a killer new site for a dollar if I can just tell prospects I worked with you." Carl chuckled warmly. "This is the person you need to talk to..."
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A few days later I was on the phone with a fellow named Tim or Tom or something like that. He was receptive, and my hopes were high. We discussed what I would recommend design-wise. I walked him through his existing site and showed him how shoddy design and ancient development practices were still in use, much to their detriment. I mentioned some competitors' sites and demostrated the sort of community Blue Bell might have been missing out on. I described some ideas and revealed a few pieces I'd done that might be of a similar flavor to what they'd be looking for. Foremost on my portfolio was a working comp I'd put together for a cool little Luling company called Tiny Texas Houses, which they (and you) could see here. It was a neat little piece and would work well with a heavily branded company that relied little on search engine marketing. While I would change the color scheme and elemens, the concept was compelling and could easily be tailored to their brand. He seemed to listen, and asked a few questions. Then he told me that they really weren't in the market for a new site at all, that someone in Brenham had already done one better by offering to do it for free, and that they had a family committee to report to and it was highly unlikely that I'd ever be able to present anything to them. At least I got my work seen, I thought.
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| Blue Bell's new landing page |
Two weeks later, I awoke in a cold sweat and shouted "Hey! That looks like Tiny Texas!" This week, we're compiling a client list, and Blue Bell is going right up near the top, between Barb's Bouncy Castles and Bring It! Cheerleading Camp.
