Had enough of those calendars from your dentist? Just in time, here is a special calendar from Langton Cherubino Group. Beautifully designed and written by our Design Director, Jim Keller, the 2012 calendar is now available. It’s filled with fun facts specific to 2012, including tidbits about Girls Scouts, Spam, and a Magnetic Influx. Update: Free Calendars are SOLD OUT! Thanks for your interest!

99 ways to catch a customer’s eye.
by Anne Fisher
Take a stroll down the pain-reliever aisle in any drugstore, and you’re bombarded with advertising buzzwords (super, extra, ultra, maximum, faster …) and scary warnings about possible side effects. (Clearly, the product-liability lawyers have been busy.) If you didn’t already have a headache, reading enough of these packages might give you one.

Richard Fine, founder of Help Remedies on West 28th Street in Manhattan, decided to go a different way. The son of two doctors, Mr. Fine began in 2009 to market 325-milligram acetaminophen tablets in plain little white biodegradable packages that read simply: “Help. I have a headache.”

The minimalist design caught on with hype-weary consumers, and the brand quickly spread from small specialty shops to mainstream outlets like Duane Reade and Target. The resulting burst of revenues led to nine new products, for minor ailments like blisters, allergies and insomnia, in just two years.

Help Remedies is one of the short, vivid case studies in a new book, Visual Marketing: 99 Proven Ways for Small Businesses to Market with Images and Design.

“Technology puts it within the reach of small businesses to use the kinds of visuals in our marketing that were previously cost-effective only for large corporations,” said co-author David Langton. “Not only does the Internet make it convenient to find and hire design professionals, but online design tools make it easy to experiment with creating great visual elements on your own.”

Mr. Langton, co-founder of Manhattan design firm Langton Cherubino Group, works for huge clients like Ernst & Young, HBO, McGraw-Hill Cos. and MetLife, but about half of his customers are small businesses. For this book, he, his partner Norman Cherubino and co-author Anita Campbell combed through hundreds of striking small business visual campaigns—including packaging, print and online—from all over the U.S. and Britain, to find the ones that are not only eye-catching but have yielded real business results.

“We started with more than 500 candidates and spent about a year narrowing them down to the 99 best,” Mr. Langton said. “So being selected to appear in the book was almost like winning an award.”

The judging seems to have been remarkably impartial: The authors laud standout work by rival design houses like The Art Department on East 12th Street, as well as marketing campaigns like Mr. Fine’s that were entrepreneurs’ own inventions.

“We wanted to be as inclusive as possible,” Mr. Langton explained. “The point is to show small business owners some things that have worked for others, and might spark some of their own new ideas.”

That’s not to say that Langton Cherubino ducked the spotlight altogether. Inspired by Oscar Wilde’s famous remark that one should either wear a work of art or be one, the firm created an online game called MasterpieceYourself.com that allows users to do both: Insert a photo of your own face into a painting by a famous artist like van Gogh or Michelangelo (Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is a popular choice), then email it to friends, tweet it, or post it on Facebook or on your own blog or website.

MasterpieceYourself is so much fun that it went viral, drawing more than 100,000 users worldwide. Like the other 98 great campaigns in Visual Marketing, it also boosted the bottom line. A crowd of new clients told Mr. Langton they chose his firm to do their online marketing because the game made them say, “Wow.”

Read more: Crain’s NY.

The book is an idea generator and the words are sparing as the images and pictures are key to the teachings of this book.

Visual Marketing is meant to be thumbed through, when you have time. You can pick it up for a few minutes or a few hours. Put it down, and then pick it up later. You don’t really need to start at the beginning and read it.
Visual Marketing can be found in fine book stores everywhere. You can also order it online at:

Preview Visual Marketing:

We’ll let you know how the sales do once Visual Marketing is available to purchase at the end of the month. This reminds me of the story of the local band, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band.

This was the number one local bar band in Rhode Island when I was growing up. My siblings, Paul and Debi were big fans. Beaver Brown got a big break when they recorded the music for a movie called “Eddie and the Cruisers.” They left the local Rhode Island music scene and began a national tour with high expectations. But the movie performed poorly at the box office, so they returned to RI and resumed playing the local circuit.

About a year later, someone said, “I heard your song on the radio.” They celebrated that it had entered the bottom of the Billboard 500. Little did they know that “Eddie and the Cruisers” would become one of the first movies to become a bona fide hit on video. Next thing you know, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown band’s soundtrack album reached the top 10 on the Billboard 200 chart and produced a #7 hit single (“On the Dark Side”) on the Billboard Hot 100. “On the Dark Side” also held #1 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart for five weeks.

So you never know how or when the numbering will change…but we’re looking forward to the journey!

Your logo should be supporting the mission and goals of your organization. But many logos are on life support. They survive only because they’ve always been there. (Like celebrities who are famous for being famous.) If your logo is suffering from these maladies, then it’s time to stop apologizing for your logo. Your logo should be working for you – not the other way around.

