Author: CMPR

Color Psychology and Branding

Posted on by CMPR

Why is it Important to Choose the Best Colors for Your Branding?

Color psychology and branding is one of the most important factors in consumer behavior and marketing. Consumers make their minds up about a product, service, or person, in about 90 seconds. More than half of that decision process can be attributed to color alone, so choosing the right color palette for your brand can be crucial to the company’s success. Having a set color palette is not only critical for the consumer’s attraction, but also for the cohesiveness of the brand content on social media and your website. Content that correlates with your company logo and overall image can help with brand recognition and distinguishing yourself from competitors.

Colors evoke different emotions in different groups of consumers, so it is important to reach the audience you desire with the right branding.

What Different Color Tones Mean & How to Choose the Right Ones

Typically, psychologists separate colors into three categories: cool, warm, and neutral. Cool tones include blues, greens, and purples. These colors are more subtle and invoke feelings of calmness, relaxation, and peace. Warm colors on the other hand are more exciting and energizing to the consumer’s eye. Reds, oranges, and yellows catch attention quickly and are used to generate a positive feeling in the audience. Neutral tones like black, brown, and white offer a sleeker and more professional look. Guide to Color Psychology in Marketing | Chamber of Commerce

Knowing this, the first step in deciding on colors is to think about your brand’s values and purpose and how you can make your design choices align with those things.

Who is your target audience?

How is your brand memorable?

What is your company’s value?

These things can be a starting point to determine how you want the audience to feel about your brand.

How Demographics Affect Perception of Color

The demographics of potential customers can affect how they perceive color and what that could mean to your brand. Knowing your target audience is imperative to choosing the right colors to ultimately attract the appropriate consumers.

Men and women often have varying preferences when it comes to color. Studies have shown that women are generally more drawn to softer colors, whereas men prefer bold ones.

Generational differences also have an impact on color preferences. Gen X and Baby Boomers tend to gravitate more towards colors that are viewed as mature and classic such as yellows, whites, blues, and dark reds. Millennials and Gen Zs typically prefer colors that are soft and neutral, like pastel pinks and greens, as well as browns and whites. Generational Colors: How to Attract Various Demographics Via Color (amywax.com)

Knowing that demographic factors can influence how one perceives colors, identifying your target audience is important to determine your brand’s colors.

Next Steps

After learning color psychology, play with various color schemes to see what you like for your branding and marketing. Free resources like Coolors and Canva are excellent tools to help you in your designing process. Once you begin posting, take note of how others respond to your beautifully crafted posts and use this information to keep what works and fix what doesn’t in your marketing strategy.

Additional References

View of Color Psychology in Marketing (jbt.org.pk)

Color Psychology: How Colors Influence the Mind | Psychology Today

AI Threatens What Makes You Unique

Posted on by CMPR
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is like a new shiny penny in a world where we expect technology will make our lives easier. I would say that some things are definitely better with the speed of tech. However, when it comes to implementing AI in content planning, I am concerned. I think it is a good idea for businesses to be wary of AI, because AI could threaten their ability to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Business Goals

To explain my rationale, I’m going to start with some of the steps we take to create a content plan. First we start with business goals and marketing objectives. Usually business goals are to 1) earn revenue, 2) profit, and 3) grow. Marketing objectives are determined by your goals and they usually revolve around customers and converting them into sales. It is a lot easier to set a revenue goal than to achieve it. The huge number of businesses competing on the Internet of Things creates many challenges.

What Makes Your Product or Service Special?

Every marketing class or book will tell you to figure out what makes your service or product unique. Doing that will make it easier to stand out on the internet. In marketing we call what makes you special, your differentiator. Your differentiator is composed of what you provide, why and how you do it and the customers in your target market. You may think that you have the coolest and best product or service in the world. However, if your customers don’t see it or need it, then nothing else matters. You need to know who your customers are and that process digs deep. It involves research, understanding what their pain points are, and what you can do to solve their problems. Once you know what makes your business the best one for them, you start your digital marketing plan. Everything that happens next is reliant on how well your content communicates your value to your audience, and how successfully it reaches them.

Enter AI for Content Marketing

Content marketing is a primary part of any digital marketing campaign. Newsletters, emails, websites, landing pages, blogs, posts, videos, podcasts, books, whitepapers, and ebooks are all content. Any of these components can be sliced, diced, and formatted for the appropriate online platforms. The issue that most business owners (especially small businesses) have is a lack of staff and time to do what needs to be done. Enter AI for creating content and your time and budget constraints are solved, right? A Fortune article on February 17th, 2023, explains that Elon Musk, the founder of OpenAI (the parent company of ChatGPT), publicly walked away from his creation. Musk indicated that “(OpenAI) no longer resembled anything like what he had once co-founded in December 2015. According to Musk, it was designed to be an open-source nonprofit, which was the very reason why it was dubbed OpenAI.” The article states that Musk’s concerns arose out of the launch of ChatGPT. He says it has turned the concept he intended into a blockbuster moneymaking endeavor for Microsoft. I’m sure everyone knows about ChatGPT by now. The software has been in the news and online thanks to the marketing muscle behind Microsoft. However, the claims it makes of creating original content, based on your prompts, reside in a gray area.

