Category: Campaigns

First Issue of The Intersection

I’ve made some refinements to the original issue, which I previously posted as a plug for a podcast idea (see the updated written version below). If you’re wondering, yes, I still want to start a marketing podcast. I’m still exploring ideas on how to execute all of this. Likely, it will be a monthly contribution, again, following relevant topics around ‘A Marketing Communication for Businesses’.

This serves as inspiration and is also creative fuel for my passion project—Blox. Communications, a marketing consultancy and a project I’m building alongside my professional career as a Marketing Manager. It’s a service-based platform designed to support mid-sized businesses across sectors, including but not limited to manufacturing, distribution, and tech, with bold (a.k.a. creative), strategy-driven marketing solutions that connect, differentiate, and drive results.

If you have a project in mind that sparks your interest or if you’re struggling to find direction for your marketing department, let’s discuss and create a plan tailored to your needs!

The website is being developed, but so far you can take a look here.

And if you’re curious, it has been a long time since I’ve posted. Life has been uber busy, and while I know that is the lamest excuse, believe me, I remain dedicated and committed to my art, writing, and design! Posts to come – promise!

For now, enjoy reading The Intersection, and as always, I am open to hearing your feedback or suggestions. Talk soon.

The Innovator’s Dilemma

🚀 Embrace Innovation + Disruption = A Lesson for Every Marketer

I downloaded a new app called Headway. It’s a great way to learn about new books, and I recommend it to anyone. Here are some of my learnings over the weekend.

Topic: The Innovator’s Dilemma (By Clayton Christensen)

The main idea is that creating a new market poses less risk than entering an established market. It is also more rewarding. Nonetheless, small new markets can barely satisfy the required growth requirements of larger businesses.

In other words, businesses may overlook game-changing opportunities because their model is primarily to maintain the status quo. 🛳️ To lead the pack, marketers must be forward-thinking, disruption-leaning changemakers.

Here are a couple of definitions to start –

Innovation: In marketing, this is the fusion of creativity and strategy. Innovation is our ability to craft compelling narratives and experiences that captivate audiences, redefine brands, and transcend conventional boundaries.

Disruption: Closely connected to the above, disruption in marketing is the radical departure from norms, leveraging innovative approaches to challenge conventions and reshape audience/buyer behaviour on a larger scale.

So, what’s the takeaway for us marketers? Here are a few key points to keep in mind:

🔍 Stay vigilant: Keep your eyes peeled for emerging trends and technologies, even if your first inclination is to tell yourself it’s too small or too niche of an idea. Do you want to cross over strategy between industries? Why not see how it fits? Run some experiments to test the waters – but before you launch anything, earn buy-in from your team. Your role will be to convince them with supporting data.

💡 Think like a startup: Embrace agility and experimentation. Don’t get too comfortable with your current strategies. See the value for your audience. How does that influence business outcomes? And if there is a misalignment, you might focus too much on activities and output. Your strategy must respond to change, not be static or a quest for perfection.

🗣️ Listen to your audience/buyers, but watch the market too: While meeting current needs is significant, don’t ignore opportunities outside your existing customer base. Seek out different and diverse points of view. Your creative director friend? He might have some powerful assertions worth exploring. Always carry paper and a pen as it provides immediate focus and stimulation – good stuff for your head.

⚡ Be proactive: Don’t wait for disruption to hit you—seek ways to innovate and stay ahead of the curve. And you can do it by yourself! Self-learning can help learners become more autonomous, organized, self-disciplined, and able to communicate. Just remember – cross-collaboration over silos and hierarchies.

What are your thoughts on innovation and disruption in marketing?

Inception Marketing

In a world where businesses fight for attention, inception marketing can cut the noise. This unconventional technique aims to implant desire into your buyer’s mind, subconsciously intriguing them to make decisions.

But how would you approach this?

As per due course, identifying and understanding your target audience is fundamental. Perhaps serendipitously, knowing who your ‘people’ are is riff with classification – demographic, psychographic, and so on. But how do you distinguish character? Dreams? Accomplishments?

Wear their shoes!

Imagine what it’s like to be a member of your target audience. Consider their daily routines, challenges, aspirations, and sources of joy. Empathize with their experiences, and you can gain valuable insights into what motivates them and how your product or service can address their needs.

I’m not saying it’s going to be easy work. It will take time, bottomless curiosity, and creativity to craft compelling buyer personas that will make a difference in your pursuit of growth. You might even have to look the opposite way. Envision your competitor knocking at your door. How would you understand them? What questions would you ask? Then, alas, you can ask the grand question – what message and associations do you want to embed in your target audience’s psyche?

Your answers should create a deep, emotional connection and tap into their subconscious desires, beliefs, and aspirations.

Remember, storytelling is the key.

Evoke sentiment and eagerness and delve into universal themes that address the human experience.

And sometimes broad is better. Subtle and indirect. The goal is to make a long-lasting impact, build brand affinity, and, most importantly, influence their attitude toward your brand in the long term.

What are your thoughts on this marketing tactic?

Saccharine

Social Media Update 2023

Hey everyone! My gosh, has it been a long time! I’ve been so busy working on my career that I haven’t had two seconds to post on my personal website. Transparency aside, I wanted to share a new series based on a weekly project I run at work called Social Media Update. In this series, I touch on social media and general marketing strategy, and I thought it would be great to share it with you all.

I’ll work my way back to when I started at Longboard, so here is our first instalment! Have fun with it, and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out at info@chonafecanlas.com.

Finding the ‘intriguing angle’ is the idea that we can focus on big-picture topics like our core aspects (innovation, sustainability, quality) to create compelling content that impacts our target audiences.

