Latest Advertising - Give us your input

Hi All,

Not sure if any of you have seen the lastest round of adverts we have been doing? We've been trying to add a bit of a theme for the next few as something a bit different.

Below is the first one we ran at the beginning of the year.



This 'Epic Productions' one moved us nicely on to the 'Film' type theme................



Below is a sneek preview of the next advert being released (you are all truely honoured as this is like the red carpet preview the stars get!!)






and this is what the original movie poster looked like





This now leads us nicely for some input from you guys:

What should we do next???

Well there's the obvious..............................

Blazing Saddles!!

Some Like it Hot!

Chariots of Fire!!

Over to you........If you think of something good you never know we might turn your idea in to reality. Doesn't matter how corny you think it sounds we wanna hear your ideas.

Dean & Steve.

Look good. Bit too abstract for my mind though! Me not knowing the "classics" much.

what about

It ain't half hot mom

Steam Traction World - Steam the final frontier (start Trek).

Steam Wars - A long long time ago in a factory far far away

Steam World and the seven dwarfs (take your pick of who is which dwarf)

Still thinking

Come on Guys & Girls,

Get them thinking caps on lol.

I'll tell you what I'll give you another few as examples:

The Incredibles

Great Expectations

Fantastic Four (can obviously only have 4 models in that advert!)

All the best

Dean

How about a fist full of dollars for the 4" Foden and A few dollars more for the 6". Same could be applied to the other engines of 2" and 4" scales.

the dirty dozen....or half dozen

You can tell I'm not in advertising....still thinking though.

Steaming in the rain.

Enter the dragon.

In the heat of the night.

not a film but still a theme that is popular over here....HOOTERS!!!

"Whistle down the wind" - the musical poster is better

"Steam Experiment"- the Val Kilmer movie

"Steam Heat" - 70s raunchy film


Mike

Ok, Ok, these might work!!

"Red Dragon" (Brian M's Burrell!!)

"The Holy Grail" (Monty Python of course)

"Double Impact" (compund engines)

"Magnificent Seven" (you decide which 7)

"Carry On -----" (you choose)

"Deep Throat----plate"

"Dean does Daventry" (think about it guys)


The Lock Stock one is pretty cool actually, I like it Dean.


Brian

bjwlancashire wrote:
"Dean does Daventry" (think about it guys)

Debbie Does Dean?

Woah... this is a build forum guys!

Yes but note what this section is called

A hot summers night steam
or closer to the original
A mid summers night steam.

The Final Countdown
"I feel the need for steam!"

You are only 33 kits away from your dream engine.

Steve & Dean
If I were a potential customer again seeing those ads would make me less likely to buy or even contact you. It would be enlightening to know what recently signed customers make of them and what type of pitch would be most successful.
While I don't count what does your next customer want to see?

PS next year ad campaign will be easy - completed models featuring a different constructor each month, Picture of pride and joy in steam and short bio about the builder. I suggest Lynn for issue 1.

Hmm, difficult subject this.............I tend to agree with Julia on this, as I feel you don't need "gimmics" to sell your engines. There is nothing "gimmicky" about your products, they are beautiful bits of engineering & should be marketed as such, ie lots of pictures of the actual products & possibly a few testimonials from delighted customers. Very streight, simple & hounest!!
Market as thoe it is a Rolls Royce product!!
Regards,
Tony

why not get some nice pictures of your engines on the adverts too instead of pictures of fullsize engines..

or render them off in 3D from the cad files. I'm a 3D artist so you can commision me to render them out if you like? for cheap as chips prices too..

here's and example piece of work! (This is your red carpet for my artwork as i never really show unfinished pieces) i've had to model the howl engine in 3DS max in my spare time and do all the artwork, lighting and shaders.
If you sent me files that are exported from solidworks for cad or 3DS format i can load them straight into MAX then it's a simple case of setting up the shaders and rendering them off for you to add to the adverts. might look better but i'd need to test one to see how they would come out.. PM if you want me to do a test Dean.. Jo

Looks very good, still very hard to get a curve though I see.

I see "Lock in Stock" in the April edition of Old Glory. Looks better in print, and very eye catching compaired to the others.

Hi All,

Many thanks for your input so far.

Let me put my 'take' on it. Please excuse if it's short and blunt i have plans this evening so i'm writing quick without much thought.