Here is our public service announcement of the signs that your logo is not working for you:
1. You always have to explain what it is
2. It refers to a business or service that you no longer offer
3. You can’t tell what it is when it’s small
4. Nobody really likes it but it’s been around so long that nobody wants to change it
5. There is no digital version

It’s not as outrageous as reality television, but seeing how logos change in a “before and after” state is certainly fun. Here’s a selection from the Langton Cherubino Group files of clients who have transformed their brands.

2. How up-to-date is your website?
o I add new content more than once a month
o I have an easy-to-use Content Management System (CMS) that allows me to update my own content
o My online events calendar is up-to-date

3. Is it easy to find you on the Web?
o If you Google my company it comes up on the first page.
o I have a Facebook link and a Facebook page for my company
o I use the “Like” feature on my website
o I have a LinkedIn profile for my company
o I have a YouTube Channel with videos about my company
o I have a Twitter handle

4. Can mobile smart phone users see your website?
o My website has a mobile view that’s legible
o I avoid a lot of video and flash on my home page
o My website is easy to navigate with your finger on a touch-screen

5. Does your website reflect the real you…and tell users who you are?
o I have my contact info on the footer in an easy-to-find place
o I have a brief description of my company and what it offers on the Home Page
o I use large images and distinctive graphics to highlight the services and offerings of my company

Make sure your website is working for you, so you may go on a worry-free vacation. Contact us for a free assessment.

Jim has managed and developed websites and web applications since 1995, when he began his career by personally designing and developing the United Nations’ online education website, the CyberSchoolBus. While CTO of National Media Technologies, Jim managed the team that developed Cushman & Wakefield’s Investment Services Group online offering management system. Jim is the vice president of education for Pride Toastmasters and also studies improv. Jim has been working with Langton Cherubino Group for the past 3 years and handled the website deployment for many projects including www.IPRO.org. We are thrilled to have the opportunities to expand our work with Jim and are proud to add another Jim (Along with Jim Keller our Design Director) to the team.

The cover for the new book is ready. Visual Marketing, 99 Ways for Small Businesses to Market with Images and Design by David Langton and Anita Campbell is coming from Wiley Publishers in September. Wiley’s inhouse designer C. Wallace used a cover image by Penfold/iStockphoto to create the cover which is based on an abstract “eye.”

The inside pages, designed by David Langton, will feature a large image from each case study and smaller secondary images. Co-author Anita Campbell has been analyzing each case study to come up with just the right “take-away” tip that encapsulates the main marketing angle for each project.

Visual marketing is coming in the fall of 2011. You can pre-order the book online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Borders.

Defining our terms
In their book, Brand Identity Essentials, authors Budelman, Kim and Wozniak define a Logo as, “a picture that represents the collection of experiences that form a perception in the mind of those who encounter an organization.” They describe an Identity as the logo plus the name, color, and music, as well as the applications where the logo appears.

Clive Chajet writing in Corporate Image makes these distinctions about Corporate Image and Corporate Identity. Corporate Image is what is perceived by its various audiences—how it appears to outsiders such as the financial community or potential consumers. Whereas, Corporate Identity is what the corporation chooses to use to shape those perceptions.

According to designer Wally Olins, author of Corporate Identity: Making Business Strategy Visible Through Design, your identity must be visible, tangible and all-embracing. Olins says you affirm the identity through: Products, Services, People, Buildings and Communications materials.

Identity=Brand
Laurence Ackerman, a former partner at the legendary design firm, Anspach Grossman Portugal, says that besides comprehensive design standards, companies manage their identity through:
1. Language (specific words and phrases for services)
2. Distinctive themes and messages (“taglines”)
3. Actions and policies (CSR: Corporate Social Responsibility)

As a company grows and more people are involved, the very essence of the brand is being expressed by multiple managers and communicators. How do we reign in all of this and maintain standards, as well as build upon a brand as the company and its story evolves and grows?

The Corporate Identity manual is the critical tool in positioning a company, no matter how big or small. The importance of consistent typography, color use, logo placement and such cannot be taken for granted. Good identity manuals help designers and communication managers establish a visual voice for the company that may include photography libraries and image standards as well as professional publication templates. These guidelines build a more powerful corporate identity that in turn influences the public and ultimately the company’s corporate image.

The real power of your ID Manual
When I was the manager of corporate communications at an insurance company, I inherited a new logo and an unyielding binder full of identity standards and recommendations. (This was back in the days when you had to print everything and a PDF was not possible.) The “work in progress” standards were too cumbersome and the page length made it prohibitive to print. So I sat down and sifted through the content and prioritized everything to see how I could get the final manual down to 16 pages.

Once the Corporate Identity manual was published, life as the internal “logo cop” and defender-of-the-brand became easier…but not in the way that I had expected. I thought everyone would now follow the carefully worded rules and exacting details that we had labored over in writing and designing the manual. What I found was that most people didn’t actually read the document, they just called me with their questions and asked me what the rules were. So the manual became my reference guide, it kept me on track, consistent and—more importantly—it became the law of the land within the company. Once I had the manual in place I could call the Vice President of Pensions and say with confidence that the logo could not be published with that drop shadow against a dark colored background because it says so on page 4. And why would he listen to me? Because, on the first page of the Corporate Identity manual, there was a signed letter from the President introducing and endorsing the branding standards. That was the most important page in the book.