The new site makes ample use of Inspector Q, a spokescharacter Strategic Insights created for RapidXchange several years ago. Inspector Q personifies the unique 12-step safety inspection process that each propane cylinder goes through before it its returned to the marketplace. After the introduction of Inspector Q on its original website and other marketing materials, RapidXchange saw significant growth. “Inspector Q has really helped set RapidXchange apart. Partly thanks to his memorable presence–and promise of safety and quality–we have been able to greatly expand our territory,” added Daren Parker, owner of both Parker Gas and RapidXchange.

“It has been a pleasure working with the Strategic Insights team,” said HangTime owner Talitha Batts, who selected the agency. “The level of skill, expertise and incredible patience of every staff member is impeccable. I look forward to working with the team on several of my upcoming projects.”

With its original location in Wallace, HangTime aims to attract kids and parents who are looking for recreational options other than passive video games or hanging out at the mall. Talitha stresses that fitness is a big part of HangTime’s mission—thus the name “Fit n’ Fun Zone.” In addition to inflatables and fitness-based video games, HangTime will feature batting cages and a rock-climbing wall. The location—which Talitha hopes to franchise—will be open for scheduled parties and camps, plus open play sessions where kids are free to simply “drop in.”

“Our assignments don’t get much more enjoyable than creating a name, logo and website for a business built around having fun,” said Bill Cokas, creative director for Strategic Insights. “Talitha has been delightful to work with—her enthusiasm is contagious and her dedication to HangTime’s mission has inspired us to ‘think younger’ and create a vibrant, colorful brand for HangTime that will draw in kids like a magnet.”

“We have worked very hard to perfect our services. Strategic Insights has the ability to make our message heard in a clear and concise manner, which will afford us the opportunity to grow and become a competitive resource in our field,” said co-owner Ryan Sobus, who selected the agency. “We are so excited that Strategic Insights will enhance the professional credibility we have strived to establish.”

Based in Raleigh and staffed by registered and licensed dietitians, Healthy Diets aims to inspire and educate individuals who have a medical need or a personal desire to improve their health and well-being. Ryan Sobus believes that everyone deserves to be healthy and has the ability to achieve it, with proper awareness and motivation. Healthy Diets works with individuals and corporations, offering a tailored counseling approach that seeks to change the way people think and relate to the food they eat. Services include metabolic testing, allergy testing, individual and group nutrition counseling, and grocery store tours to encourage healthier shopping habits.

“We’re very excited about being able to work with Healthy Diets at this stage in their growth and help them establish a long-term competitive identity and edge. Fortunately, they excel at what they do and they’re very passionate about it, so 2/3 of the equation is already in place,” said Bill Cokas, creative director for Strategic Insights.

“We have been long overdue for a legitimate site,” said Todd McGowan, CEO of Haddock Collision. “However, our customers don’t tend to go out and do unprompted searches for body shops—they usually find us through their insurance agent. In many cases, by the time they see our website, the decision to use us has already been made.”

With that in mind, Strategic Insights proposed a compact but easy to navigate and informative website that would help undecided customers make up their minds and give confirmed customers “validation” that they’d made the right choice. Designer/developer Jenn Soloway knew that the site would need to be mobile-friendly, since a great many people accessing the site would be in their cars. “We have a separate mobile site for users looking for quick on-the-go access, with the option for viewing the full site. On the full site, dropdowns are activated with a click vs. a hover, so that mobile users are not left out of the navigation or required to scroll to the bottom of the page.”

Since a large portion of Haddock Collision’s business is high-end cars and imports, Strategic Insights felt the site needed to convey a feeling of luxury, using colors and textures associated with the interiors of such cars.

Lastly, the agency harnessed the power of video to shoot several testimonials featuring actual Haddock Collision customers, allowing them to tell their own stories—in their own words—on camera. These videos are accessible from the homepage and pull from Haddock Collision’s YouTube channel. More videos will be added in the coming weeks and months.

