Bush Marketing and Branding

Nighean our creative director sent me this with the comment-- Sound familiar? Sadly, this spoof on client and agency relationships is accurate in far too many instances.

Things come to me. Much like lightening striking. Most of the bolts hit the ground and disappear leaving little trace. Then there are times when these bright ideas strike a tree and ignite. This feels like one of those realisations that will turn into some real goodness.

Ebay is clearly a leader in the world of ecommerce. You don't need Forrester syndicated research to know that the number of visits and transactions on their sites is mind blowing. How come so many people buy and sell successfully on ebay? The list is long but lets cut to the roots of my epiphany: ebay's graphic user interface. I feel so geeky and professional using that word which basically means how easy it is to check stuff out and buy it on ebay. Images and copy are sure not fancy, but boy do they work hard. How often do you see shopping carts with crappy or no images and sparse copy that leaves you wondering what the heck you are considering buying.

Look at this item on ebay I was pondering purchasing for our growing Dexter Dairy.







Nothing fancy. Great image, clear price, lots of room for copy. In closing. If you want to improve your e commerce results copy ebay.

One of my best friends is a classic for one liners, odd words and all things eccentric. I first met Rob Jull in 1986 when I was working at Upper Canada Brewing. I had just started as Upper Canada's beer sales rep right out of university. Rob had just got back from Europe and was working on the bottling line. We became good friends and ended up selling allot of beer together. A bit of a prelude to this video clip which immortalizes on of his favourite one liners: oh oh oh...bitter dregs.




Rob is very passionate about wine and now runs a business specialising in all things fine wine vinifera.com and definitely no bitter dregs. Rob's website is one of the first site's built by Bush and it is a great example of doing less better.

Speaking of doing less. If you have read this far and are interested in talking to us about websites, social media and digital marketing we have time to take on some new projects--we are literally down to working on--you guessed it ah, ah, ah.. bitter dregs.

Since landing at Bush Australia, I've had the pleasure and the challenge of shooting various products for our clients. Most times a consistent, diffused light will give results that compliment the product. The problem that usually came up in the early days was simply that the exterior light wasn't right, so I found myself scrambling around Bush headquarters looking for anything that would change the quality of the available light.

After cutting up T-shirts to wrap around lamps, I quickly smelled the burning cotton, and recalled all the “burning down the house” speeches I absorbed throughout my early years. In the back of my head I knew that buying a proper light tent would save me a lot of time, but I was keen to use household items to get me by. The Cromwell bed sheets seemed to diffuse the sunlight nicely and worked quite well for a few products - that is until the wind picked up. For a few hours the passing neighbours got a show of a foul-mouthed Canadian, chasing sheets around the property and wishing he just bought the damned tent. 

A couple hundred dollars and thirty minutes of internet shopping ended up saving me hours of post production time in every product shot since. It simply pops out of it's portable case, and within no time, I'm packing it back up knowing I shot what I needed. Special thanks to the Bush family for the back patting and assuring me that things would get easier.                                                          

Today was a special day for the team at Bush Branding & Marketing as they celebrated their 2000th project. Appropriately project 2000 is further development of bopm (Bush Online Project Management) system. BOPM was developed by Ben Unsworth during a 1 month work exchange back in 2002. The system is built in cold fusion and will be redeveloped in php and mysql by Andrew Bleakley and a team of coders who we are putting together a brief for.

Pictured at the Bangalow Hotel from left to right Jon Sturge, Kaleigh Wisman, Greg Cromwell, Nighean O'Brien, Luke O'Brien and Andrew Bleakley. Thumbs up Lukey to all our clients and two thousand projects.

One of the many nice things about running your own business with a great bunch of people is the lack of politics and tendency to get all precious about things. How many digital agencies would blog about testing vimeo out and post a six year old video of their six year old daughter going to school? I know of at least one.

Aubrey Cromwell first day at Coorabell Public School from Gregory Cromwell on Vimeo.

I hope you find the video entertaining and that you also get to know a bit more about vimeo which seems to be a preferred tool to the increasing popular youtube.

Written by Gregory Cromwell

Last night I had an epiphany of sorts when I came up with three words that sum up the direction I would like to take Bush Branding & Marketing and probably more to the point, my personal life. Ironic that my new mantra (Do Less, Better) would come to me via advice I was giving our 8 year old daughter, Morley.

Morley, like me, loves to take on as much as possible in the shortest time frame. Yesterday, it was halter training her Dexter Cow Abelina in preparation for her debut in the show ring in Bangalow Show. Moe was not happy with the fact that she could not get her cow to walk perfectly in a circle and stand quietly beside her after 5 minutes of training. When I tried to explain to Morley that she need not be frustrated with what she had accomplished in such a short time and that she should pull back her expectations and be happy with doing less, better. Understandably, Moe did not really understand what she had done wrong and what her Dad was going on about in an attempt to hold back her tears of frustration. It was then that I realised these words were as much about me as they were her. In an attempt to drive my words of advice home I went explained to Morley that my time working with her and her cow was an example of me practicing what I was preaching. A half hour before I had turned down the urge to join in on a horse ride with my wife and my daughter Aubrey. My normal approach to things is to try to do it all; but for some reason on this occasion I showed some restraint and focused on doing one thing well--which was to focus on Morley and her cow training.

In closing, I will leave you with some more words. "If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter." This is an expression that was passed onto me by the Creative Director of Ranscombe & Co on many occasions when we were pitching short and snappy headlines and copy to clients. In today's web 2.0 and social media world the ability to say and do less and communicate more and better is a winning combination.

For some more ideas on how to do less, better for your business. Have a look at this article "Marketing 2009: A Game Plan for the Recession".

Yesterday was one of those days. Five different clients with domain name and hosting melt downs. Sites disappearing due to expired domain names; ISP's appointing themselves as admin contacts so their clients are stuck to them; web developers trying to make a few bucks as domain name resellers and panic in the air with confusion and anger looking for someone to blame. "My site is gone! My email is not working. My life is over"

All of this can be avoided with a bit of prior, proper, preparation (which for the record prevents, piss-poor performance. Here are a few Golden rules to keep the shine on your valuable domain name, website and email.

Rule number 1. Register your domain name yourself or at least be sitting beside the person who is registering it on your behalf.

Rule number 2. Division between Church and State. Best to have your website hosting and your domain name registrar different.

Rule number 3. Kill a few trees. Don't be shy to print out and save all the information you are sent when you register your domain and setup hosting. Usernames and passwords are key and losing them can have serious repercussions.

Rule number 4. Register your domain name for them maximum length of time possible. Google likes this and you will sleep better at night knowing your domain name is safe and sound for a few years.

Rule number 5. Ensure you keep your contact information up to date and most importantly your email address you provide as a point of contact is one that you check regularly.

Finally if you have not followed the 5 p's and find yourself in a panic and need help to get your domain name, hosting or email sorted we will do our Bush Best to get it back for you at our hourly wrangling rate.

Domain Registrars we use and recommend

Go Daddy
Net Registry (Australia)
Internic (Canada)

Hosts we use and recommend

Brad Baker- xyzulu.com
Host Gator