Herald Sun Expo 27-29 July - suggestions thread!

[Bhootnike]

That's why we should go for stuff like highlighters or little jotter pads rather than pens, because everyone gives out pens.

The things with chocolates is that people will take a chocolate and just eat it and won't even remember what ATARNotes is two days later.

depends. if its like those crappy easter egg chocolate you get, or cadbury dairy milk style. the latter would make me crave for more. hence making me sign up here and ordering some.
mmm

btw, what about stuff like stress balls,cups/mugs, WRIST BANDS?!, rulers...,?

[charmanderp]

That's why we should go for stuff like highlighters or little jotter pads rather than pens, because everyone gives out pens.

The things with chocolates is that people will take a chocolate and just eat it and won't even remember what ATARNotes is two days later.

depends. if its like those crappy easter egg chocolate you get, or cadbury dairy milk style. the latter would make me crave for more. hence making me sign up here and ordering some.
mmm

btw, what about stuff like stress balls,cups/mugs, WRIST BANDS?!, rulers...,?

Or just give away all the money that it would take to buy that stuff, then everyone would remember AN.

[ninwa]

Heh. We had chocolates from the Chocolate Box and they were awesome.

The budget won't allow both chocolates AND stationery, so I really don't know at this point. I did find these double-ended highlighter + pen things which I thought were pretty cool.

What do you guys think of having AN-branded bags? For when people buy books. Especially for those people who might buy multiple books - saves them having to carry it in their arms, plus increased brand recognition from people carrying AN bags around the expo?

[sam.utute]

That's why we should go for stuff like highlighters or little jotter pads rather than pens, because everyone gives out pens.

The things with chocolates is that people will take a chocolate and just eat it and won't even remember what ATARNotes is two days later.

Depends on what the purpose of the chocolate is. AN seemed to be using it to attract students and then relying on the selling skills of the fabulous people helping out to close the sale.
For brand recognition, they weren't the best. But to attract students to the stall in the first place, they were great!

AN bags might work a bit better. Not sure what the Herald Sun Expo is like, but if they give out free bags (like TheAge Expo), then students might just put their AN bags inside those.

[FlorianK]

ATAR-Notes pens
From a chem-excursion to Monash i still use the pens I got

[Fyrefly]

That's why we should go for stuff like highlighters or little jotter pads rather than pens, because everyone gives out pens.

The things with chocolates is that people will take a chocolate and just eat it and won't even remember what ATARNotes is two days later.

Depends on what the purpose of the chocolate is. AN seemed to be using it to attract students and then relying on the selling skills of the fabulous people helping out to close the sale.
For brand recognition, they weren't the best. But to attract students to the stall in the first place, they were great!

AN bags might work a bit better. Not sure what the Herald Sun Expo is like, but if they give out free bags (like TheAge Expo), then students might just put their AN bags inside those.

I think if they were calico bags, there would be less chance of that happening. That'd be pretty expensive though, I imagine.

[Bhootnike]

Or just give away all the money that it would take to buy that stuff, then everyone would remember AN.

not sure if trolling or not,
but those things I mentioned are just things you usually get from 'promo showbags' and exhibitions..

perhaps the cup would be a bit too costly tho :p

I think if they were calico bags, there would be less chance of that happening. That'd be pretty expensive though, I imagine.

mm, what bout those cotton library bags?  I'd imagine they'd be significantly cheaper since people usually chip them out in bulk amounts!

[ninwa]

Okay, so we'll be getting bags for people who buy books to carry them around in - and hopefully gain a bit more exposure for us when carried around the expo.

We need idea for what logo/words to print on the bags. Something like this but again I am artistically rather retarded and any suggestions/better ideas are welcome!

[Kanon]

Just my 2 cents
Chocolates

AN labelled Chocolate

• Great for grabbing people's attention temporarily, but without someone directly talking to them they're likely to leave pretty fast
• From what I've read they were pretty popular as well as cheap!
• Unfortunetly, their chocolately goodness don't provide a long term form of exposure, no-one really holds on to chocolate wrappers nor do they think "Which company tried to give me that chocolate

Personalised Shirts

• Expensive, which may or may not weigh the costs of adding it in
• They would be great for setting the tone of AtarNotes as friendly and inviting. Sloganising shirts like having Thushan's as "Mr 100.95", Russ's as like "Pretty Girl" or something, I am really bad at this and having all of them being really friendly would be really helpful in showing how inviting.
• Just spitt balling, but use some of the poster budget to add their Uni degree to the shirt?

