The Five and Dime

Had a meeting this last week with another marketing person and saw that he had many similar books on his reading shelf that I have on mine. He recommended the new book from James Collins, Great by Choice. We’ve both read Mr. Collins’ earlier book, Good to Great, and recommend it. (Well actually I had it read to me listening to it as a book on CD in the car.)

I thought I’d put some of my favorite business and marketing books in this post. I’ll add to it later, I’ve literally read hundreds of business books and the good people at the local library know me by name.

Good to Great by James Collins

Jim Collins analyzes companies that have taken their companies from good (average results) to great (exceeding profits of their competitors) and sustained it over fifteen years (long enough to show it wasn’t a fluke.) He compares the selected companies with similarly sized competitors in each industry and analyzed the differences. The findings, the traits or “DNA” that were identified in all the “great” companies, were then conveyed as a potential road map for success.

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Logos and business cards selected for upcoming books

The Gunter Agency’s work has been selected for two upcoming books, one on logo design and the other on business card design. The books are put together by David Carter, who has over 100 design industry books to his credit. Mr. Carter has decided that all of his upcoming books will be e-books. The titles are simply LOGOS1 and BUSINESS CARDS 1.

Works from our agency includes logos for The Ad Diner, Forward Theater, Capital Wealth Advisory Group Foundation, Madison Youth Performing Arts Foundation, Ray’s Barber Shop and Precision Tool & Service.

For the business card book, works includes cards for Libris Codex, Forward Theater, Ray’z Barber Shop and Precision Tool & Service.

John Krull (former employee and all around good guy) did the MYPAF logo. Dave Kizer did a 3-D version of the Ad Diner logo that was selected (needing to put that graphic up here.) Otherwise all of the other work was done by Trevor Gunter or myself.

The Gunter Agency has been included in numerous industry “best of” books and periodicals. If you look up “Gunter Advertising” on Amazon, you can find a few of them.

This commercial we created for Verona Vision Care uses still photos of their staff and customers trying on different frames. We then animated the still photos to create the visual effect. Pretty simple idea, but sometimes the simple ideas are the most effective.

The frame show was advertised with localized cable TV one week prior to the show, radio a couple days before, minimal print, posters on location and an email blast. We visited them at the end of the day and they were still busy with customers past the advertised closing time. We heard from the owners that it had been busy non-stop from the time they opened until the time they closed.