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Entrepreneur Valerie Yeang hails from Singapore, from whence she has bought highend fashion label ‘Pulling Strings’. She came to Idea Shop with a good vision for her brand but needed ideas for how to reach her target market: Affluent late twenty-somethings.

The problem:

How could she get to know the market? How could she get to know her customers?

The solution:

Visualising a ‘customer base’ is hard. It’s intangible and vague. We helped Valarie fill in the gaps and make her customers real by asking a few questions. (Where would you want your ideal customer to live in London? Where would they work? What would they do?’) We started running scenarios with her and we could see she got a good picture of her perfect customer. Amongst other things, she thought they’d live in Notting Hill. Time for research then! We suggested Valerie go to Notting Hill – did she pick the right spot for her customers? Could she ’see’ them there? The further we explored this approach the clearer her customer became. We suggested picking up local newspapers to the area, going out to Notting Hill at peak times and at quiet times. How could ‘Pulling Strings’ become a real part of that location? She liked the advice and said she’d put it to good use.

Building a profile of your ideal customer, or of a few different types of customer is really useful exercise. It will help you think of new ways to talk to them about your existing products and services. It may even inspire you to create new products and services to meet their needs. Give them names. Cut out pictures from magazines of what you think they might look like. Think about where they go on holiday, do they have a family, do they have a partner, where do they live, what technology they use, where they hang out, what books they read, their hobbies, what makes them happy, sad, angry. Get to know them as well as you know your best friends and you’ll soon think of great ways to connect with them.

Art School Royalty is a fledgling brand still trying to work out how to announce itself to the world.

Brainchild of Christos (who had travelled all the way from Manchester!), Art School Royalty presents a unique concept by fusing the world of student art and commercial retail together through a talent led initiative.

Basically, Christos wants to offer hungry young design students a public outlet by printing their work on unique, high-end t-shirts. The business model is not unlike the social graphics tees co www.threadless.com but with the alluring twist of only featuring designs from art school students/alumni. Tee by the future Tracy Emin anyone?

However, Christos was caught at a ‘chicken-or-egg’ moment.  He needed work from designers to produce the t-shirts, but he had no examples to convince them it was a great project.

We recommended he organise talks at Manchester’s best design schools (by getting to know the professors and college heads) to pitch his idea to the students directly. As a club promoter, he also had access to a ready made brand building tool – Art School Royalty could sponsor the best nights in Manchester, thus aligning itself with the right cultural hotspots (and potential customers)! Also, with access to many of the latest bands, he should try and rope in lead singers and musicians as brand ambassadors to wear his t-shirts and effortlessly (and cheaply) communicate his brand values to his customers.

He already had a good idea to initially create an online forum to display his products with minimum expense but the long term goal is to get them into boutiques across the UK.

Ultimately, we stressed that it would be down to him to engage with the students effectively as they really hold the keys to ASR’s success.

Good Luck Christos, we look forward to wearing your merchandise soon!

Post by Hugo Bennett