Wilmington, DE — Good Shepherd Penn Partners has selected AB&C, a full-service marketing communications agency, to develop a brand identity and brand strategy for its Philadelphia-area post-acute hospitals and outpatient therapy centers.

Good Shepherd Penn Partners is a joint venture of Allentown, PA-based Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network and Penn Medicine. The strategic communications effort will identify the differentiating characteristics of the organization both internally and externally, gauge general market awareness and develop a brand platform to be used in the creation of marketing messaging and communications.Read full post...

The next time you want to see what the general public thinks about your new logo…don’t.

The list of brands that have gone through a massive rebranding effort — only to cave into online peer pressure and revert back to their old identities (Tropicana, The Gap, University of California) — continues to grow.

As someone who makes a living rebranding companies, this troubles me.

Foremost, people who comment on Internet threads usually aren’t professional marketers or branding experts. They’re the same people who take half-naked pictures of themselves making duck faces in the mirror, then film a video of their buddy eating a tablespoon of cinnamon.

They don’t understand the hundreds of nuances that go into building a brand.Read full post...

After enough pushing, prodding and hearing the “But everybody’s on Facebook” argument, you finally decided your business needed a page. About 90 percent of small businesses are on it, so welcome to the club. Whether your page is brand-spanking new or a couple of years old, you want to know how you’re doing. As with any other aspect of business, you have to check your figures, right?

Before we get started, make sure your Facebook page represents a business, not a person. If it doesn’t  the Facebook FAQs can take you through the transfer. Once you’re all squared away, you’ll find your business page equipped with free analytics (yes, free) called Facebook Insights. Not only is Insights complimentary, but it’s also fast and relatively painless. Managing your social media pages can be time-consuming, so the last thing you want is to spend more time crunching numbers. No worries. Insights spits out the important information, giving you just enough not to be overwhelming.

Carve out some time to check your figures. It doesn’t have to be every week — maybe the end of every month or quarter.

Read full post...

The Independence School’s new logo and theme line

The Independence School (TIS) is an independent school located in Pike Creek, Delaware, that welcomes students from age 3 through the 8th grade. Looking to keep enrollment strong during a time of economic challenge, with a reduced population of age-appropriate candidates and competition from other independent and public schools, the TIS staff identified the need to review their brand and rediscover what differentiates them.Read full post...

Wilmington, DE – AB&C, a full-service marketing communications firm, took home gold and silver at the 2013 ADDY Awards in Philadelphia. With more than 600 of the region’s top creative professionals on hand, the agency won gold in the public service “non-traditional advertising” category for its My7Minutes unicorn t-shirt. My7Minutes is a youth tobacco prevention campaign conducted for the Delaware Department of Public Health. In the category “fractional page newspaper advertising in color,” the agency hoisted a silver ADDY for its MedStar Good Samaritan Hospital Gilligan colonoscopy print ad.Read full post...

Where are our mobile manners?

I worked in an advertising agency back in the early ‘90s when a new business win mushroomed into half of our agency business—cell phone advertising. I still remember a creative director asking me what it would take to get me to purchase a cell phone. He was looking for ad concept ideas. The big selling point at the time was “safety.” And I recall saying, “Why would I need one? I have AAA.”

It was the “in” thing then to have a cell phone. Now, 20 years later, it has become a necessity. According to a Synovate survey in 2011, “82% of Americans never leave home without their phones.”Read full post...

Hospital food is going gourmet. Yum!

I’ve recently become obsessed with where my food comes from. And I don’t think I’m alone. There are farmers’ markets and Whole Foods popping up all over the place. Whole Foods’ labels don’t just give you the “Best Before” date on your New York strip, they tell you where the cow lived, his name and what he generally liked to do on the weekends. Restaurants are at it, too. I went to my first all-raw vegan organic café the other day. It’s a trend that’s picking up speed. And people are voting at the cash register. I have a friend who likes to call Whole Foods “Whole Paycheck.” But like thousands, I’m willing to pay more for a better product, which is presumably healthier, too.Read full post...

Held annually before St. Patrick’s Day, the breakfast has raised nearly $2,000,000 for St. Patrick’s Center.

Wilmington, DE – The St. Patrick’s Day Society will host its 20^th annual communion breakfast on March 14 at the DoubleTree Hotel on King Street. With more than 1,000 people expected, the mass, parade and breakfast are now a Wilmington St. Patrick’s Day tradition. The breakfast features headliner Joe Conklin, renowned impressionist and Philadelphia radio personality.

