On a warm and breezy late spring evening, I was out with my co-workers at U.S. Dataworks for a minor league baseball game. Our Sugar Land Skeeters (yes, that is the actual team name) won 1-0 in a defensive battle with the Long Island Ducks.
During the game, I couldn’t help but notice all the marketing signage placed around the stadium. One sign in particular caught my eye:
Can you see it–the billboard to the immediate right of the big Texas scoreboard?
When I first looked at it, I thought it spelled IRON, but we figured out it was ICON. The font makes it a little hard to read, but there is some text underneath the sign. Can’t read it? Neither could I. We tried taking pictures and enlarging it, yet we still couldn’t make it out.
Finally, one of our crew went to their website and found out they were information consultants. Whew! At least they were not a marketing consulting firm.
See, in my book, you should avoid sending confusing, potentially unreadable messages. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a billboard at a ballpark or a powerpoint presentation–when you make your message hard to read or understand, you lessen the impact of your message.
I assume they bought this billboard to send a message they hoped would bring them new prospects. Perhaps ICON is only marketing to minor-league center fielders–the only people in the ballpark who could actually read their message.
What messages are you sending via marketing channels that are unreadable or confusing? You have a target market and you are messaging to those individuals–make sure they can read and understand you.