I recently came across an interesting blog called ‘gaping void‘. What first grabbed my attention were the amusing comics littered throughout the blog - after delving further I discovered that these are described as ‘cartoons on the back of a business card’, I soon realised there were more interesting things to discover…

After delving further I discover that blog owner Hugh MacLeod is not only originally a great cartoonist and professional blogger but also since 2006 the marketing strategist for a small South African winery called Stormhoek.

Hugh has been utilising Web 2.0 tools such as blogging and Facebook to get the word out about Stormhoek, resulting in a fivefold increase in sales. Who says social networking and blogging doesn’t work for business? No one with any ounce of sense I hope.

I know that personally my sales have gone up over 30% since I started blogging in February 2007 and before this sales were almost entirely driven by online social and business networking. ‘Business networking’ as well as social networking because in my case I trade exclusively b2b, and this is my target market rather than consumers.

In addition to these successes driven by Hugh, in November 2007 Stormhoek won the Best Small Budget Brand Marketing Campaign of the Year, awarded by a Council of judges for South Africa’s Marketing Excellence awards.

Hughs most interesting project of recent times is creating the Blue Monster wine label and poster in collaboration with Stormhoek and Microsoft. The wine and associated branding is intended to be used for employees and friends of Microsoft and I personally feel is the start of an exercise in re-branding Microsoft; for a long time now the brand has been negatively effected by bad publicity.

It seems to me that the idea is for Microsoft to stop the rot from the inside first and spread that out to the public. ie first get the employees to love Microsoft and then work on the rest of the world after that. I agree that really you can’t project the right brand image if you haven’t got your employees on board first.

It appears that the Blue Monster concept is taking the world by storm, and I feel that it’s possible Joe Public may start to see this brand in association with Microsoft also. FT have also reported on the wine launch, read their news piece >>

When you visit the Stormhoek website you can see that essentially the entire website is quite simply one big blog, obviously part of the Web 2.0 marketing strategy that is working so well for them.

Now this is just the tip of the iceberg of Hugh MacLeods interesting blogs, you can visit Gaping Void to read more, and below are some of my favourite cartoons from his blog.

Finally, because this a creative blog….please read Hughs blog about How To Be Creative. It’s great. Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Art, Design Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.