How to Visually Engage your Target Market

How do colors affect purchases?

If colors engage consumers, why are black and white packaged products considered luxury items? What visually draws you to a product or company?

futurederm.com/oliviersandco.com

In Direct Marketing News, Color Your Campaigns to Boost Results by Brent Tartar, SVP of Sales and Marketing for WA Wilde Co. provides an idea of how color is necessary for a campaign, and more specifically for a direct mail campaign in his article. 

• This cost-effective level of measurement can only be attained through proper test­ing against a control. Our testing shows that color does have a significant impact on response rates when used properly.
• The real secret, however, is not just the introduction of color, but using color that is data driven. Many studies show that market­ers gain the best results by using not only personalization of content, but also of color, when it's driven by program automated busi­ness rules.
• This could mean using spot color on a chart or graph to provide added visibility, or a palette change to reflect the target audi­ence, or modifying creative to reflect colors that match to a particular gender or target audience based on data modeling.

Naturally, humans are visually inclined and colors play a significant role in how marketers strategically position their products. Click on and take a look at this infographic to see if you’ve succumbed to the fun-loving brightness of colors:

http://www.hispanicmarketinfo.com

Steve Chazin, Vice President, Product Management for Chatter, Salesforce.com at Salesforce and former Senior Director at Apple even had to rein in their advertising based partly on their colors. Chazin writes, “We washed away the multicolored logo (and by extension the memory of overpriced, underpowered, children’s computers), and we replaced it with a simple, solid black and white logo amid images of enduring heroes who had the passion, courage and dedication to change the world.  In short, we focused on improving Apple’s image while we treaded water and slowly built a better designed computer, the iMac, which would one day save the company.” It is not clear that packaging, colors, and how a product is perceived before it is even used can affect a campaign. In fact, an established brand has to culturally engage the Hispanic market while being visually engaging. According to mediapost.com, “A central tenet of…multi-brand platforms is to focus on providing valuable and culturally relevant content as a way of building brand awareness and affinity and ultimately product sales. The Web and social media are perfect media for content-focused marketing programs. A website, particularly one leveraging a robust content management system, is a potent publishing platform. By artfully integrating social media, brands have a potential for the most widespread distribution system we’ve seen to date to syndicate that content. 

If your brand is successful in English, then take the time you spent working on English campaigns to create a greater outcome with a smaller investment for the Hispanic market. Also, if you want to pull them in visually, what can you do that’s different from your English campaign? Representing an eagle in front of Mount Rushmore for example would have a much different cultural meaning to Hispanic-Americans. Being culturally relevant and visually engaging is the precise way to attract attention and gain a culturally-centric following. What are some ways you and your colleagues can visually and culturally engage the Hispanic market?

How do you visually engage the Hispanic market?

Sources:

HispanicMarketInfo

mediapost.com

Marketingapple.com

Direct Marketing News