Marketing Mnemonics

Muscle Technology

The Background:

Industrial Woodworking Machine Company was a pioneer in developing and manufacturing fingerjoint machinery. The company had delivered over 1,200 fingerjoint systems over the years. They produced some of the finest fingerjoint machinery available in the United States and shipped it around the world. They had just developed a new series of fingerjoint machinery. We believed that with these new models of machinery needed a new positioning statement and a new image to go along with that positioning statement.

Woodworking machinery looked like many other kinds of industrial machinery. In the industry, the traditional brochures and marketing communications pieces usually depicted a picture of the machine, a list of features, and a company name. They were boring and usually had nothing special to differentiate one machinery manufacturer from another. We wanted to emphasize and depict the final product, the fingerjoint, rather than the machine itself. This was partially because state of the art machinery was always changing. A brochure was often out of date before they were distributed.

The Positioning:

We believed that positioning of the company had to be that of a technology leader. The positioning of the machinery itself had to be paralleled as being the most technologically advanced machinery available. We also felt that it would be desirable if the end customer would see owning this machinery as a strong manufacturing advantage.

We developed the theme... Strength in Fingerjoint Technology.

We positioned the company as the technology.

The Mnemonic Image:

We knew the image had to be high impact, show the finished product, and project an image of strength. We chose a muscle man image from waist to chin. We incorporated a piece of fingerjointed material that emphasized the fingerjoint. The image had to stand alone. We had long term intentions of converting the image to the logo of the company.

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Comments from Mark Goff:

In this case, the image came before the words. We knew that we wanted to use a muscle person. We were able to locate a past Mr. Texas and began to compile a library of photo shots.

We first developed an eight page product brochure. Over two thirds of the cover showed the muscle man image. A photo of the machinery was inserted in the lower right corner. The advertisements also emphasized the muscle man. We produced them in full and quarter page formats in both English and Spanish. We carried the theme across various marketing avenues which included trade shows.

The only resistance encountered was from Industrial's sales management which felt that the image was too bold and wanted to produce the more traditional brochures. This was always a common problem as the sales manager saw the market only through his own eyes. The project however, went forward.

The results were very satisfying. The company obtained the largest backlog of orders for machinery in it's 40 year history. Production was sold out for 22 months. The company received one of the Dallas 100 awards for strongest growing privately held companies in the Dallas area.