”This website is the latest in a series of projects developed for us by Strategic Insights,” said Todd McGowan. “It’s a great companion to our new brochure and estimate flyer, and we are excited about the role it will play in helping further brand our business as we continue to grow.”

Last week, I received an email from Old Navy:

In other words, this email is the last contact I should expect from the company regarding the rewards I have earned. From the date I received this email forward, if I want to cash in my earned $5 I will need to put in the legwork to look up if I have a reward and then print it out before shopping in the store.

The “best part” is, I don’t even log in to the Old Navy website in order to look up my rewards. I’ll need to go through my third-party financial institution and find their statement (since I don’t see the whole bill when I log in to just pay it) – a part of the process they even highlight in their email.

Missed opportunity? Absolutely.

While I’m pleased to see that Old Navy is reducing the number of snail mailings they send out to me in a given year (and all the accompanying paper that goes with those mailings), I don’t understand why – from a marketing perspective – they would want to make it more difficult for me to remember I’m an Old Navy customer. What benefit is a rewards system for the company if it’s not serving to remind customers that they enjoy shopping at your store and enticing them to come back in?

Not to mention, Old Navy in particular has a great potential up-sell opportunity that can be highlighted as a benefit in a quick email reminder (that can double as the coupon itself on customer’s cell phones). In this case, rewards are accepted at any of their “sister” stores as well – all of which are at a higher price-point than Old Navy itself. Meaning, if I take my reward and order a pair of shoes online at Piperlime, I’m definitely going to spend more with the company than I would if I just popped down to Old Navy and grabbed a t-shirt off the rack.

Without the reminders? Yeah, I’m less likely to use the coupon and save a few dollars at the store, but I’m also no longer reminded of a reason I should go into the store in the first place. In the case of ordering a new pair of shoes, I still might end up at Piperlime…or I might end up going to a competitor, particularly if a well-timed email from the competitor alerts me to some kind of credit I’ve earned with my loyalty.

Bottom line is this: Over-saturation of your message can definitely turn a once-loyal customer off, but so can radio silence. If you have reason to communicate with your customers, you should definitely take the time to reach out to them. After all, don’t we have enough on our minds without having to remember where we like to shop?

“We are thrilled with the finished product and foresee it to be a valuable resource for both us and our patients,” said Kelly Lewis, Marketing Director for Carolina Back. The site is a mix of static and dynamic content pulled from multiple data sources on several different servers and features a lite content management system to allow the site owners to administer the frequently updated areas of the site.

With a location in Cary and in North Raleigh, Carolina Back Institute has been offering its patients non-surgical pain relief since 1992. Despite the name, Carolina Back specializes in conditions of all kinds, from back, neck and joint pain to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and sports injuries. Carolina Back’s physicians, physiatrists and physical therapists are experts in the field of treating pain, and do so with the long-term well-being of their patients in mind. Available treatments range from such advanced procedures as prolotherapy and laser therapy to well-known successful approaches like physical therapy and acupuncture.

“Since it was comprised mainly of Flash and images, Carolina Back’s original website was largely invisible to search engines,” remarked Jenn Soloway, art director and web developer for the project. “Our goal with their new site was to design first and foremost a pleasant user experience, so visitors—and Google–could easily find what they needed. Equally important was to give the site a contemporary, professional look and feel, that worked well in any browser environment, including mobile devices.”

”We have worked with Strategic Insights for many years on several projects and it has always been a fantastic experience,” added Ms. Lewis. “The professionalism, feedback, and willingness to listen to our specific needs made my role as Marketing Director an easy one on this particular project.”

Prior to joining Strategic Insights, Dan worked as a restaurant consultant for Restaurant.com, a marketing company providing local and national exposure for individual restaurants and chains. Before relocating to North Carolina, Dan also worked in his home state of Illinois at CSOxync, Inc. as an event and sales director and at J9 Executives, where he was one of the owners as well as an executive director. His background includes many years of both business development and account management, skills Strategic Insights values highly.

