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Creative latitude, packaging bliss and significant savings? Yes you can.

By BCS Global Direct, Corporate e-Store Portal, New Normals for Business No Comments

We learned recently that a lot of our clients don’t realize how volume can impact creative delivery of brand collateral designed to enhance customer experiences. Today we are sharing a hack for Marketing procurement teams, Global Brand Managers, and HR Teams to help you continue to design special experiences within a reduced budget. We are combining creative latitude, packaging bliss and 50% savings into one solution for large corporate brands. Yes you can! 

There are two ways to purchase your brand collateral. One is via our domestic resources and the other is through our BCS Global Direct service. Each has its place and serves your needs, but most buyers don’t realize how buying in volume as a group, enables greater creative latitude and 50%+ cost savings. In this blog post, we’ll show you quickly how this works for your corporate brand.

Here’s one of our most popular throws, used often when a brand wants to deliver a pragmatic product that pairs with a family environment. This is not a post about luxurious throws, but we want to show you a tangible example. It is typically purchased in quantities of 75 – 500. In this scenario, business units purchase individually. Our domestic pricing is excellent and speedy turn times make this a favorite with our client brands.

Domestic Pricing for the throw without a custom gift packaging, is $26 – $29. The throw is a gorgeous 50″ x 60″. Soft microfiber fleece one side and poly sherpa fleece on the second side. It comes bulk packaged wrapped in a satin braided ribbon custom embroidered. These retail for $50- $60 when you buy one as a consumer from a home goods store. Throws are well received by anyone who receives one as a gift. They enable a cozy reading time with young children before bed, warm family members on the sofa during movie nights and wrap consumers when they enjoy their outdoor spaces. They deliver customer love from your brand.

Now let’s look at BCS Global Direct. If you as a company, can centralize the purchase of certain brand collateral among all business units, a product like this becomes significantly more creative and about 50% less in cost. Here’s an example:

10,000 of these can be produced and packaged in a 100% custom-designed gift box with 4 color process printing inside and out. The packaging is your canvas for messaging. The throw is exactly the same, but we are buying it through a more direct supply chain because of the volume. Your BCS Global Direct Price: $17 with your own custom printed gift packaging included.  If you used 50,000 the price is closer to $14. But this isn’t a post about throws and there are ways to shape the product specifications to get within your budget.

Here’s what we want you to know. If you are looking to centralize or standardize any brand collateral in a format that is packaged as proprietary, our BCS Global Direct service can design and deliver just about anything you’ve seen at retail and customize it for your needs. Have you noticed a cool product in a digital catalog you love? Ask us. Do you have a favorite piece of apparel you wish you could customize? We will source, label and package it for you. Are you a corporate graphic designer with a vision for a proprietary packaging experience? We will bring it to fruition. Generally, the pricing is half of what it is buying domestically in smaller quantities at our already excellent B2B wholesale prices. So this works well for large national/global Brands with the ability to centralize certain kinds of purchases to support their customer journey.

To learn more about BCS Global Direct service: Click here or just send an email to us at leslie@brandcentralsolutions.com, and tell us what you are thinking about creating. 

 

Cheers and thanks for your interest in Brand Central Solutions

 

 

3 Questions for your Family Meeting

By Engaging Children, New Normals for Business No Comments

A majority of Parents are still working at home and parenting. Now that it’s summer, our kids are liberated from Zoom school, but chaos is still likely to ensue on any given day because that is how real family life operates sometimes (all the time?). Harvard Business Review offers a simple solution for a weekly family meeting, informed by the Agile Meeting model. Who would have thought to look to an engineering model for a family meeting?

3 Questions to Ask at a Weekly Family Meeting

 

For more information about new Business Normals, Work from Home Parenting and other tools, visit our Home Base Content.

How do you strike the right tone for consumers with safety as a priority?

By New Normals for Business No Comments

How are you planning to provide security, comfort and safety to team members and consumers as we gradually reopen the economy and experience more frequent in-person contact? Everyone is approaching this differently and we understand why. While safety is a central value in any consumer offering, the new safe guidelines are being met by consumers with differing emotions. Most people would agree that a touchless sanitizing station with some educational signage would give comfort in any public environment. It’s portable, educates and no one has to touch anything! But if you are considering face coverings, people are more emotional. Some people feel strongly it’s a way to care for others. Some consumers dislike them but wear them only when absolutely needed. Workers are not thrilled that they cannot convey a warm smile. Others consider this an imposition on their freedoms. Getting creative with distancing graphics can be fun, but maybe your brand would rather not be seen as having fun with Pandemic outcomes?  Our solutions work to support your particular communication strategy around safe work practices. We respect and appreciate that every single brand is going to approach this a little differently depending on how you talk to your consumers. We’d love to connect and help you plan for this.

Brand Central Workplace Safety Solutions Overview

 

Three Consumer Behavioral Trends That Will Reshape a Post-Covid World.

By New Normals for Business, Uncategorized No Comments

“In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.” Albert Einstein

The Harvard Business Review team suggests there are some specific behavioral changes that will change the way businesses think about consumer products and services. All three of them are opportunities for many Brands. How do you support a growth in single person households, our desire to depart from dense living to less expensive and more spacious neighborhoods, and a new work environment that needs to integrate with all things “home”.  Covid-19 has disrupted the status quo. Where is there opportunity to support these new consumer behaviors and preferences?

 

 

Three Behavioral Trends That Will Reshape Our Post-covid World

 

We’ve carved out a little corner of the content world to be of support to you or anyone you know. To view more, please visit: Brand Central Home Base

The status quo is on shaky ground thanks to Covid-19. Time to rethink things?

