Guerrilla Marketing

by Bill Gallagher Ph. D.

Mind Reading and Telepathy? In many ways, successful marketing depends on your ability to read your customers' minds. Magic? No! We'll give you a shortcut to new profits.

Effective marketing and communication requires that you learn to read the minds of your buying public. Mind reading is tough, so we're going to give you a hand. Right now, in your mind, please think of a simple geometric form. Choose one. Turn away for a sec and draw it on a piece of paper. Go on, do it now. When you've finished, turn back and continue reading.

We know that the majority of you probably drew a triangle of some sort. Amazing, right? The rest of you drew an oval. Okay, you may have decided to run counter to your first impression and you drew a hexagram or an inverted epicyclodial parallelogram! But the biggest majority of us conformed to our first impressions and draw triangles. And a significant minority will draw some kind of oval when asked to choose a geometric form. Why? Again, the answer is crucial to your marketing campaign.

So, what do triangles and ovals mean to your marketing and selling strategies? Take a look at your the logo on your business card and on your stationary. No logo? Shame, shame on you! If you have one and it doesn't have a triangle or oval motif, do you have a good reason?

Fortune 500 businesses all have professionally designed logos. It remarkably helps the consumer relate to and buy your product that much more. It literally helps them to have more confidence and trust in you company. When properly designed, your logo shape is something so universal that all prospective customers can relate to. So, in logos, you will often see ovals and triangles.

Think of The Ford Motor Company's logo. Can you see the blue oval? That shape is so important to their targeted buyer that the oval theme has been carried over completely to the new Taurus line. We count more than seven repeats of that identical shape on the driver's panel alone.

Look for triangles in the logos and ad layouts of Sprint, Sutter Home, Amtrac, and the new Union 76 logo with its famous orange ball, now for greater impact, it is now incased in two triangles or pyramids!

In the last year, with the help of an ad layout specialist, a respectable California winery radically changed its logo. To get the full marketing impact to their targeted customers they chose an inverted triangle theme with some dramatic colors and a touch of gold. Sales are way up! Most of us do not know much about sophisticated wine purchases. We buy because of the labels. The classy new Boeger Winery image is a big boost to sales. Congratulations to the owners and to their graphics people.

When in doubt, to get the biggest positive impact with your logo, use ovals and triangles in combination. And, for even more ideas check out these articles on colors and shapes, numbers, words and names.