I'm no advertising or marketing expert but personally i think the adverts do exactly what we want them to do. Over the last 4 years we've ran loads of different ads. Some people would say some of the ads we've ran are 'boring' or 'repetative' (the one's with the finished agricultural engine picture'), some would say some of them were controversial (the 'Kits that fit ad' or the '50% off advert where we were referring to the size not the price!'), some would even say some of them were witty (Dear Santa, all i'd Lyka for Christmas or the ad where we spelt Unbeleivable wrong and had lots of calls from customers who'd never actually taken the time to read one of our adverts before).

Even this on the forum to me shows it works. People are talking about it. How many people notice some of the other companies adverts in Old Glory each month?.....I bet very few especially if they are always the same. You just flick passed thinking as there's nothing to grab your attention. Whether purchasing or not we've been told that there are subribers who actually look for our advert to see what it's about.

To me sales/marketing/advertising is more than just saying what you do every month. It's about creating a brand. That's what differentiates one deoderant from another, one insurance company from another and so on. What did a woman laying in the bath actually have to do with eating a Cadbury Flake or Singing i'd like to teach the world to sing have to do with Coca Cola.

Of course, I do still believe it is important to push what you do and when we have finished Showman's engines and Road Loco's we should be putting in some adverts containing these and the build sequences. However we currently don't have this so it feels a bit too repetative pushing the agricultural picture all the time.

Our main problem is we don't really know what works and as we aren't marketing men we just try different things. During the final 6 months of last year we took orders for almost £1 million pounds (twice what we hoped) and can honestly say we couldn't say exactly where they all came from.

Between, the shows we do, the advertising, the quality, the finished engines already out there, the current customers who are building, the forum and the build websites, something must be working.

Hopefully its a bit of everything.

Dean

It certainly stands out from the rest. £1m in orders.....that's a good result and shows the confidence there is in the market and your products. Well done.

Cheers rob, it's not been smoothed yet hence the curves having edges. You model them with less detail in the curves to make it quicker. Then u use something called mesh smooth on the final render and it smooths them all off, it's nowhere near finished yet tho but I'll post once I get it done.

I actually really like the adverts tho dean. I think being catchy and bold is better as it'll make people actually read the advert.

Dean, whatever you do, do not to try and grow big too fast. There are lots of small business the world over that have fallen apart by trying get too big too fast. Chris

the next 'step' is giving a price for the 6inch burrell single and watch the business expand even more...

.....that would give the courier something to complain about. We may see Steve and Dean Delivery Ltd out on the road again delivering kits for that one.

I agree with Graeme, the market is good for 6" as full size are so over priced and there's storage and transport to consider too. I reckon if you could get a kit out for about 30 to 35 K in total there would be some interest.

Hi, me again,

Just thought i'd comment further on my earlier post. As i said early on in that post i was typing in a bit of a rush as i had plans that evening. Reading back through my post it does sound a tad defensive. That wasn't how i was meant to come across at all so apologies if it does.

The reason we titled this 'Give us your input' was that's exactly what we wanted. Whether good or bad or even if you thought the latest adverts were a good idea or not, so thank you for taking the time to contribute. Maybe i'll just have to learn to take constructive critisism less personal

All i was basically trying to say that as a company we feel it is important to advertise regularly. If we run the same old advert featuring the Burrell Agricultural engine then on the whole most people wouldn't even bother reading it. So we try to vary it a bit. Admittedly in some of the adverts, if an individual was to see it for the first time, they would wonder what the hell we are all about, but hopefully that might lead them to look at the website.

Advertising/Sales/Marketing is so difficult to do when firstly like Steve and I you only have limited knowledge of it and secondly you really don't know exactly what works. At Great Dorset Steam fair this year for example we chose to put adverts/jingles on their radio, Steam FM. We don't have a clue how many individuals came to the stand because of that advert but we do know we had more sales than ever before (we do know of one individual who only visited the stand because of the radio jingle and placed an order). Does this mean next year we try it again as we had our busiest show ever or do we say it was just a coincidence and a combination of customers, the models on the stand and the current product range was what worked.

I don't think there is a right or wrong answer but would still love to hear anyone elses opinions whether positive or negative about our adverts, the models on the show stand, the look of the stand itself, the flyers and the website.

Dean