Restaurant branding, marketing and advertising blog

Branding Lesson #1: Don’t wake the sleeping tiger

One thing this world creates naturally is competition. It’s natural and healthy albeit scary and stressful. At first glance, who wants competition? You’d love to own it all, right? Well, that’s just not going to happen, and that is okay. One of the hardest habits to break is to try to take everything for yourself in business. Not only is it poor practice in life, it’s even poorer practice in business. Competition creates awareness and awareness creates patronage. Patrons can be broken into their own unique interest groups and therein lies the framework for branding. Read the rest of this entry »

Become Completely Mobile

Mobility means being able to work anywhere, anytime. Wireless has freed us from the confines of the office cubicle. However, we still don’t have the comforts of the office. Like a chair. Or a mouse pad…. Until now.

Introducing OpenAire, a product that has us in awe. It’s a laptop carrying case that tranforms into a worksurface and a chair on the spot.

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's super frickin' awesome!

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How Graphics Increase Conversions On Salespages

At Vigor, we subscribe to a number of newsletters and information worth sharing with the crowd. Once such newsletter is Psychotactics, an email newsletter focused on business ideas and advise. This morning’s edition was perfect for sharing as it adds another note about how people interact and react to advertising, internet and other marketing forms. Enjoy.

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World’s Most Inconvenient Bank

Commerce Bank, a regional bank that started over 10 years ago, has recently merged with another bank and changed its name accordingly. This is standard practice for banks especially in this economic climate. Merging and acquiring shouldn’t be that jarring but it does pose a lot of holes where important things can fall through. The opportunity is there to beef up customer service and quality assurance, brace for impact and WOW current customers. This is not something Commerce/Metro Bank is doing right now.

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Driving word of mouth traffic

Everybody wants more word of mouth business for their company. It’s a need and want that supersedes the B2B and B2C specific interests. However, there is no magic bullet that builds more word of mouth beyond wowing your current customers. Until Blabberbug.com was launched. Read the rest of this entry »

What is Black & White and Red All Over?

The new RedHouse furniture TV spot. It’s poorly produced much like a car lot advertisement, but that’s not what bugs us. What’s bugging us is the poor delivery of what could be made into a more tongue-in-cheek approach to the subject of racial segregation. The music is a bit catchy, but the “actors” do such a poor job of delivering the script. This was a missed opportunity to say the least.

Painting a better picture

When I first came across Fang Ling Lee’s work here in Harrisburg I was immediately enamored. I loved the smooth strokes mixed with interpretive elements. So, we reached out and came to an agreement to redesign her lackluster website. Yesterday Vigor launched Ling’s website at www.fanglinglee.com.

The new site features content completely maintained and edited via our proprietary content management system, VIM. With dynamic galleries, events listing and links to ecommerce, Ling’s artwork is finally displayed in all it’s glory. Enjoy.

Gallery features thumbnails, preview and large images all run from a Content Management System.

Vendor / Client Relationship

Some may call me crazy for posting this, but I just could not let it go. It’s too funny and hits way to close to home.

Considerations for Content Management

Website content management systems have grown from a luxury often used by only large corporations into a necessity that is borderling irresponsible NOT to have on a company’s website. Being able to manage one’s own content reduces the amount of money needed to keep information fresh and up-to-date. Fresh information spawns continued readership, repeat visitors, new vistors, higher search results and inevitably…new business.

Despite the need for content management, a lot of misconceptions have arisen over the years with regard to what can and cannot be done (not to mention how much it should cost.) So, we’ve decided to shed some light on the facts surrounding content management systems. Whether you are using an opensource God like Wordpress, or using a proprietary system like Vigor’s VIM, the following hold true. Read the rest of this entry »

Our lil Burg Makes it Big

Forbes.com released as study setting Harrisburg, PA as number 12 in America’s top places to live. We’re so proud of our little Burg.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/01/cities-city-ten-lifestyle-real-estate-livable-cities_slide_5.html