The Origins of AI Content

ZDNet provides a simplified explanation of what ChatGPT is. They say that, “ChatGPT runs on a language model architecture created by OpenAI called the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), specifically GPT-3. Generative AI models of this type are trained on vast amounts of information from the internet including websites, books, news articles and more.” The content your are getting “customized” for you, is an aggregate, pulled from a variety of existing sources. These sources are available to everyone including your competitors. They also are a part of the language of the internet. See how AI could reduce your effectiveness?

AI Could Threaten Your Unique Differentiator

So we know that using AI to create your content means accessing the same keywords, phrases, and overall language that anyone else using the software is also doing. How long will your content maintain any orginality? Furthermore, does AI understand your customers and their pain points? Can it relate to human emotions? Here is an example of my experience with AI that stems from the inability of Google to answer my questions. Have you tried searching for something on Google lately? The SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) that come up have tons of ads that are more and more unrelated to my question. The organic results are often not really what I am looking for either. I tend to abandon at least 75% of my search attempts as a result. Guess what? Google runs on an algorithm that is based on language. If we create generic language or encourage it, how does that affect our differentiators? Can you be unique in a world where technology delivers sameness? We are at the beginning of the AI marketing story. Like any new toy, everyone wants to play with it. Here’s a thought: If a metaphor for the internet of things is a haystack and an entity selling something is a needle that needs to amplify its differences to get attention. What happens when the haystack becomes a needlestack?

Press Releases Still Matter

Posted on by CMPR

 

I have heard directly from book review editors that they toss the materials that come with review copies.  I have also had a radio producer chastise me for mistakenly not sending a press release and kit with a book.  Clients have asked me if press releases matter anymore: “I mean does anybody really read those things?”  The short answer is “yes”: there are media, booksellers, librarians, academics, etc. who actually do pay attention to an old fashioned press release, and you have no way of knowing who is going to insist on having one and who isn’t.  So in my opinion, I wouldn’t sacrifice this tool just yet.  Here are five reasons why we still like them.

Core Message

Press releases are different from any of the other copy you will use to market your book. Some of the words may be the same as what you have on the back of the jacket, but the release is supposed to achieve a few things including delivering the newsworthy or unique aspects of what you are presenting; giving the reader an idea of why you would be a good interview subject; and a relatively brief synopsis of the best points of the book (or product depending on your industry).

Press Approved Copy

This is my favorite.  First of all the copy on your release is assumed to be vetted and usable for the press.  It is likely that one outlet or another will actually lift the synopsis or even the entire release and reprint it online or in the newspaper.  The first time I saw this it was a little weird, but the words on the release, by the very nature of what the document is, are fair game for repurposing.

SEO Optimization

Having the release available on your website, your publicist’s, publisher’s, etc. gives you more real estate online and can offer more search results. You will notice a search for your book brings up Amazon.com and other big properties first.  Your publisher and our website can appear on the first page or near the top of the second page.  It gives you more power online when there are more backlinks and references to you and your work.

The Press Relase vs. The Pitch

So many people interact primarily on email these days, so there is a bit more “room” to present the best aspects of your book. As a standard practice we write pitches according to which people we are sending them.  We paste the press release below so the media contact can choose to learn more.  In the past we would send a cover letter with the press kit which constituted the pitch.  However, I know that today all of those pages won’t get read in a mailing.  The release is an informational supplement that provides another tool for marketing.  If a contact only wants to read three sentences, fine.  If more is desired, it’s all there in the email.

Best Practices for Public Relations

More people want to see a release than not, and it’s part of the public relations/media relations process. In addition, your booksellers, event coordinators at higher end venues, librarians—they want to see the meat of what you are selling without having to read the entire book.  Having a press release gives you a more serious, professional persona when you are marketing your book.  It says, you mean business and people should pay attention to you.  Don’t sell yourself short.

The other more esoteric reason for the release is that it is an opportunity for you and your publicist to come to an understanding of what your intention is about your book and its relevance.  You may also discover some things that are unclear about your work, or an interpretation that is not at all what you meant.  It’s important to come to terms with how the book will be presented and what the selling points are.  It’s super competitive out there, as you know, and you want to make sure your work is getting the attention it deserves.

For some examples of different press releases go to our Campaigns page and click on the book jackets.  You can also check out this article I wrote for Jane Friedman’s website.