“We were very impressed with Dan’s attitude and demeanor,” remarks Bill Cokas, Creative Director of Strategic Insights. “From his very first interview, he came across as confident, self-assured and ready to close the sale. His dual experience with both new business and managing accounts is a rare find in this market and will be a tremendous asset to the agency.”

Dan graduated from Greenville College in Illinois with a Bachelors of Arts in Communications. He is active in several marketing organizations and networking associations, and lives in Cary with his wife and young son.

“I am very impressed with the teamwork and the one-on-one relationship Strategic Insights has with their clients, which was one of my main reasons for joining the team.” Dan says. “I am excited to be part of the core group that will take Strategic Insights to the next level.”

Bill Cokas
Creative Director
Strategic Insights

“Long gone are the days of the set-it-and-forget-it mentality for your online presence.  Your web identity is a living, breathing entity and without regular maintenance, it can wither, atrophy and eventually die.“

The same can be said for continuous learning in a chosen area, even if it’s an area you are an “expert” in already.

With that said, there’s the start of an excellent collection happening right now on my Kindle in terms of books relevant to what we do here at Strategic Insights. Here’s what I can be caught reading around the office these days (when I’m not designing!):

• The Art of Client Service, Revised and Updated Edition: 58 Things Every Advertising & Marketing Professional Should Know by Robert Solomon
  

  Sadly, this is no longer available for the Kindle, so I was lucky to grab it when I did. I’m currently in the midst of reading The Art of Client Service, and I highly recommend it for anyone in the design industry. It is admittedly geared specifically for project and account managers however, we can all benefit from learning as much as we can to see things from the client perspective at every stage of the design process.

  Instead of shrugging our shoulders when we get feedback that doesn’t quite make sense, we can start to understand where to backtrack to to help bring the client through the process with is. After all, we’re all in a project or campaign together.

• Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy by Dev Patnaik
  

  A Kindle “freebie” at the time I downloaded it, this one immediately grabbed my interest as something up my alley. I’ve had an interest in “emotion-based” industries since college (thanks to an internship for a group of hospitals my sophomore year) and was immediately inspired when I saw this title to bring me back to my “roots” with a resource based entirely around creating empathy.

• Marketing in the Moment: The Practical Guide to Using Web 3.0 Marketing to Reach Your Customers First by Michael Tasner
  

  I also grabbed this one while it was free for the Kindle on Amazon, but am still intrigued by it. While I find the title to be cliched (I hate using terms like “Web 3.0 Marketing”), I’m hoping the book will contain either some new pieces of information on the increasingly expanding options available to our clients for spreading their message, or at least offer some nice refreshers and reminders on things to keep in mind.

• Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS by Zoe Mickley Gillenwater
  

  This is the newest book to make it on to my Kindle, and probably the one I am most excited to dive into. For those who don’t know, flexible web design is a not-so-new approach to building a site so that it will adapt and self-optimmize for a large variety of viewing options. In other words, it’s the attempt to design for any screen size, resolution or orientation that a user could choose to view your website on. While it does not replace specific-use situations (such as mobile devices) completely, it helps bring a more cohesive experience to a website by understanding that absolute pixel-perfection across all possible circumstances is not the ideal.

  It’s about matching the experience, and not necessarily the layout, to provide the best presentation of information possible.

It’ll take me some time to get through all these, but I’m always on the lookout for more books to add to the list. How about you? Any books you’ve read or are excited to start reading? Share your inspired reading lists in the comments.

Jennifer Soloway [follow me on Twitter] // Senior Art Director // Strategic Insights

Web designers have one audience in mind when beginning a new web project. No, I’m not talking about our clients (sorry, guys).

I mean the end user. The person who will sit on the “other side of the screen,” clicking through the information presented. It’s common sense that the end result should match up with the expectations that user has come to expect from the brand, experiences on similar websites, and experience with the web as a whole.

This does not mean that every website across the internet is expected to perform exactly the same. It is a statement, however, that every website that falls into a certain category (e-commerce, banking, forum, etc.) should function similarly to other sites within the same category. Users would not expect a banking site to behave as a forum, and vice-versa.

