We love to do pro bono work when the opportunity and time to do it converge. Recently, we had an opportunity, and we decided to make the time.

I’ve known the Hoover family for about 10 years. Chris and I coached church basketball together for 4 years, his children have grown up with mine, his wife has taught my kids, and we generally count Chris and his family as fantastic people we are fortunate to know.

Around 6 years ago Chris was diagnosed with MS, and it shocked everyone. It was hard to understand how someone so strong, vibrant and full of energy could be diagnosed with something so life changing so quickly. That shock immediately turned to action as friends rallied behind Chris and his family, and in a matter of a few short months, Team Hoover was born. Team Hoover is a group of devoted family and friends that rides in Chris’ name at the New Bern MS bike ride. Every year this group rides hundreds of miles and volunteers countless hours to raise money for MS. Chris leads the team, and his enthusiasm and energy inspire and motivate everyone who participates.

That energy and spirit turned a passionate group of friends into a non-profit organization, and the ride has led to greater fundraising, and FUN-raising, opportunities. As the organization grew, so did the need for a logo. Family commitments (and honestly the idea of my butt on a hard bike seat for 100 miles!) have kept me from attending the ride, so I was thrilled when I got to donate time to create a logo, support Chris and help the cause.

The process started, interestingly enough, on a basketball court. I sketched initial ideas while sitting in the stands during my son’s basketball practice. Those sketches turned into 8 logo ideas. All the ideas were based on parts of a bicycle, the concept of team, and the verse on the team jerseys “…mount up with wings like eagles…” Once we had some ideas, we picked a favorite, made some tweaks, and voila – an awesome group had an awesome logo for their ride!

Thanks for giving me the opportunity, Team Hoover – we’re proud of the logo and loved seeing it splashed all over New Bern this past weekend as so many showed up to support a great family and a great cause. Hopefully this got me off the hook for riding at least one more year!

My wife and I have our 10th anniversary this summer, and to celebrate we are going on a trip. Taking the trip was the easy decision, deciding where to go has not been so easy. Our destination has to be far enough away so it’s different and special, but not too far away in case we are called back to parent duty. It has to be a place where my wife can lounge on the beach whenever she wants, but have enough to do that I don’t get bored sitting in a beach chair all day. To decide where to go, we have burned up bandwith checking out hotels, resorts, and travel sites looking for the perfect location. In our search, I noticed just how fast my wife makes a decision about a place after looking at their site for no more than 10 seconds. Before a site had barely loaded, I would hear “Not Secluded Enough,” “Too Kid-Friendly,” or “Too Expensive.” She was making these decisions without reading one sentence of their well-written copy, or enjoying their soothing slide show of spectacular pictures. Impulsive, you say? Not really. In his book “Blink,” Malcom Gladwell discusses how we subconsciously make decisions in “a blink of an eye,” with what he calls thin slicing. Our brain makes incredibly fast decisions based on the infinite number of environmental factors it can assess. Sometimes these decisions are accurate, and sometimes they aren’t, but they do happen. When my wife looks at a web site and makes a decision about the type of place it is in 10 seconds, it’s her brain instantly processing what the page is communicating through layout, design, color, pictures and every other visual element, combined with her life experiences and natural perceptions. Is it fair to judge a place so quickly without going through the details of the site? Probably not. Does it happen? Definitely. If you use your site to make an impression on current and potential clients (who doesn’t), take a step back from all the content, all the cool links and bells and whistles and try to look at it from the perspective of a first time visitor. What does your site say in 10 seconds?

Marketing guru Seth Godin offers this take on how marketing is narrowing its focus. We’re preaching this to our clients — especially taking advantage of email campaigns and Variable Data Printing to speak directly to your audience.

Mass production and mass media

We invented televisions so marketers would have a way to run TV ads. We have magazines so marketers can run magazine ads.

Make no mistake: mass media exists because it permits mass marketers to do their job.

Mass production, the ability to make things cheaply, in volume, demanded that we invent mass marketing–it was the only way to sell what was being made in the quantity it was produced.

The internet, though, was not invented so marketers could run internet ads.

And, at the same time, mass production is being replaced by micro production, by the short run, by customization, by the long tail.

Just in time, mass media is going away too.

Mass marketers don’t like this and they often don’t even see it. They’re struggling to turn Snapchat and Twitter and other sites into substitutes for TV, but it’s not working, because it’s an astonishing waste of attention.

The Ed Sullivan Show existed to sell Jello to everyone. Today, there’s no everyone, and certainly no media channel that can sell everyone, cheap, to the folks who market Jello.

This is an ongoing challenge for mass marketers, and the opportunity of a generation for everyone else.

For fifty years, TV and TV-thinking was the shortcut. Make average stuff for average people (by definition = mass) and promote to every stranger within reach. It worked.

But mass is fading, fading faster than our desire to be mass marketers is fading. The shortcut doesn’t work every time now, and the expectation that success is the same as popularity is still with us.

Fifty years ago, producers and marketers got smart. They saw the miracle of mass marketing and they adopted it as their own. They amped up mass production and bet on the masses.

The smart creators today are seeing the shift and doing precisely the opposite:

Produce for a micro market.

Market to a micro market.

When someone wants to know how big you can make (your audience, your market share, your volume), it might be worth pointing out that it’s better to be important, to be in sync, to be the one that’s hard to be replaced. And the only way to be important is to be relevant, focused and specific.

 Click to see more of Seth’s posts

First Story.

My morning routine involves getting my toddler out of his crib (usually before 6 am) making coffee, and then checking out the latest scores and news on my laptop. It’s the only time during the day for me to catch up on all the things that are happening in the world. A couple of weeks ago my cable company robbed me of my cherished morning routine through a disruption of their internet service.

