Case Study: The success of The Vinyl Room online store

The Vinyl Room was established in 2009 to provide stylish designer wall decals that are a simple and effective way to decorate almost any interior space at home, in the office or at the bach.  Since then the online shop that uses the Spinning Planet E-Commerce system has grown to be very successful so we asked it's owner Michaela James the secrets to her success.

Web Safe Fonts

Here is a quick explanation about fonts on the internet:

Why is there web safe fonts?
Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari can only use the fonts installed on each computer. This means that every visitor to your website needs to have all the fonts you want to use installed on their computer. Different people will have different fonts on their computer, so there needs to be a standard set of fonts.

The most common web safe fonts available are: Andale Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier, Courier New, Helvetica, Impact, Times, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS and Verdana.

But I want a font that's not in the web safe font list?
Your website designer can do this as CSS does allow you to assign a custom ...

Lean Manufacturing background

Lean manufacturing first started in Japan in the years of reconstruction after the Second World War. The Japanese industry and Toyota had the challenge of rebuilding a shattered manufacturing base without recourse to the market or the Japanese economy. This needed to be done under the severe credit restrictions imposed by the occupying forces which caused reduced sales and very limited resources to invest into the new manufacturing plant.

This seemed like an impossible task as Toyota was close to being bankrupt at the time. Taiichi Ohno, who was the company’s Assembly Shop Manager at the time, took on the task of redesigning production using three constraints which he found successful in other industries in Japan:

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Television Advertising

Televisions have been around for just over 50 years in New Zealand. In 2008 research conducted by AGB Nielsen Media Research showed that 3,924,400 people watched television in NZ, the average person watched 3 hours 8 minutes per day in 2008, and on average 35.6% of the entire population (5+) was watching television during the peak viewing period of 6pm to 10:30pm. This suggesting that Television can be a successful medium of advertising.

Strengths

• Television can communicate simultaneously with consumers through both visual and auditory senses.
• Advertisements on television can give products life, or be made to appear bigger than in real life.
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Newspaper Advertising:

Newspapers have historically been the leading advertising medium, but recently with the increasing activity on the Internet the success of newspaper advertising is deceasing. This is also partially due to the fact that newspaper readership has been on the decline for a number of years.

The effectiveness of newspapers can be measured in a very similar way to that of Yellow pages:

• • By using a unique phone number or website you can measure the amount of calls, or site visits.
  • This is important as you need to know where your money is going when spending it on advertising, are customers reacting to your ad - what is your return on investment

Benefits of Newspaper advertising:

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Benefits of Advertising in Yellow Pages

Yellow Pages:

Is a telephone directory for businesses (White pages is for non-commercialised businesses).

Yellow pages can be a useful media for advertising as it:

• deals with active buyers, consumers use Yellow pages as a source to locate businesses

• Yellow and white pages are delivered free to households in New Zealand

• Yellow pages is available online

• they offer the opportunity to measure the effectiveness of your Ads.

Yellow pages measure their effectiveness of advertising with AD TRACK:
AD TRACK measures call volumes through a unique phone number that appears only in your display ad in the Yellow pages. Here's how it works:

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Touch Based Strategies

In our production meeting this morning we were discussing the best way for Spinning Planet and our clients to benefit from new technology.  It got me thinking about how computers used to be so I thought I'd post my musings in this month's blog.

I've been in digital business since 1985. The journey from my first floppy disk based PC to my iPad has been a wonderful experience. Finally we can say that technology is becoming so transparent that it's difficult to put your finger on it. Instead of a cold machine that inhibits our creativity with the swipe of a finger we can touch other people's thoughts, ideas and feelings directly.

Benefits of Radio advertising

The Radio is one of the most used media - people listen to it as they wake up, when driving in the car, in the workplace, and especially when listening for the latest news. Radio can be a successful tool to target your market.

Some of the benefits of Radio advertising include:

• You can connect with customers on an emotional level. Often people relate to their radio station.
• It reinforces brand awareness as it is repetitive
• Specifically targets listeners from specific demographics by choosing your radio station carefully
• Radio is often the first choice for news therefore you are reaching out to active listeners

Measuring Sponsorship

A common fault with sponsorship is that many businesses fail to find ways of measuring its success.  Try thinking of sponsorship as advertising, except instead of paying an advertising agency to produce an advertisement and broadcast it, you are sponsoring an organisation in exchange for them promoting your brand.

Here are some ways you can measure your sponsorship activities:

1. When sponsoring an event find out as much information as possible.  How will the event be advertised?  Will your brand/logo be featured within the advertising?  How many people can be expected at the event?  Who are the other sponsors?  Who sponsored the event last year?
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Mobile Marketing

Within this information era, consumers are constantly being bombarded with new means of marketing communication, challenging media effectiveness (Heinonen & Strandvik, 2003).  Vast media availability has led to fierce competition for consumer attention.  As consumer attention and time has become increasingly scarce a new form of marketing has emerged…Permission Marketing!

