Marginhancers

Details: Our Thank You! referral rewards program.

We love referrals!
If you know someone we can help, we want to thank you from the bottom of our heart. And we want you to know you’ve been thanked, so you’ll keep those referrals coming.
If you send a client, colleague or portfolio company to Marginhancers for a Branding Audit, we’ll send you a $20 gift card to Panera Bread or amazon.com.
If your referral signs on for an Assessment of Strategic Potential, valued at $1297 or more, we’ll send you a $50 gift card.
If your referral joins one of the video plans at ezbiztv.com for a year, we’ll take you, your referral and two guests to The Pasta House or the Olive Garden for dinner.
And if your referral hires us to implement the recommendations in a Branding Audit or an Assessment of Strategic Potential, we’ll take you and them, plus two guests, to Morton’s for a truly outstanding dinner.

Need some help?

Unlike traditional marketing firms, we don’t bill by the hour at Marginhancers.

And projects don’t expand endlessly, just because people need a general-ledger number to bill their time to.

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Producing the piece.

Your creatives should come back to you with a piece that brings forth a highly emotional response.

Preferably, the one the brief called for. Because without a strong, nearly visceral emotional response, the reader won’t act. Instead, the brochure will go in the trash or on a pile of paper that will sit around for a month – and then get thrown in the trash. [More]

Developing the message.

Now, ask for a brief. Or write one.

This is your blueprint for what you’ll communicate – a more detailed version of the six questions you just answered. [More]

Do you need a brochure at all?

Don’t ever just decide to print a brochure.

Start with these questions:

1. Why communicate now? What’s the message? (Never mind that the warehouse needs to move 18,000 widgets out by the 25th of the month. What will the widgets do for the audience? Put one way, will they meet a need on Maslow’s hierarchy? Or, put another, how do they make meaning, in the sense that Guy Kawasaki describes it?)

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Lesson 1. Arcane jargon: Print production.

Today: Everything you ever wanted to know about print production, but were afraid to ask.

We’ll start with printing a simple brochure, because it’s something we’ve all stumbled through at least once. Even that’s changed a lot in just the last couple of years. But it still has terms that threw us all the first time we went through the process.
Now, three things need to happen before you ever need the arcane terms.
But since this is a glossary, we’ll put those discussions in their own articles, and you can click on their subject lines below to cover them at your leisure.

Deciding to do anything at all.

Developing the message.

Producing the piece.

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Guy Kawasaki on making meaning.

I can never get enough of this video.

Guy Kawasaki is just too smart – if we did nothing but follow his advice (more than just this), we’d all be rich.