In a city like Melbourne, it is very easy to become overwhelmed by how fast-paced the city moves. The city is cluttered with businesses, restaurants, and attractions, and even more-so, the advertisements for those places. As someone who works in a communication field, it was interesting to see how there are signs and ads on virtually every building, and every one of those ads was fighting to grab the eye of each passerby.
It was notable to me how different businesses valued different strategies when trying to reach their audience. The city is overly-saturated with businesses and you could see how the competition drove some businesses to invest more in their marketing and expand their creativity.
We stopped in a visitor center that offered pamphlets and brochures of different attractions to see how different companies worked to gain the attention of visitors. The first thing I noticed was the section for non-english speaking tourists. I thought it was unique that the city has such an inclusiveness when it comes to visitors, especially those from Asian countries, but I found that the brochures that catered to these people did not use very strong design layouts.
While the Asian culture may value different design aspects, I couldn’t help but note how cluttered and unpleasing these brochures were. I picked up three different brochures that were in different languages, and while I can’t reach what these brochures say, I can evaluate the design of them. The brochures that offer more pictures would certainly be more appealing to someone like me who likes visuals. On the other hand, the brochure with fewer pictures but more readily advertises their pricing might grab the eye of different cultures that are more monetarily-focused.
Looking along the wall of brochures, it seemed that most of them just blended in with everything else. Marketing professionals face the challenge of standing out in markets with a lot of competition, and must think outside of the box to stand out. In a sea of rectangular, boring brochures, one stood out to me. BalloonMan is a hot air balloon attraction, which on it’s own is a unique attraction, but the way they used their creativeness to develop a brochure different from all the others is what caught my eye. Instead of the rectangular shape of all the other brochures, they chose to round out the top of their brochure to show the outline of the hot air balloon that is pictured. This shape difference, along with the high-quality pictures and colors is what popped out to me. They really took their design to the next level and created something that attracts the eye.
As we were walking through the town, we came across a number of restaurants along the water competing for foot traffic. These restaurants work different than the tourist attractions in that they don’t typically use brochures to bring in patrons, but instead their atmosphere (and menu, of course) is what will bring in business. One restaurant that stood out to me was a place called Pilgrim that had a nice outdoor seating area. What got my attention was the chalk-board sign outside the building. In a place that relies on simply the foot traffic to make money, they must market in a way that lets the potential customer know how the atmosphere is going to be and also what values make them stand out. The sign for Pilgrim said: “All Aussie, locally & ethically sourced products - Pop in and treat yo’ self.” This type of marketing promotes their use of local product which is something that I’ve noticed is important to many in the Australian culture. Their use of slang terms like “treat yo’ self” can give customers an idea for their relaxed atmosphere. With there being many restaurants along this walkway, creating a sign that catches the attention of people passing by is what will bring in business.
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