Arts Marketing - Dan Ramsden on arts marketing

Creative Messaging

Creative Messaging is a new company specialising in arts marketing. It will offer bulk sms and email marketing for the arts.

On launching the service Dan Ramsden, Company Director said, in a commanding voice so as to inspire confidence:
"We work in the arts
We love the arts
We want more people to see, do and hear things they love
We enjoy building audiences
and dialogues with audiences and customers

We have the technology to help audiences find things they’ll love

We can help you use it too

Come and explore our website a bit

www.creativemessaging.co.uk"

When he was feeling more discursive he added:
Some people will charge a lot of money to do some fairly simple things with SMS. We wont.

If all you want to do is send bulk SMS to your own list you can go to our SMS platform http://sms.creativemessaging.co.uk
Create an account and get going.

If you'd like to find out a bit more about how we can support two way dialogues using SMS, use Shortcodes and keywords to filter and automate responses to messages, forward SMS messages to email, use SMS to initiate calls to and from your box office or sales team then explore the site a bit more or get in touch.

All our messages are sent via UK networks - you manage your own list and your subscribers details are safe and secure.

We will charge you a maximum of 7.5p per message - there is no software to install, all you need is a web browser. You can pay securely online using Paypal or we can invoice you. You can export your details from database software straight into the SMS platform.

It is really easy.

Don't be scared of SMS because of cost or lack of technical expertise. We make it affordable and straight forward.

There is no annual subscription to the service - if you only do 1 campaign per year that's fine - but we'll always be happy to help you find new and effective ways of utilising these technologies.

If you think that the SMS services sound great then what we really love is the EMAIL platform that we have found to offer to artists and arts organisations.

Bulk Email is highly complicated and a fairly saturated market, our platform doesn't offer anything massively different - but it comes from us, a company that knows and cares about the arts, it works and it looks lovely.

Creativemessaging.co.uk will also be a place where I write more specifically about marketing with new technologies - although most content will be shared with this site too.

Dan Ramsden is Director of Creative Messaging and the owner of this site. He is also the owner of a first edition of 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley, although this is largely irrelevant.

the logos of brand

Lo·gos (lô'gôs', lŏg'ŏs') n.
In Christianity, in Saint John's Gospel, especially in the prologue (1:1-14), the creative word of God, which is itself God. Also called Word.

Even without the theological hermeneutics marketers are keenly aware of the powerful creative potential of brands, and of their public face, the logo. But brand is much, much more than simply a logo. Brand is the sum of all the associations a person has for your organisation. It is what your organisation is worth to them, it is the value of the "idea" of your company, more than the reality. The business world knows this, ordering the value of the largest companies in the world with reference to the power of the brand. When things go wrong, when the associations are re-formatted, or re-ordered we see an impact on the value of a company. When the Challenger space shuttle exploded in 1986 the stock market reacted by devaluing the companies involved in manufacturing the shuttle (interestingly wiping the most value from the company which manufactured the faulty O-rings blamed for the tragedy, even before the fault had been found, or rumoured). Brand relates to how much we trust a company. Brand is how much we care. Consider whether it would make a difference if we all woke up tomorrow and Apple, Microsoft, BA, HMV, Pepsi, Guiness had all ceased trading, and been replaced by different companies all offering exactly the same products. Would it matter? Imagine all of the players and staff of your favourite sports team suddenly moved to a local rival, where would your alegiance lie? Fewer and fewer transactions in our life are simple. Value is everywhere. People select products not only on features, but also on a rich set of associations. Think of the products you are most passionate about and try and decide if it is just for what they offer "on spec" or is there something more, something behind that, which although not spoken out loud people are aware of.

Its strange but the pervasiveness of brand in our psyche means that as marketers we have a powerful tool that doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with what our organisation does - but is probably more affected by how we do it.

For the next few months the articles will be continuing to focus on constructed meaning. I will develop a metaphor of brand creating a world for your organisation. This is a world that the user/audience/customer can come and live in for a while.