Sideshow Creative

Sideshow Creative had an amazing year in 2010.  We enjoyed tremendous growth, created amazing results for clients, and built strong, continuing relationships!  We look forward to another impressive and exciting year moving forward in 2011 (and beyond!).

You’ll see some active and positive changes within Sideshow Creative, as we are continuously working to improve the quality of our work, the strength of our client relationships, and the efficiency and effectiveness of our services.

With a ‘Back to the Basics’ restructuring, Sideshow Creative will be better equipped to offer selective and personalized teams to each client and specific endeavor.

Sideshow has formed and continues to create strategic partnerships with like-minded individuals and businesses in the marketing and related fields to be able to offer the best teams and talents to its clients. We have a large pool of skilled specialists in graphic design, strategic planning, event management, and web services to pull from – so that we can build the perfect talent solution as needed.

It’s a New Year – a year for opportunities and positive change.  CHEERS!

Liz

A product that looks the same as its competitors isn’t going to get noticed.  Do something different—stand out, and people will naturally be drawn to your product.

Take a look at this picture and tell me which product catches your attention.

I don’t even care what’s different about those yellow-packaged Oreo cookies.  I just want them because they are different.  You should think the same way about your product branding.

Say you’re a cookie company competing with Oreo.   Say you even use the same cookie format with a creamy delicious center sandwiched in-between two chocolate cookies. You want to make a name for yourself.  You want people to buy your cookies instead of Oreo’s.

The key is to do something radically different than Oreo.  Use different colors.  A different type of package.  Anything that keeps people from looking at your cookies and thinking, “hey, that’s just like Oreo’s”.

If you want your business to succeed, look nothing like your competitors.  Find a way to make people think of your product first.  After 58 years of recognizing the Oreo brand as the only noteworthy cookie in the market, people will be willing for a chance to change.   You can give them that chance.

Encore Health Resources recently passed the milestone of employing 100 people.  That’s a pretty big deal.  And we here at Sideshow were lucky enough to be able to put together a little something for the people who make Encore as great as it is.

To each of the 100 employees (and a handful of others), we put together a package of 100 LEGOs and mailed them to their homes.  With the LEGOs was a booklet explaining why they were getting 100 LEGOs in the mail and what they should do with them—they were to build something out of their 100 pieces and send it in as part of a contest.

What the recipients of the LEGOs may not know is that LEGOs don’t just come in simple 100-packs.  We had to count out over 17,000 of them by hand.  Brick by brick.

Soon after finishing the project, I came across this fantastic pie chart on The Oatmeal

This is the kind of thing we love to do.  It’s fun.  It’s different.  It may be a lot of work, but the payoff is well worth it.  Encore hired us to celebrate their milestone.  We made that milestone memorable.  If you need a special project done, we want to help.  Even if it means counting out 17,400 individual LEGO bricks.

I don’t know about you, but I used to want to be a Muppet. They had everything. They were furry. They were smart. They lived on Sesame Street. They were all great role models for children everywhere— except maybe one of them.
Yes, I’m talking about the Cookie Monster.
Anybody can tell you what the Cookie Monster’s favorite food is. It’s in his name. And most people can tell you the audience that the Cookie Monster caters to—children. So with the advent of healthier living, parents were less than pleased with the character that, on an educational show, was addicted to cookies.
So…Sesame Street changed their approach. The Cookie Monster now focuses on eating healthy foods, with the occasional indulgence in a cookie while struggling to restrain himself from eating more. And with that shift in focus, a rumor started that they were changing the character’s name to the Veggie Monster. Or the Health Food Monster. Or something equally less endearing than the Cookie Monster.
But guess what. The name stayed the same. After 40 years, they couldn’t change the character’s name. It’s recognizable. It’s fun. It’s who he is. It’s just plain awesome.
Moral of the story: You can change the way you market something without actually changing what you’re marketing. Sometimes a new approach is all it takes. Emphasizing different or new aspects of your company can be all the push you need to garner more attention and increase business. Looking at something from different angles doesn’t change what you’re looking at—it just changes how you see it.

The Cookie Monster is still blue and furry. He’s still called the Cookie Monster. He still eats cookies – just more responsibly. C is still for Cookie. That’s good enough for me.