Sponsorship Policies

Sponsorship is a form of advertising that has been increasing in popularity.  Where the sponsorship of an event or organisation can be beneficial to both your business and the event or organisation, it is important to make sure that these benefits are balanced between you.  If a business is participating in sponsorship activities it is a good idea to set up some sponsorship policies.

Marketing through Social Networking Websites #4 - Communication

Join groups and be active in commenting and giving out helpful advice.  Make sure that you keep all communication positive.  By offering advice people will start to recognise you as an expert in your field which then rubs off  on your company image.  By raising your profile, social networking will start to work more and more for you. 

One of the benefits of being online is that people can view your profile and get to know you without you having to physically be there or even be online at the time!  Also where word of mouth spreads from one person to ten other people, online social networks allow one person to spread the word to hundreds of people and in even less time.

Tip: Set a time limit to how much you are prepared to spend ea...

Marketing through Social Networking Websites #3 - Making Connections and Networking

Once your profile is set up it's time to make connections and network.  Find relevant connections with other businesses that you are connected to, organisations you support, information that you are interested in, and people who have an interest in your business.  People within social networking sites do not want you to sell products to them.  Remember these sites are about being social and networking.  Here your marketing goal should be to create and foster a positive online image and make connections with people who you may otherwise have been unable to.

Tip: It can be easy to get carried away when making connections as there are a lot of interesting things on the internet!  You may wish to set guidelines as to who and what you want...

Marketing through Social Networking Websites #2 - Your Profile

As everyone knows, first impressions count.  Just like face-to-face networking, with social networking you only get a short amount of time to make a good first impression.  This is why your profile must be dressed to impress!

Write your profile specifically for your audience.  Social networking is more than just handing around your business cards, its like posting your resume for the world to see.  Transparency for a business can really help with company image.  It indicates that you are trustworthy and don't have anything to hide.  Just like a celebrity gossip magazines, people like to read the profiles of people and organisations that they may be interested in dealing with.  Regularly update your profile, and don't be afraid to sh...

Marketing through Social Networking Websites #1 - Creating a Presence

Social networking sites have accelerated to the point that if your not part of them your missing out!  The question is, how do you utilise these sites to bring about more business and ensure your not just wasting hours a day updating your profile and answering posts that are irrelevant.  So how do you make the most of social networking for your business?

First thing is first, you must create a presence within these social networking sites.  Don't just choose the ones that everybody is using, but choose sites that are relevant to you and your business.  Different sites hold different audiences so don't just join all of them and duplicate your information.  Research your audience and create information that will be useful for them.  If...

Copyright and intellectual property in the digital age

Copyright has only been around for about 300 years starting with England's Statute of Anne (1709). However it wasn't until the invention of the Printing Press which allowed for authors to reproduce their works cheaply and in copious amounts before it really flourished. How does this relate to copyright in modern times?

First we need to address the idea of ownership. Is that really what copyright is for? Do we really own something we create? All of the ideas that we used to create have come from previous people and if we're writing a book we might even directly quote them. Even with software many of the components have actually been developed by other people. When Microsoft released Windows 3.11 which was an Internet capable version o...

The power of news

`The very construction of the news is designed to create the largest possible audience ...you're filling up the blank spaces between the commercials.' (Parenti, 1993)

Having worked for television news I can understand the above quote very well. A decade ago news wasn't so much about news but ratings. At one point TVNZ fired most of it's news staff and replaced them with better sets and created a more family styled news program - Mum and Dad read the news, Uncle Jim told us about the weather and our cousin the pretty Maori girl told us what was happening in sport. It hasn't changed much really. News was very commercially driven. Though that is still the case there are other factors influencing news now. Reporters are no longer our s...

Is anything real?

How many times have parents complained that their children spend too much time on the Internet or in games? The statement is probably true because there needs to be a balance between our physical and digital worlds but first let's investigate what is happening in those digital worlds.

What is the Internet?

When most people think of the Internet they're actually thinking about the World Wide Web. The Internet has always been far more than that. At one time, before it began, it was called the Intergalactic Network which indicates that it was destined to be the communications medium not just for our planet but our Galaxy.

"The technology we are concerned with is the transformation of information into digital form, where it can be manipulated by computers and transmitted by networks. The ...

The Internet Generation

There's a a common presumption that the effects of the Internet such as globalisation and global marketing is creating an homogeneous youth culture. Examples of this might be Youth gangs in Auckland mimicking gangs in the United States or even the global marketing of Miley Cyrus. However, as shown by a recent United Nations study, this may not be the case:

The study, World Youth Report, 2005: Young People today, and in 2015, reveals the many ways that modern technology empowers ...