Project Spotlight: EOY Comic Book
The Concept
Our client wanted to do something beyond the typical end-of-year product brochure and thank you tchotchke for customers. It had been a difficult year due to COVID-related supply chain issues, and several members of the sales team had been hailed as “heroes” for their efforts to keep customers in business and stocked. We decided to lean into that and came up with a “comic book,” with the goal being to humorously recap the year, mention specific products and services, and further improve the relationship between sales and customers.
The Process
We broke this project into three phases:
BUILDING THE FRAMEWORK
We worked closely with the client’s in-house marketing team to come up with a storyline that was simple to understand and visualize while encapsulating key moments from the past year. A key part of this step was merging their industry terminology and concepts with the over-the-top comic book storytelling. We also came up with the idea of “trading cards” for the salespeople, which would serve as a directory of the sales team members while also sharing some of their “stats” with customers for future conversations.CONTENT COLLECTION / CREATION
We scheduled and ran an extensive photo shoot, complete with props, capturing photos of all participating sales team members. This included photos with specific posing which would be utilized within the comic book story. We also located and modified stock assets where needed to help build the visuals for the story, and integrated our photos into those images. Finally, we worked with the client’s in-house marketing team to collect the “stats” for all of the sales team members, as well as the information for the “ads” which would focus on their key products and services.DESIGN / PRINT
We worked closely with our printer to create a design that resembled a classic comic book while maintaining a higher quality for professional distribution. Our design included perforated pages which would allow the trading cards to be punched out if desired. The design and print process was completely very quickly – in a matter of a few days – in order to get the books into customers’ hands before the holidays and end of year.
The Results
The feedback on this project was immensely positive. The client’s sales team expressed their strong satisfaction with the information and imagery in the comic book. We also heard from several sales team members that their customers got a good laugh out of it, and some of them even punched out the cards of their sales team members and put them on display. But the biggest sign of success for us was hearing that the sales team enjoyed the experience so much that they were already excited to see what the next year’s project would be. Special thanks and congratulations to the client’s internal marketing team who were instrumental in helping generate buy-in from the sales team and facilitating this project all the way through. This project was a perfect example of the type of work we love doing at Rigg Creative – taking a routine end-of-year recap brochure and expanding it into something truly creative, effective, and memorable.
