Hi all,

Just a quick shout to let you know that we recently became a proud member of the Chesapeake Sustainable Business Alliance. You can visit their site here: www.csballiance.org.

The Chesapeake Sustainable Business Alliance is a group of companies in the Mid-Atlantic region that share similar philosophies on the environment as it relates to doing business. As a group, we believe that business can be done, and can be done well utilizing local, sustainable resources. We band together to ensure that our environmental impact is as small as it can possibly be while still ensuring profitability.

Our design + communications firm has been putting these philosophies into practice for nearly five years now, and we hope that with our committment to the CSBA, we can become even more aware of ways to lessen our impact. We’re really excited about being a part of this group, and we encourage our friends and colleagues to get involved as well.

Garret Ohm
www.orange-element.com

You guys might remember a previous blog posting where I discussed anti-ad-campaigns, and how marketers were analyzing sub-culture trends to empower influencers to market for them.

Well, here’s another one for you. It seems marketers have recently turned to asking consumers to tattoo themselves with their logos and taglines. Sometimes these consumers are accepting pay, but other times, as you’ll read, they’re merely doing it in trade for goods and services. Note the one guy that gets a Dunlop tat for a set of free tires - yikes!

Here’s the article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21979076/

As someone that considers himself as a student of brand communications, I take a bit of a different view of this article. I think one of the inherent benefits that marketers have to consider when they partake in this type of marketing strategy is that consumers start to see how powerful their brand is. They look at a human being that is such a brand evangelist that they will endure the pain and permanence of a branded tattoo and think to themselves, “wow, that must be a great brand if they’re willing to do that.”

I think that’s a really powerful statement. Perhaps even moreso than the actual impressions…

Garret Ohm
www.orange-element.com

According to a new study by PQ Media, that’s how many brand-related conversations happen per day, just in the United States. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? The word-of-mouth-marketing-industry (wow, what a mouthful) is growing by leaps and bounds, mainly due to consumers’ increased reluctance to trust traditional media and advertising.

When we at Orange Element read things like this, we start to think about how this impacts the design and marketing communications industry. One might think that we wouldn’t be excited about these trends because this obviously starts to diminish the quantity of physical marketing materials that will be produced. But our firm is really excited about these trends, because they create a demand for really strong, well executed marketing ideas. These are ideas that must be inherently viral and buzz-worthy. Strong ideas supported by brilliant designs will be the result.

We’re all for anything that helps to alleviate the world of mediocre creative product.

Thanks for reading,

Garret Ohm
www.orange-element.com

So by today, about 500 of our closest friends should have received their Orange Element holiday gift in the mail. If you haven’t, don’t worry, we still have some to hand deliver! And if you’re out of state, you should get yours either today or tomorrow–Wednesday by the latest.

This year’s gift was a useful one — sheets of wrapping paper, custom designed by each member of the Orange Element team. But this wasn’t just any ordinary wrapping paper. This was 100% recycled wrapping paper. Actually, the entire mailing–envelope, label and all–was recycled. And the paper itself was FSC certified. We really wanted to do something that was cool, but we also had a burning desire to do something that was environmentally responsible. That’s the kind of company we are!

As an added bonus, Orange Element was featured on the front cover of the Baltimore Business Journal, including a picture. The story we were in was about the weak economy and how lots of businesses are cutting back this holiday season. It made it sound a bit like we were skimping, but we really weren’t. Producing 7,000 sheets of wrapping paper is not cheap! But that’s the nature of PR, I guess…

Garret Ohm
www.orange-element.com