Today I was involved in a side project which required the whole of our group to think up some ways which we could promote our company to possible clients, preferably local businesses. We had to think about:
- Networking
- Targeting new companies
- The cost (can't cost a lot of money)
- Needs to deliver

We began by thinking about the types of companies and clients that we would be targeting are services at and how these types of companies would all be able to link together in some way. We came up with Record Labels, Fashion, Drinks, Charities, Food and Education as the main areas to consider. We felt this was quite a wide area to target in and could show links between each other, however we narrowed these categories down by removing food and education as we felt they would not link in with all of the other categories. We also felt that there were not many companies in this category that were local and also that would be able to fully benefit from our services.

For ways to promote the business we thought about virals, creating a set of headphones to send out to clients which would link in with music and fashion. The headphones could then use some form of audio to deliver a message to the client.

We then began thinking deeper, looking into our brand name (13PlusOne) and using this within our promotion ideas. We thought about sending companies an apple a day for every 14 days relating to 13PlusOne. We also thought about sending shoes to show SOUL. The shoe idea was also linked with getting your foot in the door so by placing a shoe outside the possible clients door. However we then came up with problems for this idea relating to gettin the shoe in the door, which led us to thinking about a paper based shoe design being used to slip under the door. We then felt that using a paper based image lost the feel that the shoe gave out.

The day consisted of a great amount of thought processing and ideas generation which led to us bringing all of our ideas together on some larger sheets of paper and having a group discussion on what idea to use. We had struck a problem as we had achieved some effective ideas but we knew we could generate something better and more effective with less constraints and cons. We were stuck at an idea of using bottles and postcards, which resulted in us trying so hard to think up ways of putting it to use, when we eventually looked closer to the actual design of our brand identity, which led to us to linking the green plus to doctors, pharmacies, cures and then coming up with the use of a prescription as a bases for a promotion idea. The prescription could use some creative copy and type to show some play on words which would be technical, creative and interesting to look at. The use of showing our company as a cure to design problems was a strong idea that was struck upon.

After this idea had been chosen we split into groups of three and each created some promotional materials relating to the pharmaceutical theme. The ideas that my group came up with were to create a medicine paper bag promoting our company with a prescription, a sachet of sugar, a tipex and also a rubber in the shaoe of a pill. We presented our ideas to one another and ended up choosing the survival kit to work as our promotional materials.

My groups ideas:

Our final design ideas:

Other groups designs ideas: (chosen design on the left)