8 reasons clients forget you

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© Copyright 2011, Mark Combs, Cre8iveDept.com. All rights reserved. No part of this book
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Published by: DzinDNA, Sapulpa, OK
Contents
Introduction 1
1. Inconsistency 2
2. Lack Of or Too Much Emphasis 6
3. Clutter 9
4. Lost/Poor Message 12
5. Poor Corporate Image 15
6. Low Perceived Value 19
7. Wrong Target/Wrong Weapon 26
8. Low Frequency 31
What I Learned 35
About Mark Combs 37
Cre8iveDept.com 8 Reasons Clients Forget YOU! | 1
© Copyright 2011, Mark Combs, Cre8iveDept.com. All rights reserved.
8 Reasons
Clients
Forget You
I was looking for a company to fix my A/C unit at my house,
and although I had seen several vans around town, I couldn’t
recall the name of a Heat/Air company to save my life. I had
gone as far as looking in the yellow pages for a good service
company, still no luck. They all looked the same. So when I
was at church that week, I asked several people who they

used for their climate control maintenance. Guess what I
found out, none of my friends could think of who they used
either. That made me think. Why can’t anyone recall this piece
of information? Is this limited to A/C companies? Does this
happen with my company? Is there something I can do to keep
this from happening to me?
Following my initial quest, I started looking at the branding,
marketing and advertising of successful and not so successful
Heating and Air Maintenance Providers. Through my search
I found 8 things that they all had in common. In some
combination I found all of these reasons employed in the
successes, and avoided or ignored in the failures.
Lets look at each one and talk about how we can avoid being
forgotten by the very people that need to remember us, our
customers. All of this is assuming you want to be remembered
by your customers… I thought so.
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© Copyright 2011, Mark Combs, Cre8iveDept.com. All rights reserved.
Reason No. 1 - Inconsistency
Spread before me was about a dozen pieces of marketing and
advertising from one company, let’s call them Allied Heat &
Air. There was an obvious consistency that was screaming at
me from the table… Inconsistency. I mean there was nothing
that was the same, the logo was different in half of the pieces.
The type faces had both serif and sans serif fonts. It was very
distracting. I saw a rainbow of colors, tons of advertising
messages and about eighteen different slogans and tag lines.
If it weren’t for the name, “Allied” I wouldn’t know it was from
the same company. There was nothing from this company that
had any common thread. My brain had a hard time connecting

the dots between each piece, and therefore never made the
connection between the company and consistency.
I understand, they were trying to cut through all the clutter we
see every day. Did you know, everyday, we see a minimum of
4,000 advertisements. 4,000 advertisements! That’s huge! We
as Americans are bombarded daily with advertising from every
angle, every source. It is nearly to the point to where there is
nothing we can do without seeing some sort of advertisement.
The only escape we have is immersing ourselves in nature, or
sleeping. And, I would bet that someone somewhere is working
on those mediums right now.
So as a small to medium sized business, with an advertising
budget that is modest at best, how do we cut through all of
the onslaught of advertising? How do we break through all
the noise? One thing you can do that won’t cost you any more
than you are already spending, be consistent.
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© Copyright 2011, Mark Combs, Cre8iveDept.com. All rights reserved.
There is a reason large corporations have teams of people
on staff to make sure all of the marketing efforts look the
same. There is a reason they have volumes of paper filled with
guidelines of how their logo can look and can’t look, what
colors can and can’t be used in and with their logo. The reason
they go to all this trouble and expense is consistency. They
work tirelessly maintaining a consistent look, a consistent
message, and a consistent brand image.
Years of experience and testing has proven that a consistent
look, message and image builds a place in your customers
minds that your company holds that none of your competitors
can take from you, unless you give it away.

You don’t have to hire a marketing team to act as logo police,
you don’t need to spend year’s worth of profit on establishing
a graphic standards manual. You can become more aware of
your corporate image and keep a consistent look and message
in everything you do. It’s really not that hard. Below is a step
by step guide to establishing and using your own graphic
standard.
Your Logo
Step 1: Find, Create, or Establish a black and white AND a
color logo. *At most your logo should use only 2 type
faces. *At most the color logo should use 3 colors.
This is your foundation, EVERYTHING is built on this
step. Get this right before you do anything else.
Step 2: Get digital files for both. You are going to need
several file types of your logo. I would get an EPS, a
JPG, a PDF, and a PNG. Any logo designer worth their
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salt can give you these file formats when they design
your logo.
Step 3: Eliminate ALL OTHER variations of your logo. You
don’t want old versions of past logos floating around
your office, printer, newspaper, or yellow pages sales
rep. You need to make sure you have destroyed or
replaced all occurrences of your old logos.
Step 4: When asked for your logo, use ONLY the approved
logos. You will have many times that the newspaper
or printer will ask for your logo, MAKE SURE you only
send the logos that you have deemed valid. Be firm on
this, remember you are your own logo police. Its up to

