The Stackpile

November 24th, 2008

Customized Bank Cards

Card customization is nothing new – outside of the United States. Simply searching on Google returned an article about the KBC bank in Belgium who were already providing this service to their customers back in 2006. Customers were invited to submit an image of their choice and after a few days new card was available for pick-up at the bank.This trend has now found its way slowly into the US via Capitol One’s Card Lab. I propose this be a venture undertaken by credit card companies such as American Express Business. Their new plum card simply does not say who you, the company are!

Picture of American Express Plum Biz Card

A simple addition of your company’s logo onto the card would not only enhance the company’s image and recognition, but there would be no confusion about who was paying when an employee was taking a client out to lunch. No, they are not using their personal bank card, but the company card – reinforced by the simple logo addition.Now it would be amazing to be able to make completely customized cards for your company but I’m sure this will not be available anytime soon. Regardless, I have created the Stackpole & Partners future credit card below:

Stackpole Credit Card Design

For those of you who are artistic and enjoy a craft project like myself, make sure to check out this other hit I received from my search on Google regarding different techniques one person has used to personalize their card.

Posted by Marissa on November 24th, 2008
Filed under Advertising, Banking, Branding, Design, Fun, Miscellaneous | No Comments »

November 21st, 2008

SearchWiki . . . Is there a point where personalization is too much?

You have to ask the question – how will the new SearchWiki feature play into the ranking of sites in general? With this new feature, you can personalize sites within your search results and list the sites you want based on specific search terms – aren’t we going too far with customization? And, isn’t that what a bookmark is for?

The big question for marketing is: how will this impact our Search Engine Optimization efforts in 2009? Is this good or bad? Well, I think that this provides both good and bad. For general searches, this supposedly will not impact natural rank, so we can be safe to be follow the same general principles – content & relevancy = rank, etc., etc. However, in the world where enough of the Google users that you are trying to reach log in to their account and use this feature, possibly pushing your competitors sites to the top positions and ignoring you altogether, what good is search engine optimization?

Do we need to start implementing a user-generated content strategy for the Google SearchWiki Community? Making sure that our sites are appearing in this community by influencing the community’s rank for our sites? Furthermore, will Google share with us any of the information on the users that we are targeting, how they rank our site, our competitors’ sites, etc.? Will our search engine marketing ads still appear within these searches? Will the preferences of the Google users have any impact on the search engine marketing placement and costs? Time will tell.

Maybe we should all consider that personalization for some things might be going too far.

Posted by Christina on November 21st, 2008
Filed under Search Engine Marketing, Web | Comments Off

November 5th, 2008

On a historic day…

November 4th, 2008 will go down in history…Barack Obama has been elected the 44th president of the United States. I get goosebumps just saying it! Now after all is said and done, looks like us marketers have a lot to learn from the Obama campaign. This great article sums up the brilliance and strength behind the campaign and its tactics and has compared it to the best brands out there. I just wanted to share how the Obama campaign has really captured our hearts like no other brand has done before, between the Obama logo my husband carved into a pumpkin for Halloween, or my Fantasy Football team named Team Obama, to the cookies we made last night for our election party with Obama’s logo on it. We are embracing the Change! Simply amazing…Congrats Barack Obama!

Posted by Nirali on November 5th, 2008
Filed under Fun, Marketing | Comments Off

November 4th, 2008

How Simple It Can (Sometimes) Be.

It’s hard not to think about branding and image advertising during any election season. Even more so this season. But now that election day is finally here, I thought I’d share with you a striking example of how very simple and uncomplicated branding can sometimes be. My five-year-old daughter voted last week. Not to worry, she wasn’t registered by an Acorn volunteer and using an absentee ballot or anything. The voting was completely unofficial and took place at her elementary school. Results were published in the school newsletter the next day. My daughter cast her vote for Barack Obama, and was very proud to tell us all about it when she got home. When I asked her why she chose Obama, she replied, “I heard of him first and I liked his name.” Well, okay. It doesn’t get much more simple than that.

Oh and for any of you who are interested in the results, the student body elected the democratic candidate in an admittedly less landmark, but nonetheless interesting, election. With excellent voter turnout, I might add.

Posted by Kelly on November 4th, 2008
Filed under Branding, Fun | Comments Off

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Customized Bank Cards

SearchWiki . . . Is there a point where personalization is too much?

On a historic day…

How Simple It Can (Sometimes) Be.