By New Normals for Business, Uncategorized No Comments

brand central solutions man at desk looking at computer

According to a recent McKinsey post, digitization of everything was moving at a brisk pace prior to the Pandemic. The current need to virtualize so much of how we work, live and learn has simply sped up the digitization trajectory.

Your website is often the first point of entry for a consumer into your brand’s ecosystem. How does your website deliver in a world where distancing and virtualization have already changed consumer behaviors?

All of this starts with an experience on your website and conversion events that lead to a sale. Business professionals know this, of course. But Covid-19 has disrupted the status quo. How does that change the way your website needs to engage consumers or businesses you serve? Here are five ways McKinsey suggests that you can improve a buyers’ digital experience given the changes we are already experiencing.

  1. Improve the self-service options you already have. For example, on websites, ensure buyers can readily find information, compare options, make purchases, and receive service without live support from sales reps for less complex needs.
  2. Rapidly fix what’s broken on websites and mobile apps. Watch for technical issues in real time and resolve them as they appear. Such no-regrets moves could deliver incremental revenue and improve the digital experience in ways that promote increased loyalty.
  3. Keep the human touch for complex interactions. Have your sales reps on call to support buyers by phone, videoconference, or webchat, whenever they need it; a 24/7 or 24/5 live presence can be especially meaningful when remote interactions are the only options.
  4. Think like a consumer. Ensure any e-commerce channel provides a B2C-like experience for every product or service, whether a new purchase or a repeat order. Link e-commerce sales goals to your overall sales targets and incentives systems. Be willing and able to double-count credit when customers interact both digitally and with sales reps.
  5. Measure your progress. Are you a primary or secondary supplier? What is your churn rate, loyalty score, rate of customer satisfaction? Does your performance vary between digital and in-person interactions?

 

Please get in touch if you’d like to let us provide a Website Wellness Assessment. It’s complimentary for two months so we can provide our clients with an extra set of hands and possibly a fresh perspective. It’s a good time to rethink the ways in which your website helps connect and convert to generate revenues and growth going forward.

 

Youcubed.org: Family Math fun when Zoom learning leaves kids uninspired.

By Engaging Children No Comments

Youcubed.org was formed by an award-winning Stanford Math professor to give teachers, parents and students the resources they need to excite students about mathematics. They have devoted a link in their website to fun Math tasks that make at-home-school a little more engaging, if you feel like the Math by Zoom is less than inspiring for your children.

 Youcubed.org at Home – Math Tasks that Excite

 

Please come visit more Brand Central Home Base content across 5 different categories of interest. Feel free to adapt any of this for your own team members or customers.

4 ways to help anxious kids while we are impacted by Covid-19 changes.

By Engaging Children No Comments

Simple things like learning to breathe really work for almost any age kid. The professionals interviewed for this article discuss 4 ways parents can help anxious kids during Covid-19. They suggest we first acknowledge what is happening, then resolve our own anxiety, give kids mindfulness tools (age appropriate), and create a schedule with pictures. My college student still uses deep breathing exercises during stressful times that we taught him as a 5 year old. It is a remarkably simple tool for attaining a sense of calm and well-being. Works for parents too!

4 Ways to Help Your Anxious Kid(s)

 

Please visit other Brand Central Home Base content across 5 different interest categories. We’ve compiled only a few key articles in each category from expert resources, for you. Share as you wish or adapt for your own team members or customers.

3 Themes in your Communications now: Emotion, Empathy, Compassion.

By New Normals for Business, Uncategorized No Comments

 

 Emotion, Empathy, Compassion

The time for emotion and meaning is now.

 

 

 

The team at Emotive Brand in Oakland, California does some of the best writing I’ve seen about why brands need to be based on emotion and the importance of empathy and compassion, always, but especially right now. They make it simple and clear. If you need some inspiration, this quick read will give you a reset and position you for rich conversations with team members and customers throughout your day. The time for emotion and meaning is now.

 

For more content about Working From Home in the time of Covid-19, visit our Brand Central Home Base content corner and see what’s up across 5 categories of interest.

Brand Central Solutions – Here for you during Covid-19

By Uncategorized No Comments

To our Valued Client Family, our LinkedIn Network and Prospective Clients getting to know us:

We are living and working in unprecedented times. We want you to know that we are here for you, right now and always. Many of you know that Brand Central Solutions has a dedicated team of distributed professionals across the United States and Globally.  Our Sourcing Manager works remotely in the Bay Area. Our HQ is located in San Diego. Our Production Coordinator works remotely from the greater Boston Area and our Ops and Finance team is in Boston, now all working remotely in unison. We have designers in Utah and India and a wonderful partner team on the ground in China. We will continue to take steps to ensure the safety of our team members, families and communities.

Business as usual is not the priority but continuing to deliver excellent service to our clients remains a number one priority. Our organization is set up to stay connected and to finish projects we have in-house and implement projects that may be used to support your WFH teams, Onsite Teams, Brand Messaging during Covid-19 or Corporate support of vulnerable populations in your local Communities.  Our elite group of dedicated supply chain partners are set up for remote support of factory workers who at this time have adapted to distancing guidelines, along with stringent health and safety rules.

Our website homepage features a new content resource called Home Base, to be of extra support to you at this time. In it you will find useful resource content and hacks for organizing work from home office spaces, managing kids, wellness tips plus a few or our favorite work playlists and tasty recipes that help you grab a fast lunch and refuel for your afternoon Zoom conferences. We want to be relevant to you right now.

If you want to connect and talk/email about your new work situation, share a story or brainstorm a way to use your brand capital to support the communities you live/work in, we are here for you. We are all available during regular business hours and welcome your contact.

I know we will get through this time and prosper together as a community.

Warmly,

Leslie Bridges
​​​​​​Chief Experience Officer

 

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