you.
Your Marketing Materials
Step 5: Evaluate your stationery, business cards, and
signage for the same look and feel of your approved
logo. This is where it starts to get a bit tricky, you
are going to need to be brutally honest about how
close these individual pieces are to your now “standard
logo”. Use ONLY approved logos, and approved colors.
Step 6: Create an overall marketing message. Decide what
your message is going to be. Write down the all
encompassing thought that you wish to covey to your
customers. Now, the trick to marketing is to keep
saying that message over and over without being
redundant.
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© Copyright 2011, Mark Combs, Cre8iveDept.com. All rights reserved.
Step 7: When you create an ad, sales sheet or brochure,
make sure it conveys “your message” Keep going
back to the message you just wrote. Write it in a
new way but say the same thing. You can even write
several ways to say your message and rotate them
throughout the year.
So, you have an approved logo, your stationery complies
with the new standard you have in place, you have an overall
message that all of your advertising conveys. Good Job! You
have Consistency! Now there are some rules you must stick to.
Rule 1: Always use the approved logo.
Rule 2: Always employ your corporate colors in anything
the public will see.
Rule 3: Always convey your marketing message in one way

or another.
Rule 4: Never use more than 2 fonts in an ad or brochure.
What does all that do for you? The consistency you have
achieved conveys a dependability about you and your
company. It tells your customers that you will be there and be
the same reliable company you have always been. And that is
worth remembering in a market place that changes so fast.
If you have any questions, or need help with designing a logo,
establishing a graphic standard or creating a marketing message,
you can e-mail me at and I will
personally answer within 24 hours.
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© Copyright 2011, Mark Combs, Cre8iveDept.com. All rights reserved.
Reason No. 2 - Lack Of or Too Much
Emphasis
Too Much Emphasis!?! how is that possible? We will get to that
in a bit. But for now, lets tackle the lack of emphasis problem
I found in my quest for A/C service.
One company I studied, let’s call them “Thermal Solutions”,
had a very consistent look and feel to their marketing
materials. “that’s a good thing, right?” Well yes and no. They
were almost too consistent. They always used the same font,
but all the type was the same size and the same color. They
always used the corporate colors, but their corporate colors
were black and white. They always conveyed a message but it
usually said, “go to sleep”.
Thermal Solutions did all of their marketing materials on
some bad copy machine that was way past due on the service
agreement. Everything was done on normal copy paper, folded
poorly and had way too much information with no reason to

attempt to read it all. They had too much sameness and not
enough emphasis. Now I am not bashing a low budget, or
limited resources (but please read Chapter 5 in this e-book).
There are ways to stretch a shoestring out and still make a big
impact. What I am talking about is a lack of emphasis.
What is emphasis? Emphasis is the degree of importance given
to a design element. So if something is important, it should
be given more emphasis. Fine. How do you do that? There are
several ways to do that. If you make one element bigger than
the others, then it has emphasis. If one element is set apart
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© Copyright 2011, Mark Combs, Cre8iveDept.com. All rights reserved.
from all the other elements, then it has emphasis. You can
give something emphasis with color, or if it is darker than
the other elements. Basically, you want the most important
element to be different than the rest of the elements in the ad
or brochure. The idea of emphasis is to decide what the most
important element is, then give it the most emphasis. Next
pick what is the second most important, and give it a bit less
emphasis, then pick the third and fourth most important and
assign them each an appropriate amount of emphasis. Look at
it as prioritizing things in your ad or brochure visually.
Now back to the question, “How do you get too much
emphasis?”. Can you have too much emphasis? Yes, and I’ll
show you how.
Imagine a piece of paper filled with the text of a speech
you are supposed to give at your business owner’s club next
week. You have worked hard on the speech and you think
it’s a really good topic, it’s written well, you had someone
you trust look over it and agree. As the day of the meeting

approaches you read it again and again, but you decide the
main points are getting lost in the rest of the copy. What do
you do? How can you remember to make the most important
parts really stand out when you give the speech? Then it hits
you, “use a highlighter!” Great, you grab a highlighter and
start highlighting all the important parts of the speech. You
read it again and find more points you want to highlight. So,
you break out the marker again and highlight some more. You
read it again, and find more you want to highlight. So you
start marking again and before long you look at the paper
and all the words are highlighted except a few of the small
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