Porpoises and fast hummers

Getting your message across at sales conference time.

Yep, it’s coming round to that time of year again. The Annual Sales Conference. Like an end of year exam, it’s an entire year’s planning crammed into a half hour presentation. So don’t waste it! A great strategy communicated badly is like playing Chinese Whispers. Rather than ‘Focus on the needs of your customer’, you could end up with ‘Porpoise only feeds on your fast hummer’. And no one wants to see that.

Here are four things to keep in mind in preparing for your sales conference.

1. Be empathetic

It’s easy to get caught up in corporate tactics. How and why are the company doing this? Of more value is, why should our staff do this? What’s in it for them, professionally and personally. Like branding your company, a well considered and designed brand for your conference should establish an empathetic connection with your colleagues, motivating them to follow through on your strategy for the next 12 months.

2. Keep it short, clear and impactful

Ten minutes is as long as most people can hold their attention on any one thing (brainrules.net). So it’s important to keep them emotionally invested in your presentation. One way to do this is to use produced video to pull at their heart strings, or make them want to leap out of their chair with excitement. Punctuating presentations with an emotional trigger through video or imagery can spare your colleagues conference whiplash*. 

3. Use visuals rather than text

When people hear information, three days later they’ll only remember 10% of it. Add a relevant picture and they’ll remember 65% (brain rules.net).

Take the time to generate relevant visuals to reinforce your message. Remove all but the key words from your powerpoint slides - or remove them all together and just show a clear infographic or image.

4. Wash, repeat

Ever heard of a theory called ‘Spaced Repetition’? It’s about repeating things at increasing intervals to cement long-term memories. You can use it to remember peoples names, but you can also use it to cement your key messages in the minds of your colleagues. Use soundbites on gameday, then follow up with the same relevant, branded content to ‘repeat’ the message. Emails, leave-behinds, even merchandise, can drive your messages home long after the last after-party canapés have been devoured.

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Now’s the time to get in touch if you’d like us to give your strategic messages a boost, with event theming, presentations, video production, sales collateral or promotional items.

* Jolting of the neck muscles due to sudden awakening from sleep during a presentation.

Interview with a Freckle: Johnny Le

Johnny is the newest member of the Freckle team. After a few weeks of settling in, we thought we would sit down with him for an 'unterview', and get to know the person behind the CV.

What do you tell people you do at awkward speed networking events?

I’m a visual communicator that specialises in branding, print and digital design who also knows my way around a camera. Outside of this, you’d probably find me on a bike, in a cafe or cooking in the kitchen.

Where were you before Freckle and why the change?

Before I started at Freckle, I worked as a designer within the property industry, creating branding and marketing collateral for property developers and small home builders. I also had a semi-illustrious career as a construction site photographer until I was replaced with a drone.

Sadly, the previous agency I worked at had to close down, but in a way it was a good opportunity to escape the property bubble and find out what else was out there in the world of design. The opportunity at Freckle was too good to pass up so I quickly jumped on it.

What are your greatest strengths and ‘quirknesses’?

I’m a naturally curious person who’s always looking for new and exciting things. I enjoy the experimenting in my design process, finding new approaches to create something unique. My quirkiness would have to be my absolute hate of velcro, it’s the nails on the blackboard for me.

Everyone has a good app idea, what's yours?

Sometimes I find myself in a “Ready, Steady Cook” situation at home, where I have a bunch of random ingredients and no idea what to make with them. My idea would be to enter those ingredients into the app, which would then come up with some recipes base off those ingredients. It’ll be a great way to save food and money. 

What could Freckle clients ask you about, that you could expertly talk about for three hours?

I could probably talk my head off for hours on the different types of paper stocks, print finishes and print production processes. I’m a big fan of tactility in design and how it can be used to create a deeper connection to a visual concept.

You're on death row, what's your last meal?

It would definitely be a bowl of ramen from a shop called Shin Shin in Fukuoka, Japan! I travelled an hour and a half on the Shinkansen to try it when I was travelling in Japan and it was the best I’ve ever had.

What will your ‘Freckfest’ talk be titled?

I’d call my Freckfast Talk “Connecting in a connected world”. In a world connected by social media, I’ve noticed that we’ve become distant in our face to face social interactions and have increasingly become socially isolated. So I want to explore ways we can get that face-to-face social interaction back.

How to keep business animated over Christmas

A well timed, well designed and well executed seasonal message can build brand awareness and set you up for the new year.

Yep, it’s that time of year again. The Christmas squeeze is on – end-of-year fatigue is setting in and everyone needs everything done before Christmas.

It can be a tough time of year, but it can also be a great time to reach out to your customers, suppliers and colleagues to do some all-important brand, relationship and trust building.

Back in the day, you’d spend hours signing Christmas Cards and licking envelopes (what’s an envelope…?). And don’t get me wrong, your customers will still respond to that personal handwritten touch. In fact, with personal snail mail becoming a rarity; a well-designed, unique and brand-aligned Christmas Card can provide some much needed cut-through.

In 2017, a lot of communication is done on the run, so contact via email or messenger services is far more common – but it can be difficult to cut through. Creativity becomes your key weapon against inbox fatigue. Here are some things to consider for your seasonal communications.

Be Relevant

It’s Christmas, so be Christmassy. If your audience doesn’t do Christmas, then just be full of holiday cheer.

