MZInc. Makes Small Budget go far, Casting Hangtags as the Branding Star

Challenge

A leather manufacturer had great new collection, with good designs and craftsmanship but no budget to advertise. No brand name, no brand logo, no advertising or marketing materials, no national recognition, just a great product. Another thing that they didn’t have was an advertising budget. They only had a small budget set aside for trade show promotion. MZInc.’s challenge was to successfully market their brand to as many consumers as possible within the constrained budget that they had allocated for trade show promotion.

Solution & Execution

The first priority was to create a solid brand identity with the logo design. The logo is important because it provides a visual umbrella that covers all of the various products and unifies them into one recognizable brand. In order to create distinguished marketing pieces that captured the texture and feeling of the leather, most of the budget was spent on photography, models and great paper. The creative direction was executed to make it look like client has millions of dollars to spend for a big campaign. Each shot of the catalog was of a quality that could have been an ad by itself.

Trade

Database marketing was employed to launch a b2b mailing. MZInc. recommended that the client acquire a targeted mailing list of trade buyers and introduce their new "brand" with a catalog that did not have the look and feel of a trade piece, but more of a consumer branding campaign, which buyers could relate to.

Consumer

How to brand to the consumer though? To keep costs down, the same "trade/branding" catalog that was mailed to retail buyers, was scaled down into accordion fold hangtags that resembled mini catalogs, which cross-sold the entire line. Exceptional visual presentation, high quality paper, and 8-page hangtags with oversized brand logos were unusual and impressive enough that customers would not discard them like most other hangtags. In MZInc.’s small test studies the reactions were more than positive, arousing curiosity and brand recall. This turned out to be an innovative and inexpensive way to reach millions. Since our client shipped a huge number of garments, this guerilla style marketing was a way of promoting the brand with absolutely NO budget for print advertising.

photography by Ike Karnick