When creating social media content, we can ask and answer a couple of questions:

Q: What is a significant concern for our business and other businesses today?

A: Our audience demands a greater understanding of where and how our products are sourced and manufactured.

Q: What approach can we take?

A: We can and should comment on sustainability by promoting a transparent and traceable approach. This entails a mix of carefully curated messaging that effectively positions our differentiators while driving an emotional reaction from our audience. 

For example, we could share that all production is on-site and that we have an incredible production team that helps to build our premium products. We would also mention that we pursue responsible consumption and production, which helps create sustainable architecture that positively impacts the environment and the communities around us. 

Our team is mindful that we must not fall into the trap of hoping word will get out and the customers will come. Through proactive and strategic messaging, we can understand why we do what we do, and share that message with the world. 

So, what did you think of that? Do you feel inspired to identify some core aspects of your business, then do a deep dive into how they can impact your target audience? Please share your thoughts!

We’re Tipping and We Need to Find Answers to Our Global Problems Soon

A United Nations report declares we have reached “a breaking point”.

So, what does that mean?

With almost 10% of the 8 billion people living on this earth suffering from malnutrition, 3 million lacking healthy diets, and climate change issues rising to the forefront, it is no surprise that we are in desperate need of a way to produce more food without harming the environment.

The report reviews a few critical ‘climate change impacts’ like reversing water degradation by choosing smart technologies and sustainable farming practices or sequestering greenhouse gases emitted during agricultural activities by employing regenerative farming principles.

And perhaps the most critical solution of all? Deploying technology to enable a more connected agriculture and food industry. In my opinion, we can become powered by data and collaboration, putting us in a better position to come up with answers to big global problems and, in the long term, create a more resilient economy.

Still, to make an impact today, we need to understand the challenges and realities that farmers face now. So your first stop is here.

Read the report – https://bit.ly/3nUtj9b

#savetheenvironment #sustainability #regenerativeagriculture #agriculture #foodindustry #growingpopulation #growthforgood #makingchangehappen

Agtech Career Series

I am so passionate about educational marketing. It inspires me to look beyond the standard expectations of my role. For this project, I tried to situate myself in the mind of a teenager reading a presentation about a job in farming. It’s so much more than that though. It’s igniting their energy with thoughtful and calculated design. It’s creating flawless headlines and engaging copy that will leave them fascinated and motivated. More urgently, it’s about arming that younger generation with the knowledge to pursue a rewarding career in an ever-growing and transitioning industry.

Our primary call-to-action invokes us to – farm smart start today. We’ll provide you with the education and the technology to succeed. To change your operation for the better. To help the planet survive. So let’s band together and fill each other with hope to prepare ourselves to fight with our minds and hearts to beat global problems like a growing population, food waste, and climate change.

I hope to participate in more projects like this in the future and maybe even join the classroom for some face-to-face interaction and hands-on teaching!

Read more about the project I launched here. Alongside a blog series, these are the assets I designed for the students:

And here are the blog graphics that were used to complement the content. I mimicked a rainbow effect because the colours of a rainbow positively impact our brains, affecting emotions, mental clarity, and energy levels. We all know long nights of studying could take advantage of a rainbow or two!

But Local First Facebook Ad

The ‘support local’ movement is a force driving change worldwide. It moves people to want to purchase fresh, healthy products from farmers. It creates a connection between shoppers, where we can ignite conversations to examine how we’re doing our part and why it’s so important. Products are showing up more readily and in places where you least expect to see them. Overall, there is a feeling of togetherness, kindness, and open-mindedness that helps promote awareness and captures the interest of new, existing, and prospective customers.

I wanted to create a fun digital ad that spoke to the nature of the ‘support local’ concept, one that explores options (expressed using a carousel format), eliminates predisposition (articulated in the ad copy), and ultimately grants us the ability to choose (the call-to-action ‘but local first’) – take action (decide what you want to eat for breakfast) or take action through inspiration (are your eggs local? Well, you can get them laid the same day of delivery! How awesome is that!). The inspiration trickles through in a matter of seconds affecting all those involved (conveyed through various images, colours, animation, and the image of a family). As individuals watching the ad, we feel more attuned to thinking about what’s on our plates, how it got there, where it comes from, and why our consumption habits can negatively or positively impact the planet. The focus remains on the following values –

Support local

Empower people

Help the planet

Grow the community

What are your thoughts on this ad? If I could make one change, I would use a graphic of a globe in place of the farming graphic (at the end of the video). Does it speak to you and make you feel empowered to support local? Let me know your thoughts; open to discussing with you!

Food for Thought

We all wonder about things, everyday things, that lead us to research and ponder.

For example, are you starting a new diet? Curious about trying fresh, healthy food? Just nosy about the history of something? Well, these graphics will satiate you.

The #AllAbout campaign explores a variety of fresh, local, and healthy products, giving customers the chance to learn something new in a colourful and digestible way. As part of an ongoing strategy to define the tagline #TrulyFarmtoTable, I explicitly position an image at the bottom of a newsletter, like my brother Alan would say when we were kids eating dinner at the dinner table –

“The Ultimate” a.k.a. the last bite.

It satisfies and perfectly wraps up the meal (conversely idea) (metaphorically conversation).

Are you munching on words or proverbial nuggets or just vegan nuggets?

Well, these images will work in the same way! Once again, satisfying and perfectly wrapping up your dinner.

Another analogy – who didn’t chew Bazooka bubble gum only to unwrap the tiny comic folded neatly on the inside? Take it apart. Pop the pink gum. Immediately unravel the humorous reward.

It’s a ritual in a sense, and these graphics were indeed a ritual to create. So, I hope you enjoy them and that they will entice you to…Munsch!