The best way to determine what users are expecting out of a website is to research. Research sites with a similar function, competitor sites, and the existing company’s site if the project is a relaunch.

But, what if what we WANT is to change user behavior on a website?

First and foremost, understand that there’s a delicate balance that needs to be achieved when changing user behaviors. Nothing is keeping your users from leaving the site if they become frustrated or don’t understand what actions are expected of them. With that said, it is possible to change user behavior provided there is sound reasoning, obvious visual clues and response mechanisms, and a sense of familiarity left intact.

My favorite go-to inspiration for changing user behavior while remaining sensitive to expectations is product design.

“Green” products are changing consumer behavior. Or, trying to.

There’s no denying that in this day and age, it’s hip to be green. It also goes without saying that “going green” is often associated with making personal sacrifices in daily habits and choices. What, give up my morning Starbucks in favor of making coffee at home? Suddenly, it’s a lot more appealing to leave “being hip” to the hipsters and tree-huggers.

Green-conscious product designers are rising to that challenge by designing reusable products that mimic their disposable counterparts in look and feel. The only differences lie in the materials used to make them (glass and porcelain vs. plastic and paper) and the fact that they don’t get chucked in the bin after only one use. Even better, these newer products are built for the dishwasher, unlike the hard plastic coffee mugs of yore (if you read them, most should be hand-washed for durability; but who does that?).

In other words, they’re putting the effort into the design to make switching to reusable, “greener” choices as easy for the consumer as getting a cup or bottle on the go.

Google made the submit button obsolete.

An on-screen example of a behavior shift is evident in Google’s 2010 redesign. The biggest, yet still subtle, difference the search company made was to remove the need to hit ‘Submit’ in order to show search results. Results are now live-updated as you type, actually eliminating a step previously needed to be performed by the user.

To be honest, I needed the change to be pointed out to me before I realized anything was different. This is exactly what you want in a behavior shift – for users to not even realize it’s happening. Users expect search results to arrive quickly, and the live-updating of results is a logical improvement in functionality.

Make it easy, make it obvious.

In the end, the key to changing user (or consumer) behavior is in making the difference obvious and convenient. Users are not going to change if it requires them to make the extra effort, or is noticeably different from what they are used to.

It is possible to change user behavior, while keeping them happy by meeting their expectations. It’s all about researching the audience and finding what works naturally.

Jennifer Soloway [follow me on Twitter] // Senior Art Director // Strategic Insights

RALEIGH, N.C. – Strategic Insights, a full-service marketing and web services agency located in Raleigh, N.C., has been named the marketing agency of record for CareFirst Animal Hospitals, a network of veterinary clinics serving the Raleigh and Morrisville areas. In this role, Strategic Insights will provide CareFirst with strategic marketing and branding efforts, including but not limited to, collateral design, advertising and a revamped website.

“Having Strategic Insights in our marketing corner truly helps our practices shine,” said Dr. Jared Conley, who selected the agency. “We are blessed to have found a marketing company that’s so creative and easy to work with.”

With four practices throughout the Triangle, CareFirst Animal Hospital provides patients with full-service veterinary care, including pet medicine, pet emergency care, pet boarding, doggy daycamp, grooming and obedience training. Strategic Insights plans to roll out a new website for the company in Spring 2011, as well as a series of in-store collateral pieces.

“We’re very fortunate to be working with the gold standard of veterinary care in the area,” said Bill Cokas, Creative Director for Strategic Insights. “CareFirst also has a unique advantage of having multiple locations, giving it a built-in edge over the competition. The fact that they appreciate the value of distinctive and consistent marketing makes the relationship very enjoyable.”

About Strategic Insights:
Strategic Insights is an advertising and marketing agency based in Raleigh, NC. With a mix of consumer and business-to-business clients, the agency produces brand positioning, websites, broadcast, print and collateral materials.  For more information about Strategic Insights and its signature Vibrant Brand Personality, visit www.strategicinsights.net.

Contact:
Bill Cokas, Creative Director
Strategic Insights
919.790.3500
bcokas@strategicinsights.net