Due to creative interests, I’m afraid I carry that habit of trying to find meaning in everything, anything, which has a danger of irritating those other personalities who prefer a more pragmatic life.

At MWS Media we could potentially suffer from this condition, given our creative outlets, were it not for setting clear goals and structures in our marketing plans, and equally with client projects, collaborating with their ideas to produce effectively targeted video.

But if I were to go back to my habit, I’ve wanted to see if I can find business relevance in a story I’ve grown up with, and if there is advice and ideas there. I recently re-read Alice in Wonderland, and if I looked at it from a marketing and business perspective, which still seems odd to do, there were some unexpected parallels. (Admittedly, I was looking for them.) 

If there’s one thing Alice in Wonderland could possibly teach us if we ever tried to translate it into the world of business, it’s about perception, presumptions and dealing with different people.

Despite how outrageous and surreal these characters are in this story, there are aspects in all of them that could be seen to reflect certain types of marketers and the marketing strategy behind them.

What I’d like to think about for this post is how some of the quotes in the story can act as advice, and how some characters are identifiable to your work in marketing and developing business. I will explain each anecdote under the title Personality, or Perspective, just to make it clearer (or perhaps more pretentious.)

So imagine for a moment that Alice is both yourself and potential customer, and Wonderland embodies not just your business and brand, but the world around you too.

Personality: The Cheshire Cat

This is a certain type of marketing manager that provides both good and bad qualities. The good thing about being a Cheshire Cat marketer is you might offer industry knowledge and customer sympathy, giving your business that large smile that everyone else will now remember. However despite your efforts to reassure your audience (‘Oh, you can’t help that, we’re all mad here’) there is no real reason to believe or be guided by you because you stay completely out of the action. Be careful to lead by example, rather than staying up in your tree suggesting routes, leaving Alice more confused.

Personality: The Queen of Hearts

This kind of marketer or sales person has a good amount of success to prove their worth, they dominate others and shout the loudest so they can’t possibly be ignored. Whilst these qualities may guarantee your voice is heard, the major flaw in this character as a marketer is that you may lack foresight, cutting ‘heads’ off before you appreciate the potential benefits of that particular marketing ‘playing card’. You may only be able to grab short chunks of attention before your audience starts to drift, with no real plan of how to make the audience’s experience of your business durational. Always think ahead of how a customer or potential customer could engage with you over time.

Perspective: “Speak English!' said the Eaglet. “I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either!”

It’s very much that awkward moment of being called out in front of everyone, and on social media nowadays it is harder to cover up. If you’re not going to make enough effort to engage with your customers on a familiar level, and instead use technical terminology, then you stand the danger of baffling them into frustration, they won’t respond well and they will challenge your knowledge too.

Perspective: “I wish I hadn't cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears!”

This could serve as a warning to those marketing managers out there who believe that their current plan is the only effective one for their business. This is especially dangerous if this marketing plan is more than 3 years old. The world is changing and people are experimenting with new and exciting ways to connect with people. Your old strategy, like Alice, is shrinking into a less effective way compared with new ones out there, and if all you can do is cry about it then you may have lost the followers you had and it’s too late to get them back.

Perspective: “If it had grown up, it would have made a dreadfully ugly child; but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.”

I believe this is a good example of playing to your strengths. Marketing is all about bringing out the best qualities of your business and enjoying them. There’s no use pretending to be like any other business, otherwise you will just be as an ‘ugly child’, with no positive qualities that stand out. Yes, you might be a ‘pig’, but you’re the handsome kind of pig, and Alice preferred to see him that way, just as your customers want to see the best version of you.

Personality: The Mad Hatter

Perhaps the best marketer in the book, if a little risky, although he ruined it at the end. Throughout the tea-party, he engages Alice with questions, challenging her presumptions and also including her in the internal matters of the table. The first technique all three of them use is to stress the exclusivity of their party, and whilst most marketer’s aim is to invite, it’s essential to make any new follower or customer feel that they have joined something either exclusive or special, perhaps with access to other benefits. However, Alice leaves on account of the Hatter’s remark, “I don’t think – ““Then you shouldn’t talk.” which is important to avoid with any existing follower or customer. For one, don’t interrupt them if they are confused, and also don’t brush off their concern carelessly.

And finally...

Perspective: “…which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

If, as a marketer or sales person, you want to monitor your success, this is the question you need to ask yourself frequently. You should have a clear idea of what you want to stand out in your business, how you want to connect with your customers or followers, and how you want to be seen on the outside, and the route you take should inform this success.

Alice only wanted to get somewhere, whereas if she’d had a good idea, she may have found a clearer path.

