KEY TO SUCCESS

Company: 360 Wraps  Project: Helping your client perfect its branding

Key to success: Convince the client that simple is better for a vehicle wrap

Dodge truck wrap for The Boneyard Haunted House. The client operates the World’s Largest Haunted House in Arlington, Texas. All proceeds from the haunted house benefit the Special Olympics.

I learned a lot about branding while working with various NASCAR teams and marketing companies over the past 10 years. Here are some of the things I’ve leaned that will help you build your brand as well as the brand of your clients. 

As a wrap shop owner, I feel personally responsible for the success of the people who choose to do business with us. When someone comes to our shop and decides to have us wrap their vehicle, we take on the project as if it where our own company. In this article I will explain how we help the clients understand the benefits of creating a clear message on their vehicles. 

If you read my first article (S&DG March 2010) you know that I did not go to school for marketing. In fact, I didn’t go to school for anything. I was in the military. So everything that I am going to tell you is what I have learned from 10 years of working in the marketing field. I have always been very inquisitive, so I ask a lot of questions when I am around people who know more than me, which happens very often. Over the years, I have learned a lot about marketing from many different people in many different industries. The one thing that you won’t find me doing is using big fancy terms to refer to stuff in marketing. I like to use the KIS principle, which stands for Keep It Simple.

Amarillo Restoration’s trailer before its rebranding.

The first thing I would like to discuss is the message that your client is trying to get across with their wrap. We have clients all the time that bring in a tri-fold brochure and ask that we put all the information on their vehicle that is in the brochure. Their theory on this is if a brochure is only nine inches tall and 12 inches wide and you can fit all that information in there, then surely a 16-foot-long car would be ample space to put all their information on it. 

What most people fail to see is that their vehicle, when viewed as most people will view it, is actually going to be much smaller than their brochure. What do I mean by this? Next time you’re outside, I want you to do a little experiment. It will help you explain this issue with your customers. 

Take a business card out of your pocket and hold it at arms length in front of you. Now find a vehicle that is about 100 feet away, and you will notice that the business card actually appears to be larger than the vehicle. This is the perspective from which you are looking at both objects as well as the distance of them to your eyes. Knowing this, it is a good idea to explain this to your customers and then hopefully they will understand that even though their vehicle is large, it is mostly going to be viewed from a distance that will make it appear to be small. 

MrRestore.com’s trailer after rebranding.

There is one other variable that you might want to remind them about, and that is speed. Most people who see your wrapped vehicle will either be speeding along in a car or standing still as you speed along, so this makes it much more important to clearly get the message across. When designing proofs for your client, make sure you tell them to print it out about eight inches wide for the side of the vehicle and put it on a wall that they can look at from 20 feet away. So many times I have battled a client when they were telling me that they needed all these things listed out on their vehicle that were on their brochure, so when I am having a problem with a client like this, I will do the design the way that they asked then I will make another design the way I think it should look with the information that I think is important, and print them out. After they see both of them on the wall from across the room, the concept of “less is more” becomes clear really fast.

Why am I so passionate about designing the wrap the way that we think it should be done rather than just letting our clients tell us what they want done? This goes back to our original thought that we care about the success of our clients’ business. If we allow the client to totally ruin their wrap by having us place too much content or content that does not make sense on the wrap, then that client is going to blame us for the wrap not working. As this industry grows, we want everybody who gets a wrap on their vehicle to see success from it and to spread the word that vehicle wraps are the best way to go for marketing. 

Let’s look at the case of MrRestore.com. When they came to us, their name was Amarillo Restoration Services. The company had been around for 15 years or so, and they just partnered up with some new investors and wanted to improve their image. The new name of the parent company was Mercedes Restoration. The owners and I sat down to discuss the design, and I told them right away that it was a bad idea to name the company Mercedes Restoration. I felt like people would assume that they restore German cars with a name like that. So when they left, I started thinking about what I would name a company if I did fire, flood and storm damage restoration?

I looked up a handful of domain names, and MrRestore.com happened to be available. Next time we met, I advised them that if I were doing what they did, I would name my company MrRestore.com, they loved it and that’s when we started working on their branding. 

The rebranding for MrRestore.com led to multiple wrap projects and a satisfied client that will return for more business.

We felt like the images on the wrap needed to explain what they did without even reading it. That is where the fire, water, and storm came from. The MrRestore guy was put in the logo to represent that strong man that you need in an emergency to help, and the last part was the tagline that we developed, which is “The Calm After The Storm”. 

Over the last year, we have wrapped eight trucks and trailers for them and they are now working on a franchise model that will open the door for even more wraps. MrRestore has used its new brand to help them land some pretty large national accounts, which they feel that the professionalism of their look has helped to create the trust in their clients. When you win over a client like we did with MrRestore, you will have a client for life.