Welcome

Welcome to the playground. We’re glad you found us. Feel free to stay and play as long as you like. Keep in mind that the site is under continous construction so we’ll be adding pages all the time.

This site is designed to give you some insight into our approach to branding and marketing. It’s also intended to be fun. It’s not that we don’t take the site seriously, it’s just that we feel it’s more important for you to feel comfortable with who we are and how we think. If you like us and you want to know more, give us a call. We’ll be happy to brag about our history, our clients, our awards and our people. For now, check out our site and we hope to meet you someday.

Our Philosophy

At Parker Madison, our philosophy is that we believe most businesses market themselves under a false assumption: “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”

The truth is that just because a business opens its doors and decides to sell products or a service doesn’t guarantee that anyone, much less everyone, will be waiting to partake of the new offering. Even creating a product or service that is clearly better than the rest doesn’t ensure anyone will take notice. Sure you can bombard the public with all sorts of facts, figures, reasons and statistics why a product or service is better than the competition but if they don’t dig it, that is, if they don’t feel emotionally connected on some level to the brand, they won’t buy it.

So what’s the solution? Dress for Recess.

Most businesses think they need to dress for success - that is - they need to create marketing materials to reach their target audience that states every logical reason why said market should buy from them instead of the competition. The truth is that people don’t buy high-end products or services based on logic. High-end purchases: cars, boats, homes, etc are all emotional decisions. When people are emotionally connected to a brand, they will use logic as an excuse or alibi to rationalize the emotional decision they’ve already made and that's what we call Dress for Recess.

Dress for Recess

Dress for recess is simply a protocol for addressing the intended audience. That protocol looks like this:

Sense of Character | Appeal to Emotion | Appeal to Logic

Character/Personality: People do business with people they know, like or trust. Your marketing material should exude personality. Viewers should be able to identify your marketing simply by recognizing the look and feel. Determining what that personality is and how the look and feel should convey is the real art behind successful branding.

Appeal to Emotion: Your target market is made up of real people who make brand choices based on emotions that are rooted deep in their psyches. These people want you to believe that they make very rational decisions based on logical principles, but research shows that most people let their emotions guide purchasing behavior more than 85% of the time. The key to appealing to emotions is rooted in understanding. Smart marketers learn which emotions their target audience associates with their product or service then apply a healthy dose of empathy to the communication process.

Appeal to Logic: Facts, figures, features and benefits have their place in marketing communications, but it’s not the first thing to get across. Logic should be used to close the deal, not open the door.

Eye-to-eye

The Eye-to-Eye process is the system we use to discover key information about a company’s culture, personality and distinctive characteristics that will help to establish the brand aesthetics.

The process also takes a deep look into the buying behaviors of the target market and the feelings and emotions this group associates with their purchases. Together, these two groups of information will help us in creating an image that effectively bridges the gap between the buyer and seller. It allows communication to occur on an Eye-to-Eye level.

B2B vs B2C: The Eye-to-Eye method of brand marketing is the best way to build a brand, whether you’re marketing to consumers or other businesses. Remember, businesses don’t read industry magazines, go to lunch with vendors or make purchasing decisions; people at businesses do those things. If we speak to the hearts of people, their minds and their loyalty will follow.