Hello Everyone,
Welcome to Alex's Ad Factory. I am Hector Alexander Merced and I made this blog to discuss my experiences in Marketing and the techniques I've used in the past to establish my marketing experience. This first post will discuss one of my more fruitful experiences in being the owner of a hobby retail store chain, The Gamers Lounge.
THE STORY: The story is me and a friend, Spencer Marugg, wanted to start a store in Ohio. Back in my days in Connecticut I use to go to hobby stores and LAN centers so I suggested we make a mix of the two. I started off by making a series of surveys with surveymonkey.com and got people in our target market to participate. I defined our target market as college aged Video Game and Anime Fans. Using the results from the surveys I built a business plan and we secured the funding for the venture. Later on met David Baum who helped us with the hobby retail portion of the store and eventually merged with us to make it a multiple storefront operation. (For the record at the point I was still days away from my 21st birthday)
Marketing started months before we even opened, I had made the website and started a message board. I would go to the Anime and Gaming Club meetings at the BGSU campus and tell them about what we were doing. I encouraged them to sign up for our message board which became quite alive and helped build word of mouth and a customer mailing list all in one. We then had many of those looking foward to the store help us paint the store which helped foster the vestment important in community based marketing. Opening day was a huge success having an all day rush of customers.
I was in charge of many of the promotional practices used by the stores here are some of the examples of Flyers I developed for ad campaigns.
This is my Tournament Flyer
This flyer was supposed to really be just a basic flyer to get the info out about a couple of our tournaments. We tried to have a lot of events going on a daily basis to increase the value of coming to the store on a daily basis. Every flyer since the beginning had our logo which became quite recognizable and became so unanimous with the product category that other stores in town started getting referred to as Gamer Lounges.
This is my Halo FLyer
This flyer tried to emphasize the joy of leisure time with friends. We attempt to sell the idea of the store as a place to enjoy time with friends which worked very well as The Gamers Lounge became quite a friendly community.
All the flyers made during my time with the gamers lounge where completely designed and created by me, many of the images I used off Google images. The logo was created by me in Adobe Photoshop along with all the flyers. Also during this time I mastered my ability to spin any event to make it press worthy which got the Gamers Lounge a lot of press among local newspapers. Like here's a few articles on it that are of interest:
RELATED PRESS:
BGFILE.com ARTICLE ON THE GAMERS LOUNGE
Students Open up Shop
Get Your Game On
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