Author: Dana Phelps

Investing in Professional Development

Dana PhelpsBlog, Professional Development1 Comment on Investing in Professional Development
We like when our smart friends at Start-Thinking include us in their blog posts. (Thank you!)

Last week, Josie and I attended the annual Public Relations & Marketing Seminar hosted by the North Carolina Chapter of Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). Like the other years I’ve attended, I found this to be a worthy professional development investment. For more on Clairemont’s professional development philosophy, check out this Start-Thinking post from Kristen Klucas on why and how agencies invest.

I had the pleasure of meeting the very talented Kristen when we both attended a Social IRL session with Sarah Evans… yes, investing in our professional development!

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Doing Our Best at Doing Our Part

Dana PhelpsBlog, Starting a business, Sustainability3 Comments on Doing Our Best at Doing Our Part
Josie rides her bike to work!
 

My son has a little sing-songy expression that he sometimes uses when he’s working through a task: “Doin’ my best, just doin’ my best.” I think it is a good motto for most anything, and especially for individuals and companies trying to live a greener life.

 

When I launched Clairemont, I knew that I wanted our agency to be sustainably aware, and that I wanted to work with sustainable clients. Being green is largely about taking baby steps. I selected office space downtown Raleigh so that hopefully some employees could travel to and from the office without getting in a car (which has become a reality!) and so that we are in walking distance of lunch spots (our faves buy from local farmers), the bank, the post office, etc. to minimize during-the-day driving.

 

Upon opening the office, we’ve found other small ways to do our part including the implementation of a reusable cup policy, participation in our building’s recycling program and printing on carefully selected recycled paper only when printing is a must!

 

When Josie joined Clairemont, I gave her an extra title of Clairemont’s Green Ambassador. The fact that the way she lives her personal life demonstrates that she loves her Mother Earth warmed my heart during her interviews. From a professional perspective, I knew her experience of living in Asheville serving in the AmeriCorps Project Conserve with a focus on conservation issues in North Carolina’s mountainous region would be a great asset to Clairemont clients.

 

In the coming weeks, our Queen of Green will be sharing sustainable tips here on our blog. As we also continually seek ideas on how to protect the environment, please send us your thoughts so that we can keep on doing our best… just doing our best.

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Engaging the Senses

Dana PhelpsBlog, Marketing, Public Relations, , ,
I didn\’t eat one of these candy apples, but I sure enjoyed them as eye candy! Aren\’t they beautiful?

A recent trip to the North Carolina State Fair was a great reminder of how effective engaging the senses can be as a marketing tactic.

Several hours, two buckets of taco salad, a perfectly normal funnel cake, a something else that was called a funnel cake but clearly was not, a couple of lemon shake-ups, a roasted corn on a stick, a half pound of salt water taffy (vanilla — it’s the only choice for taffy), a few cheap game prizes and six goldfish later, our senses had certainly been stimulated!

Thinking about this caused me to flashback to my days as a guest relations intern at Walt Disney World. I remember being surprised to learn that there was a system to blow the smell of the candy shop out into Main Street. Mmmmmmm. And it worked! It was difficult to walk by without going in to buy some of whatever they were making that smelled so darn good.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be looking at other companies who creatively engage the senses to capture consumer attention. If you have interesting sensory marketing examples, please let us know!

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A Rose By Any Other Name…Might not be as Marketable

Dana PhelpsBlog, Furniture PR, Public Relations, Starting a business, , , , ,

Last month I had the honor of guest blogging on Spin Sucks about the art of naming. Since then, Clairemont has named three furniture collections that debuted last week at furniture market, so we thought it would be appropriate to share the post in its entirety on our blog, too. We hope you will enjoy it as much as we enjoyed naming the new collections!

A sampling of the furniture we named that was introduced during fall market.

In a few weeks, I’ll experience my annual ritual of kicking off Fall Furniture market by walking into the showroom and checking out my client’s toenails as I greet her. Yes, her toenails.

My client and I share a love. A love of OPI Nail Lacquer. Take a fashionable color, add a fun, catchy name such as Kiss on the Chic, Gliterzland from the Swiss collection or the best-selling I’m Not Really a Waitress Red, and it goes from a hue we might select once at the nail salon to a bottle we’ll buy to use again and again.

If you’ve ever started a company, you had to name it. If you lead a company or are in marketing, public relations or advertising, you’ve likely been asked to help name a product or campaign. It might not be nail polish, but chances are you want your target audience to respond the way OPI fans do. How do you do that?

Too bad it isn’t as simple as comedian Mitch Hedberg portrayed it to be. “I want to get a job as someone who names kitchen appliances. Toaster, refrigerator, blender….all you do is say what it does and add ‘er’. Hey, what does that do? It keeps shit fresh. Well that’s a fresher….I’m going on break.”

Start with some inspiration. From Altoids to Zima by Evan Morris tells the story behind 125 well-known brands. Morris writes that once upon a time, naming a product was as simple as taking the manufacturer’s name and adding a product description, such as Smith’s Pure and Effective Cough Syrup. Nowadays, as Morris notes, companies often create new words for brands. Google started as “googol,” a word that the nine-year-old nephew of a mathematician made up to mean a “very, very large number, ten raised to the hundredth power.”

Continue reading “A Rose By Any Other Name…Might not be as Marketable”

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