St. Patrick’s Day: Market your Green

St. Patrick’s Day will soon be here. You know the rules: If you’re not proudly wearing your Irish green on the 17th of March you should, and deserve to, come home with a lot of bruising. Speaking of green…yeah, I know, it’s a stretch…We’re seeing a positive trend of more projects coming to us that are in the LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design review process.

Sweetwater, a mixed-used community in Hailey, ID, LINK is in the LEED for Neighborhood Development Pilot program. The exciting aspect of the Neighborhood Development (ND) program is that it looks at responsible design in a more comprehensive fashion. Instead of designing for one building, one site, the LEED-ND is designed to certify an entire neighborhood.

Our marketing program for Sweetwater uses this information to educate our potential customers about the benefits this brings to them, the Sweetwater neighborhood, the town of Hailey, and to the surrounding environs.

If you’ve created a Smart Design that goes above and beyond the minimums be sure that fact is communicated effectively.

Oh…and don’t forget to wear your green on the 17th.

Read more about LEED here. LINK

Tell Your Story

I love a good story. Doesn’t everyone? Research has proven time and time again that stories are what drive us….and they drive good marketing.

Just think about the really great commercials:

Coca Cola - Mean Joe Greene giving his jersey to a kid
Budweiser - almost any of theirs, especially with the Clydesdales
Apple - throwing the sledgehammer into Big Brother

The common denominator is that they gave us a story; more than just images of the product or just beautiful people (or animals) using them. Way too often ads and videos focus on “stuff” and do not connect with us.

Even when creating videos or commercials for real estate, a church, a school or medical facility, it is important to connect with the viewer. Bricks and mortar can only say so much to us - we need to connect through some emotion.

A script with or without narration needs to be developed to drive the story. Everything from lighting to camera moves to color guides the viewer. So next time you watch a commercial or video production watch to see if it is “stuff” or a story.