“We are thrilled to welcome Joe Conklin to Wilmington to entertain our supporters, many of whom have been with us since day one,” says Joe Farley, Sr., event founder and emcee. “The event is truly remarkable because it both unites Delaware’s Irish-American community and ensures St. Patrick’s Center is equipped to serve those in Wilmington who need our help the most.”Read full post...

I’m all for target marketing, but this is a little invasive.

To anyone who’s faced with a cable bill in excess of $200 every month, news that Intel is planning on “blowing up the cable industry” with its own set-top box and unbundled cable service is big stuff. Instead of paying a fortune for 500 channels you rarely watch, Intel says they’ll allow you to subscribe to specific channels of your choosing. According to Intel, the set-top box will offer cable channels delivered “over the top” to televisions anywhere there is an Internet connection, regardless of provider. Consumers can subscribe to content per channel – maybe even by show. They even plan to enable consumers to use “Cloud DVR,” which would allow users to watch any past TV show at any time.Read full post...

Poorly researched concepts are one of the main causes of failed campaigns.

You’re in a concept meeting. Your client, a skin cancer organization, has asked you to come up with an advertisement that will convince young women to stop using tanning beds. Your coworker, the mother of a teenage daughter, speaks up. “My daughter Kelly had no idea that tanning beds can cause cancer until I told her recently,” she says, “so the ad should probably focus on melanoma.” Her idea is received with nods of approval, the creative team is informed, and out goes the fear-appeal ad. How easy was that?

Easy, perhaps, but at what cost is such a strategy used by adverting agencies? According to the experts, great cost. Read full post...

Google Analytics is a data source powerhouse. It can measure almost everything, so it can be pretty overwhelming. Here are a few key metrics any small business, blogger or marketer just starting out should focus on.

Where is my target audience?

In Google Analytics, if you look at your demographics by location, you can get a picture-perfect view of where in the world your audience is coming from. You can break this down by country, state, region and even city.Read full post...

Philadelphia master impressionist and radio personality Joe Conklin

Wilmington, DE – As part of its 20^th annual St. Patrick’s Day fundraiser, the St. Patrick’s Day Society will present Joe Conklin, Philadelphia master impressionist and radio personality. Conklin, known for his dead-on impressions of Barack Obama, Charles Barkley, and a litany of politicians, athletes and film stars, will headline the March 14 communion breakfast.

To date, the Wilmington-based event has raised nearly $2,000,000 for St. Patrick’s Center, a respite for people in need on Wilmington’s East Side. The mass and breakfast were the brainchild of some influential Delawareans, including Joe Farley, Sr. The former chairman of the Delaware State Democratic Party is proud that the event still embodies its original tradition and mission, despite its tremendous growth over the past two decades.Read full post...

Waiting an entire week to watch the next episode of your favorite TV show is beginning to seem as outdated as watching a show in real time. The DVR liberated millions of people from having to be in front of the television at a certain time on a certain day of the week. And now in an unprecedented move, Netflix recently released all 13 commercial-free episodes of its original show House of Cards – at the same time.Read full post...

It can sometimes be intimidating to come up with the perfect blog post. Here are 5 tips for creating a blog post that will leave ‘em wanting more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5ymk61BzNA

So, what to do when there is a convergence of products, pricing and promotional approaches in an industry that’s overpopulated with players — how do you stand apart?

In this country we are blessed with the opportunities of the free enterprise system that can richly reward the hard work and singular focus of driven entrepreneurs. However, the free enterprise economic model can be a fickle lover. It is devoid of emotion and will turn on the unwary. Today’s success is tomorrow’s Rubicon for those adverse to change and adaption.

Take banking for example. There are more than 9,000 banks in this country, and with very few exceptions they are all exactly the same. Oh sure, B of A, JP Morgan, Wells, Citi and a few others have the lion’s share of branches and ATMs out there, but they are really no different than each other or smaller banks at their core. They have the same products — basically loans and deposit accounts; they are priced the same — the overnight Federal Funds borrowing rate is virtually the same for all of them, and none can charge more interest on their loans or pay more interest on their deposits for very long before competition eats their lunch. So how do you survive? How about convenience — a branch network in a lot of great locations! Nope, not any more — better and better mobile platforms and apps as well as remote capture/deposit and automated tellers have a lot of branch managers dusting off their resumes. And it’s getting easier and easier for customer-facing folks at banks to remember your name and birthday, because branch traffic in the U.S. is plummeting.Read full post...