If that had been the first time it was down it wouldn’t have bothered me, but our cable and internet service had been anything but reliable leading up to that point. As I drove to work still a little perturbed about my morning, all I could think about was the cable companies total disregard for a high-level of service and I decided to look into changing cable/internet providers. There’s more competition than ever which has led to great incentives for switching companies.

Before I could seriously research an alternative, a letter arrived in the mail from my cable company. The letter started with a description of the problem that occurred and the steps they were taking to keep it from happening again, but how the letter ended is what kept me from switching. The company actually apologized for the interruption, and then offered me a free movie as a “gesture of concern for your inconvenience.” It seems I was wrong, the company does care about their level of service, at least enough to write a letter and offer me a free movie. I’ve been dying to watch “Hangover” again so I was pretty happy, and I never looked into switching companies.

Second Story.

There has been a Coke machine here at Metro for about 15 years. We drink way too many soft drinks, so it gets a lot of use. Like most vending machines, our Coke machine would eat some change every now and then. Like most people instead of immediately calling for service we beat on the machine then dump more money in, and when that doesn’t work then we call for service.

Recently the machine ate 70 cents. Not a big deal, but we definitely wanted to be able to use it (remember, we drink a lot of soft drinks), so we called the person that owns and services the machine. He comes out, opens the machine, and hands us 50 cents. We ask about the other 20 cents, and he sarcastically said that’s what he was charging us for coming out to fix the machine. Again, a break-down in service got us thinking . . . and calculating. One person here has bought at least one drink a day for the last five and a half years. That adds up to over $1,000. That’s just for one employee, at one drink a day (some of us have been known to buy much more.) When we started calculating just how much we were spending, it started to make sense to pool some money and make a run to the wholesale store once a month and keep drinks in our fridge. It’s less expensive, and we don’t have to worry about losing any more money.

The Moral of the Stories…A little change can go a long way.

Every company, no matter how large or small, will have a product or service that does not meet a customer’s expectations at some point in time. How a company handles the unhappy customer will keep the customer and actually strengthen the relationship, or will lose the customer…probably forever. Recovery is the strategy of keeping a customer after not meeting his or her expectations.

In the first story, the cable company was able to “recover” because they accepted responsibility, apologized, and then provided something I valued to compensate for the loss of service. Their cost for recovery was really low. They had to print and mail the letter, but letting me watch a movie cost them nothing. So for 20 cents (the price of the letter) the cable company kept a client that will spend thousands of dollars over the next few years. That’s a strong ROI.

In the second story, there was no accepting responsibility, there was no apology, and there was obviously nothing given to us that we valued. All the Coke machine owner had to do was give us the entire 70 cents back. We would not have started contemplating just how much we had put in that machine over the last few years, which led to our decision to change how we buy soft drinks. By keeping the 20 cents the Coke machine operator lost thousands of dollars in future revenue. That’s a negative ROI.

The Coke story is a strong case for Recovery, but let’s take it a step farther. Imagine if the Coke machine operator had given us the entire 70 cents back, apologized, then given us a free Coke. That would not only have compensated us for our loss, but more importantly it would have strengthened our relationship. We would have told that story all day, “Dude, I got a free coke!” He would have showed us he valued us as a customer and our relationship would have been stronger than it was before. His only cost would have been the wholesale cost of a Coke.

It’s definitely easier to keep an existing customer than it is to find a new one, so if you don’t have a Recovery strategy, it may be time to develop one. Look for ways to show your client you value their business when something goes wrong. It could have only cost the Coke Machine operator a 20 cents, but now it’s going to cost him thousands of dollars.

With a tag line of “A Fresh and Responsive Approach to Residential Real Estate” the Jackson Law firm needed a strong identity to communicate it’s message. Metro created the logo, stationery, a website and social media graphics to help the firm brand itself as fresh and responsive. High quality business cards were printed to make an impact when handed out. Metro helped the firm create a Social Media Content Management strategy to engage clients through facebook, linkedin, twitter and google plus, centered around hootsuite and their WordPress site to make it easy to manage.

An awesome project for an awesome person.

Thanks for the opportunity to help, Oie!

In 2014, we finally lost our HP 8100 printer. This guy had been around for 20 years, printing countless number of mockups, samples, direct mail letters and orders. You will be replaced, but you’ll never be forgotten!

It’s political season again, and as usual we are helping a number of candidates with a variety of projects from web site development to direct mail. “Woofer” Davidian threw his hat in the ring for District Court Judge. Yes, he goes by “Woofer, “ which created a great opportunity to do something special with his logo.

Woofer’s actual name is Vartan Ambar Davidian, III, and as Woofer himself said, can make some potential voters think of him as a terrorist! But he has gone by Woofer since he was a small child, so using the nickname was an easy decision. The challenge came in how to treat the nickname in the logo and subsequent branding. We embraced the nickname idea, and decided to use his actual signature as part of the logo. It adds a great personal connection in the logo. To offset the more casual nature of the signature, we used a traditional serif typeface and navy blue for his base color. The traditional last name treatment and color contrasted well with the signature in a lighter blue to create a memorable logo.

The concept for the logo translated well into Woofer’s web site. The navy background works well, and he had a great picture taken by Val Stone that reinforces the concept of professional/judge contrasted with the personal connection. Facebook is a big part of his campaign, so we designed his facebook page, and tied that into his web site, along with contribution buttons placed conspicuously throughout his site and facebook page. In a little over 2 weeks Woofer had over 300 facebook fans and donations were coming in through paypal.

The branding also worked well in printed pieces. We created a handout piece that garnered a great deal of attention, but the invitation we created and mailed for his Kick-Off event was described as the most impressive invitation one person had ever seen.