Welcome back. (Did you miss us?) Many of us took the weekend off to recharge ourselves from SoccerFest, but we are now back in full gear, so watch out for our coming marketing efforts this week.
By now, maybe you’ve been to downtown Amherst and seen our posters hanging. Next time you’re in Northapton, take a look around there too. We didn’t saturate the downtown area as much as we did in Amherst, but we still hit a lot of good places. We got a lot of pizza shops to put up posters in their front windows, which we hope will allow us to hit numerous target markets, including college students and families.
We’re hoping, as I said in a previous post, that our poster really stands out and will get people to turn their heads and look at it without them even realizing it. Trying to come up with ideas for such a design yielded some interesting results.
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This was one of my initial concepts. For those of you that don’t know, Andy Warhol was an artist famous for his colorful pop-art paintings. Check out his Marilyn Monroe painting if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Warhol’s style of art is often parodyed in pop culture, so it seemed like an intriguing fit for SoccerFest. Usually Warhol art depicts people, but I thought a soccer ball would look really cool. I experimented with a wide variety of colors and came up with about 9 different squares, which I used to create the above designs.
How effective would this design be as a poster? They are very colorful, so they would be sure to attract the attention of many ADD-afflicted children. Of course, that does not do us any good unless we can get the parents to take notice too. It’s definitely something very hard to ignore, and many parents that grew up in Warhol’s era might appreciate the nostalgia. Also, judging from the number of art shows in the area, a lot of people would probably get a kick out of it.
So why did this design get vetoed when I brought it up to my group? Well, the design we went with was more polished and professional, so it seemed to better legitimize our event. We decided against having two separate poster designs to target different markets because we felt that consistency should be a focus this year. Repetition and consistency will breed familiarity and recognition. (This isn’t a one-shot deal; we’re still building this event for the future.) That’s why the SoccerFest posters, palm cards, and our upcoming Valley Advocate advertisement all look very similar.
Don’t worry, you haven’t heard the last of us. Watch out for our college promotions kicking off this week.
Remember, Clif Bar SoccerFest will held on May 10th this year, and registration closes on April 30th. (Oh yeah, we now have online registration. We rock, eh?)
– Shawn Smith
Later that night, we visited Allsport Soccer Arena in Northampton, where we put up more posters (see pic at left) and talked to participants and spectators there about our event. Obviously, we got a lot of interest from the people there. While at the arena, we took grassroots marketing to a whole new level when a group of high school kids challenged us to a pick-up soccer game. The kids were wicked cool, and we all had a great time. (Oh, and by the way, I scored 2 goals.) It’s always great when you have a chance to connect with your target market in such a personal way.
The point of marketing is to capture attention and create interest. We felt that publication materials were an area that could use improvement. Previous poster designs had been very conventional (white paper, black text, lots of text, etc.). However, when you’re competing for the eye of a wandering passerby, you can’t be afraid to stand out. (I had some pretty crazy ideas initially, but more on that later…) I decided to go with a dark background. I took a wicked cool stock art image of a soccer ball (amateur Photoshoppers should check out