Gemma

A lot of businesses want to use video production in their marketing strategy because they’ve realised the power and popularity of video and start to envision viral view numbers. The reality can be quite different. When we are asked to come up with some creative ideas for a video we first ask the all important question… What is the video for?

Business is done by people and people are more likely to do business with people they like. There’s a reason people pay a lot of money for top brand perfumes for example, rather than cheaper high street versions; it’s because brands are built on how people feel about them. How is your video going to make people feel? Is this video to show off a certain product? Is it to grow brand awareness? Is it giving advice or tips? Is it going to go on your website or on your social channels?

These things really do matter. Video that works creates an emotional response so if you want your video to be viewed (and shared) by the people that you want to reach you need to create an emotional connection. The purpose of the video should dictate how you want to make them feel.

Is your video funny or entertaining, leaving the viewer feeling amused and more likely to remember you in a fond way? Are they engaged and grateful that you shared that information?

Here is one of my favourite examples of a brand video creating an emotional response from their target audience:

And here is my favourite example of a humourous video making a business more memorable:

It’s a shame when we see videos where businesses have set out to create something to help their business grow and end up with a heavily branded video that’s sits exactly in line with strict brand guidelines and doesn't generate any views or success for them. All because it doesn’t evoke any emotion (other than maybe boredom…).

We hope this has been helpful, even if it just means you’ll always remember who to go to for taxidermy! As always, feel free to leave us feedback or to tell us the subjects you want covered!

Thanks,

Hayley

In my blog post last week I talked about recording the audio for our latest feature film, which is a completely improvised film with no script, just characters who meet at a tree in a field and essentially have a completely unscripted conversation. Even we didn’t know what they were going to say and our job was to record it, which as you can imagine was a bit of a mission!

We placed multiple mics around the location itself and the two actors also wore lapel mics that were discreetly hidden under the tops they were wearing. The lapel mics were initially considered more of a backup solution, just in case the other mics didn’t pick up clearly enough the dialogue. However when importing and syncing the eight different mic sources it became clear that while the six mics placed around the location had captured the dialogue cleanly, none of them had captured the level of detail the lapel mics were giving us.

Before importing and syncing the audio sources I’d imagined we’d be using a blend of mic sources to create the final mix itself, but there were phasing issues, and the sources themselves sounded too different from each other to easily swap back and forth between different mics. It would’ve been a bit of a nightmare trying to select the best source for each line, then also have to try and EQ each mic so that they all sounded cohesive and natural to listen to.

The other option was to simply pick the best source, which was clearly the lapel mics, and to work harder on getting those to sound as good as they can. For the most part this method makes it a lot easier to achieve more, faster. I applied simple compression, EQ and basic gates to each lapel mic source and then proceeded to listen though to the tracks individually, adjusting the setting for the inserts as and when each required it. After approximately fifteen to twenty minutes I’d heard as much as I was going to in terms of range of dynamics and volume, so I was confident the setting of the compressors, EQ’s and gates would be good enough to do the job of keeping the sound mix of the film under control.

The next step was to painstakingly go through the two tracks individually again, picking out all of the pops, clicks, interference and general rustle and noise on each lapel mic track. For some reason one mic was particularly prone to interference noise, while the other was more prone to clicks and pops? Either way, I used good old-fashioned cut and paste techniques to cover up any noises I didn’t want to hear. There were lots of moments of silence between the actor’s dialogue where I was able to steal snippets of “silence” to paste over random clicks and pops.

The actors were also sat close enough to be able to dip the volume of one mic and bring up the other mic momentarily, where I needed to cover a click or pop that occurred when an actor was speaking.

Probably the biggest challenge is wind and plane noise. It’s random, can sometimes completely cover a line of dialogue if its loud enough, and worst of all happens just when you don’t want it to! I used EQ as best as possible to reduce the level of wind and plane noise during dialogue, but ultimately in the end we decided that the rustic, gorilla feel that we took to the film meant that leaving some wind and plane noise in actually brought quite a nice texture to the sound mix, especially considering there is nothing else to listen to in the whole feature other than two actors speaking. The film is actually sometimes more about the silence between the lines than the lines themselves as well. Because the actors were improvising every line, there are a lot of beautiful silent sections where you can see the characters thinking about how to respond to what’s just been said. And so all those little things that make up the audio soundscape of the field they were in at the time, the birds, the trees, planes flying overheard, wind, rustle of clothing during movement, these are all the things that make it actually quite an interesting listen as a sound track, rather than simply tidying the whole thing up, whacking some music and audio sfx here and there and just giving audiences exactly what they expected to hear.

We hope it’s a nice refreshing change if and when you ever view the film, to know that every moment you see, and in particular hear, was a natural, organic moment created by the two actors as their characters, and everything you hear is exactly how it happened on the day of filming itself as well.

Phil