The Rosewood team is working remotely and fully operational. Our physical location is closed.
The Rosewood team is working remotely and fully operational. Our physical location is closed.
“I’m often running behind when it comes to marketing.” “We’re dumping dollars into marketing with no results.” Sound familiar?
Henry manages three businesses, including Stable Hollow Construction, a specialist in restoring historic structures. Two years ago, he entered the Rosewood Marketing Guide™ Path. “We’ve made a lot of progress in the last two years. I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” Henry declared.
In 1855 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”
Over the years this has been boiled down to this pithy statement: “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.”
This seems like a simple formula (better product = sales success), but you can probably identify what is missing: how is the world going to find out about the better mousetrap? We could revise that formula this way…
“We never really had a logo,” states Japh Miller from Buckeye Metals Sales in Frankfort, Ohio. “We were not branding ourselves well in the market.”
For years, Buckeye simply used its name with a basic metal profile above it. At small sizes, the logo quickly lost recognition. At any size, it lacked the clarity and impact to help fuel a stand-out business.
Before moving forward with other marketing goals, Buckeye needed to brand itself to stand out from the crowd.
“How has business been going for you?” Fred asked James.
“It’s crazy busy,” James replied, “We are booked all the way into next year. I’ve never seen it like this. We just can’t keep up.”
How many times has a conversation like this happened in Anabaptist circles in the last year? Many of our businesses are thriving like never before. Employers are having trouble finding and keeping employees to handle the surge of work.
If your business is in this situation, you might wonder whether you should stop your marketing campaigns. After all, why invest in marketing when you are deluged with orders? This article provides insight into this question.
From his experience managing shed lots, Dave Miller knew that sales catalogs too often confused clients rather than making it easy for them to decide what to buy. “Many shed lots have generic catalogs with separate price lists,” Dave relates. “Customers have trouble figuring out shed prices.” As a result, salesmen would spend considerable time answering basic questions to guide customers through the buying process.
As owner of The Olde Sale Barn, a distributor of Amish-built storage sheds on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Dave needed a catalog refresh. He wanted to provide his customers with a clear road map rather than a confusing puzzle.
“Did you move your business to Kansas?” Jeff asked.
“No!” Sam responded. “We are still right here in Lancaster County, PA where we have been for the last 40 years! Why do you ask?” Jeff was one of the top dealers of Free Rock Equipment and certainly would have been informed of any major changes in the company.
Sam soon learned that one of Free Rock’s dealers in Kansas had purchased the domain name freerockequipment.com on the internet. The dealer then set up a website at that website address that posed as the manufacturer’s website. The information was misleading and caused a lot of confusion with other Free Rock dealers and with equipment users.
Every businessman knows the struggle to develop ads that effectively market his products. Nearly every manufacturer knows the dismay of seeing dealer ads that don’t present his branding accurately.
This is the story of a manufacturer who worked with Rosewood to simplify ad development for its dealers while ensuring its own brand integrity.
We are accustomed to using GPS to give us our location, but did you ever wonder how sailors were able to navigate around the world before the days of GPS?
With ocean currents, changing winds, dense fog, angry storms, relentless waves, and no landmarks in sight on the open seas, how could a ship set off from Boston and have any chance of reaching Bombay thousands of miles away? Yet in the 1600-1800s, global shipping was a big business, with ships routinely sailing from Europe and the Americas to ports in the Far East and back again.
While there are no visible landmarks in the ocean, there are marks in the sky—the sun and stars. Navigators used tools like the sextant in determining their ship’s longitude and latitude. The sextant allowed a navigator to measure the angle between the sun or star and the horizon.
Over 100 hours of research and scene planning. Prop shopping trips. Borrowing props from acquaintances. Precisely choreographing two days of shooting the photos.
That is a thumbnail sketch of the complex work of Rosewood prop stylists in planning a premium photo shoot for Finch Poly Outdoor Furniture.
You may wonder if this kind of extensive planning and prop preparation is necessary. Isn’t a quality photograph primarily the work of the artist behind the camera?
“Prop styling brings the photo to life,” relates Merv Esh, owner of Windy Valley Woodworks, the parent company of Finch. “All the detailed touches that a designer brings really make the difference.”