 

The Genius of Home by Catherine Read, Ph.D.

Posted on by CMPR

In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the number of parents choosing to teach their children at home rather than sending them to school. Many parents find that public schools cannot offer their children the individualized support they need, and private schools can be an intense expense. 

In The Genius of Home (Bell Pond Books, November 2021, 978-1952166099, original trade paperback), Dr. Catherine Read describes her experiences following her decision to school her children at home and to follow the curriculum used in Steiner-Waldorf schools. Read is a pioneer of this method, among the first ever to document her journey and her success. To some, using the Waldorf curriculum at home may be a contradiction, but The Genius of Home provides both an informative base for why this method works, as well as instructional guides for those considering homeschooling. 

Catherine Read shares her journey as the primary teacher of her two daughters through the entire Waldorf curriculum – from early childhood through high school. She outlines what she did, when she did it and why. In this inspiring account, Read reveals the flexible, artistic, challenging and ultimately rewarding nature of this unique approach to education. There are many approaches to homeschooling, but Read and her children found their success through the guidance and insight of Rudolph Steiner using the Waldorf method. Both of Read’s daughters have gone on to pursue higher education, with one graduating in veterinary medicine at Cornell and the other receiving her Master’s in Art Therapy at Long Island University. With Read’s book as a guide, parents can help prepare their children for further education in a thoughtful, balanced way. She emphasizes a balance between observation and critical thought, sleep schedules and biological rhythms, and between intellectual work and time in nature.

“To educate means to draw forth (Latin, educare: to lead, to bring up); the teacher must draw forth, but, also, must meet the new individual at their own level. But what does the teacher draw forth from the child?”

The Genius of Home, by Catherine Read, includes detailed instructions on classroom materials and setup, sample lesson plans, curriculum adaptations, and day-by-day examples of how the author adopted the Steiner-Waldorf curriculum into her home. Explore how rhythm, creativity, and nature come together to give a comprehensive education from kindergarten to high school graduation. Part memoir and part how-to, the account from Read’s years as both a parent and teacher will be an encouraging and instructional companion to anyone thinking of engaging in their own school-at-home.

 

Uncontrollable by Sara Staggs

Posted on by CMPR

Epilepsy, seizures, brain surgery—these are not the everyday problems of everyday people. For Casey Scott, a high-powered civil rights attorney in Portland, Oregon, they are a part of her life. Like many smart and super capable women, she is determined to manage her demanding boss, two kids, a husband—also with a big career—and her health conditions, until one day she can’t. Finally, up against a wall where sudden death from a seizure is a real possibility, Casey must make a heart-breaking decision that will alter everything she had carefully planned for her successful life.

Based on her real-life struggles with epilepsy, UNCONTROLLABLE (Black Rose Writing, 978-1-68513-201-9, $22.95, May 23, 2023) is a debut novel by Sara Staggs. It is the story of 

Casey and Jonah Scott, a power couple, who fell in love and married expecting to conquer the world. But when Casey’s seizures start occurring more frequently Jonah insists that they need to get serious medical help and make extreme changes to her career plans. 

An extensive hospital stay and painful testing takes Casey halfway across the country, while Jonah tries to handle his own failing aspirations at work and with the kids. Meanwhile, Casey is determined to return to work on a prominent civil rights case, after brain surgery. The strain on their marriage has unexpected consequences and Jonah and Casey will have to find even more strength and courage to save Casey and their family.

Sara Staggs was a civil litigator in Portland, Oregon. Two brain surgeries were successful at limiting the severity of her seizures, which can now be controlled with medication and proper self-care. She had to close her law practice and bid farewell to that chapter of her life for good. For Sara, writing is the next frontier. She has contributed to several publications including: Huffington Post, Flash Fiction Magazine, In Parentheses Literary Journal, Five Minute Lit, and Tiny Seed Literary Journal literary journals. She also has several other projects in the pipeline.

UNCONTROLLABLE is an inspirational story of a woman whose life is derailed by something out of her control, and how she chooses to face life on its terms, abandoning what she once dreamed she could be. 

SARA STAGGS was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. She practiced civil rights litigation for several years before turning to writing. Her debut novel, Uncontrollable, is based on her experiences with epilepsy, and has been called “a compelling story that tackles complex themes with sensitivity and nuance” by Pacific Book Review and is a Five-Star Readers’ Favorite.

She loves to write fiction, both adult contemporary and YA. Sara is an epilepsy advocate and an LGBTQ+ advocate. She writes a blog that covers epilepsy, LGBTQ+ concerns, writing and publishing tips. She has appeared on television and podcasts to talk about epilepsy and works to dispel the stigma that surrounds the condition. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and, when she’s not writing, can be found reading, hiking, mountain biking, or camping with her husband and two children. 

 

Find her online at www.sarastaggswrites.com