One of the things that I emphasize with students is that their ability to listen will serve them well in the advertising world. Many times my best ideas aren’t even my own, I just listen intently and take what the clients say and give it back to them. Most of the time they don’t realize what they are saying. And I think it is a fair statement that we polish the idea a little bit.

One of the best slogans we ever created for a client was the phrase “Know Your Worth” for Royal Neighbors of America. RNA is an insurance company that specializes in marketing to women and has a long history. They were the first insurance company to even offer insurance to women (hard to imagine that there was a time when women couldn’t buy insurance), they were also very involved in the women’s suffrage movement, working to give women in the U.S. the right to vote. They grew very big over these early years and kind of rode that success for years to come.

The phrase “know your worth” wasn’t our invention. It actually was a line buried within a paragraph on their website. It took an astute designer (Holly Stine) to see that line and think that it could be a defining phrase for the company. (Which also shows that it doesn’t matter what your title is, a designer can come up with good copy, a copywriter can have good graphic ideas.)

Unfortunately, after three presidents and four marketing directors within a two year period, the fourth marketing director decided to ditch the “Know Your Worth” slogan. That’s too bad, but often new marketing directors feel it is more important to make their mark and they can’t do that with someone else’s ideas.

The dog house in front of Companion Animal Care in Fond du Lac.

(This is part two of a series. Part one can be read here.)

We’re currently working with an animal hospital in Fond du Lac. One of their problems is awareness. We’re addressing part of that awareness problem with some innovative marketing programs that are literally getting prospects to walk in the door. But one of their problems is that people don’t know where they are located, even though they’ve been located on a very recognizable street for many years. (And Fond du Lac isn’t that big of a place.)

Their monument sign was fine and out near the street where it could be seen easily. Do they need more signage or something different?

I suggested creating a landmark out front that people would notice. We narrowed it down to two different ideas. A pond with a large sculpture of a dog peeing into the pond (you know, a dog version of the cherub statue peeing fountain.) Or building a structure. The structure won out. And what would that structure be? Well a dog house, of course.

They had already hired a talented artist, Therese Randall, to paint murals in their building. She returned to turn the dog house into a piece of illustrative art. Now if anyone asks them for directions, they can say they are “in the place with the big yellow doghouse out front.”