Be personal

Email is a personal medium – make personal references in your email using dynamic content and a segmented database. Perhaps mention the last project you worked on, or the next one after the holidays.

Be useful

Don’t just send a greeting card email. Add something useful to your email, such as a calendar link to your holiday trading hours, or a Christmas Shopping List.

Be Creative

This can make or break the recall of your brand over this busy period. Be funny, be naughty, do something which surprises your audience so that they remember and talk about you over the holidays. But make sure it’s on brand! Doing or saying something that is at odds with your brand values can cause big problems in the new year.

Be Animated - Literally

This is really part of being creative, but it is worth mentioning with regard to email, because animated GIFs are a relatively easy and festive way to create impact in the inbox. Just make sure the creative is well thought out and executed – and adheres to the last 4 points!

We would love to help you come up with a killer Christmas promotional idea or email campaign, so give us a call now to make sure it’s ready BEFORE CHRISTMAS!

Freckle’s War On Waste

I went to Africa a few years ago. We rode a truck from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania out into the Masai Mara. As we entered a small town on the edge of the National Park, we were greeted by the Masai locals - a beautiful race of people. The warm, orange sun crept slowly toward the horizon and the local kids cast long shadows as they herded their goats back to their village. And, drifting along in the warm breeze between the kids, the livestock and the acacia trees were hundreds of bright white plastic bags, empty water bottles, coke cans, crisp packets, cigarette packets, Mars bar wrappers, containers, newspapers and toilet rolls.

In amongst so much natural beauty, there was SO. MUCH. MESS. “What are you doing?” I wanted to shout out to the Masai. And then, I realised that we are no different over here. In Australia we produce 50 million tonnes of waste every year. Of that 50 million tonnes, 12.5 million tonnes is being produced by Australian workplaces. That’s about around 23 wheelie bins per worker per year! So in an office of eight people we are wheeling out 184 bins of waste. In fact, the only difference between the Masai and us is a garbage bin. We clean our waste away so it’s out of sight and OUT. OF. MIND. But the thing is, it’s not gone. Just forgotten.

This got me thinking, I can’t fix Africa, but what can I do in my patch?  Well, I've decided to set us a challenge: To reduce our office landfill-bound waste to one small shopping bag a week by Christmas. Yes, that’s right: from two 50-litre bags to one small shopping back per week. We’re looking at reducing our waste by about 75%. It’s huge.

Here are the three things I think we could focus on to start:

1. Recycling.

Freckle's strata don’t provide recycling facilities so I’m going to create a bag so I can take our recycling home with me once every week or two. This means I’m going to care a great deal about how much paper we use. I’ll also pull together a poster that shows us which plastics can be recycled so it makes it easy for us to get it right.

2. Eat or repeat.

Like Mum always said: “There are starving people in Africa.” It’s true, but there are two million starving people in Australia as well. I believe the key here is: Don’t buy more than you need, and if you do, store it properly so you don’t have to throw it out after one day. Obviously, some bits of food we can’t eat, so I’ll be ‘repeating’ them. Yes, I’m saying we should start our very own Freckle worm farm.

3. Multi-use. Reuse, Repurpose, Upcycle.

If we make something, let’s aim to keep it in the system for as long as possible. This goes for projects we do for clients as well. And once that something has become useless, let’s try to find another use for it.

I also think we could make a real effort to print double-sided. I know we do already, but it’s worth noting that for every 100 reams of paper printed double sided, we can save about one cubic metre of landfill, a tonne of greenhouse gas, and a couple of trees. Not to mention a 50% dollar saving for the business.

Finally, let’s not use it in the first place. Plastic bags are a good start. So, for our garbage let’s start using bags that are already in the system, instead of buying new ones. I know, plastic bags are bad, but practicality and hygiene in a work environment means that we have to be smart about it. And, of course, coffee cups … I ran some numbers. If eight of us have one takeaway coffee a day, that’s 1,440 cups a year – more than 20kg of waste. Hands up, who needs a reusable cup? How about we order them this week?

Let’s do this together. Over the coming months, I’m sure we can all come up with ways we can make our 83sqm a more pleasant place to be.

There are plenty of resources out there to help. One worth having a look at is Business Recycling. It is run by Planet Ark and NSW EPA and provides loads of information to help businesses reduce their impact on waste generation.

Just because we can’t see rubbish, doesn’t mean it’s not there. Rather than figuring out new ways to deal with our waste, how about we stop creating it in the first place?

What are your top tips for reducing waste in the workplace?

Want to know more? Here are some fantastic resources about waste and what we can do about it:

OzHarvest

The Conversation

Foodwise

Business Recycling

EPA

Freckle: Designers of Intelligent Communication

A few months ago we embarked on a journey to rediscover what it meant to be ‘A Freckle’. We decided that the reason we're here is to use design to enrich the lives of the people we work with, the brands they represent and the audience they are trying to reach. But that takes more than just creating something beautiful. It requires digging deeper to find what's truly valuable for your audience. It requires intelligent design.

So we've repositioned ourselves as Designers of Intelligent Communication: Brands. Campaigns. Events. 

Our new website represents this new approach, encompassing everything we're known for in the industry – ease of use, scaleable service, direct access to senior designers – but with a new focus on helping you to find, own and communicate your hidden brand values and enrich the lives of your audience.

This is the continuation of a story that started over 12 years ago, in the back room of a Surry Hills office block, and we can't wait to start writing the next chapter.