Pens, Pencils, Rulers, Mech. Pencils

• From what Sam Utute has said, expensive
• Not a very unique item to have, many other stalls will have them and they'll leave less of an impact than the maze pens (which are awesome) on long term exposure
• People (definitely NOT me  ) see a pen stall and just try and grab them, later losing them in the first 20 seconds.  I know a few others that do this aswell, so I assume this is pretty common

Highlighters

• Part of the reason I went to my Highschool
• Are more unique than pens, pencils, rulers, mech pencils, etc
• Aren't as readily used, therefore less likely to be lost
• A bit of a niche thing, I think they'll either win the crowd over or not


Overall, there's two things to getting people at the stall.  There's attracting them in the first place and then keeping their attention long enough.  A great strategy that i think Ninwa mentioned was offering the children chocolate (lol) and then making then exposing AN, but if we wanted to market AN as a more 'trendy' and 'friendly' community I feel like be more personable with the people would leave a better impression.  Imagine this;
AN Attendee: Chocolate?
Person: Sure
AN Attendee:  So, how's VCE for you?  Which subjects are you doing?
Person: Indonesian Basket Weaving... (they'd probably be a bit hesistant at this point)
AN Attendee: OH, I did that subject as well!  You finding it hard...
* conversation continues to the point at which the AN Anttendee shamelessly plugs AN.

Also utilizing the idea to give anyone that has purchased a book or two a bag with the AN logo on it aswell as the website plug.  It's been mentioned that the plastic ones that they provide during the Melbourne Show are a bit too much, but what about the brown paper tote bag?  They're pretty stylist and easy to print on, and I couldn't imagine paper would be that expensive.  I'm not really a very good designer but

I know the logo looks really bad, I couldn't scale it properly because I just copied and pasted the source file from the homepage and I cannot do text for my life.  But something like that I think would be really effective, the bright red, yellow and red would catch peoples eyes really easily, and having just the website there is already indicative of what we do.  We're about ATAR Notes. 

As for keeping long term exposure, I'm really not sure how to do that.  The only way I could see would be via people being personal?

I think it'd be great if the stall was kept relativity small and clean.  I'm not entirely sure how big the stall is, but I've got access to a 17", 19", 21.5" and 24" monitor if you'd like to borrow it for the day.  As well as a Macbook air if you wanted to maintain that trendeh view, but there'd be some conditions on the Macbook .  The poster you designed looks great, but from a person that cannot do fonts at all, the fon't isn't very nice (I'm sorry!).  I think Pauls onto something with people wondering around (i think it's pretty much essential for these guys to be wearing a shirt that distinguishes AN) and hovering around stalls stealing their people! If you need help, myself and I'm sure theres HEAPS of other people on the site that wouldn't mind helping out if you so require it

and again, these are just my opinions

I'll add to this tomorrow I just need some sleep, it's 2:51AM

[/list]

[nacho]

I like the idea of AN shirts.
I'd wear it to uni if it was like a plain white shirt + AN Logo + my user name and maybe my avatar
that'd be so cool
and maybe that caption too 'The Thought Police'

pens would be the best idea?

PS: Do you need any extra help  with the expo?
I'm in need of practicing my marketing and sales skills and would love to help out

also i think the font used in : http://imgur.com/a/TlIWJ is shit
seems unprofessional, may as well be comic sans. is anyone else not feeling this?

2) Better security, Connect education (next door) managed to catch someone trying to nick the books we had on the table, meaning that we'll have to ensure we have enough people there so that we have people on the table at all times.

I'm from rowville

[Camo]

I'd be happy to try for a few days off.

Nina just message me if your happy with me volunteering.

[FlorianK]

If you're going with the shirt idea, can we get one too?

[DavidB3ck]

I can help with design a bit if you need anything.

[paulsterio]

I have an idea for another cost-cutting measure, make all those volunteering to pay a certain fee for a shirt, like I'd be happy to pay $10-$15 for a decent AN shirt and I reckon most others would be too - or maybe give them the option of having a personalised shirt - like I would be happy paying a few extra dollars to have my shirt personalised.

Bags would be expensive, but they might be worth it, not sure.

[ninwa]

@Kanon:
- nice profile pic

- you're right, the chocolates are merely a way of drawing people in. Most people will accept the offer of chocolate, and then they feel obligated to listen to my rambling about AN. And most people I found were actually interested in what I had to say.

- shirts just make us look more professional. I found that at the The Age expo there was nothing to differentiate the volunteers, so during busy periods when there were HEAPS of people, a lot of them didn't know who to ask if they wanted to buy a book. Not sure personalised shirts are worth the trouble though, since volunteers tend to come and go and we're never 100% sure who will show up.

- I already requested about 20 billion quotes from customised stationery companies and unfortunately every single one is out of our budget this year

- the bag design is great. We actually just put in an order for those brown paper bags. We plan to order customised stickers and stick them on the bags, similar to your design

- Why do you have 4 monitors?! thanks for the offer. Not sure if we'll even have a monitor, last expo there was just not enough space on the table for it. And I wouldn't risk your Macbook, when it gets REALLY busy there's nobody to keep an eye on things.

@David: if you can design a better poster and/or a design for the stickers to go on the bags (ideally just a massive AN circle logo thing and a few words about how awesome we are) that would be amazing

@everyone else, we'll figure out the volunteers thing closer to the date