Brand Marketing Promotion: How to design a poster?

Nowadays, countdowns are widely used, including but not limited to new product launches, large-scale exhibitions, promotional activities, film and television drama launches, etc.

Posters are the most common carrier of countdowns and are commonly seen on major social platforms, self-media and even outdoors.

The heartfelt countdown poster has the following functions:

• First, it serves as a reminder ;
• Secondly, it can attract the attention of the target audience, arouse enough interest, and achieve effective warm-up;
• Third, continue to create heated discussions , expand the influence, and keep the activities/products exposed.

But it is not just a matter of marking 1, 2, 3. To make the countdown poster creative, one must have a subtle understanding and in-depth exploration of human nature , and innovate in content or form to achieve a fatal blow.

Now, I want to share with you how to use "suspense" to create countdown ideas.

1. Create suspense and arouse the audience’s curiosity

Suspense means setting up questions or conflicts in the poster, leaving the story unresolved and with an unpredictable outcome, leaving ample room for the audience's imagination and arousing their curiosity and thirst for knowledge to the greatest extent.

Where can I find the answer to the question? How to resolve the contradiction? To know what happens next, please stay tuned for activities/releases after X days ... In this way, the audience's appetite is whetted step by step and they are guided to participate.

In the dull daily routine, the audience is in urgent need of creative ideas that can ignite brain cells and emotions! The more blurred, the more intoxicated.

The countdown to the new product launch of the Hammer smartphone is a typical example of creating question-like suspense. This creative model has continued for several years and has become a hot topic among the audience and even on the Internet.

2. Ask questions to stimulate positive thinking

As shown in the following set of countdown posters for the "Numk Pro 2S Launch Conference", the overall style is a unified red background with white text.

Each picture has a question: a few sentences list certain phenomena in reality, and then summarize the problems from the phenomena . Put a "?" on a new line to express the question more strongly.

Figure 1: Nut Pro 2S launch event countdown poster

On the surface, some of those questions are related to the product, but some are completely irrelevant to the product. For example, the copy of "2 days left" (see Figure 2) is talking about architecture, which makes people confused.

Because of this, it actually arouses the audience's determination to find out the truth, and the effect is achieved.

method:

1. Without any leading description, just ask a question in one sentence;
2. Analyze the phenomenon/situation, and then use the described scenario to lead to related questions.

Remember to use the "?" symbol to express a strong questioning effect; if there are any questions, you should explicitly or implicitly tell the audience that "they can go to the scene to find the answers."

3. Leave a large area of ​​space blank to stimulate imagination

That is, in the countdown poster, corresponding blank spaces are intentionally left , and no text or image elements are added to the area. It makes the poster intriguing . It seems to have no information but it is up to you to interpret, leaving plenty of room for the audience's imagination .

As shown in the poster in the middle of the picture below, the entire screen is left blank, with only the countdown days at the bottom.

Figure 2: Nut Pro 2S launch event countdown poster

If you look closely, you will find that the design of the entire poster is actually based on the appearance of the Nut phone. The blank space is equal to the entire screen. What kind of surprise is hidden in it?

The audience immediately entered Sherlock Holmes mode, thinking divergently and participating in discussions, thus achieving the purpose of interactive warm-up. Finally, if you want to know, see you at the press conference!

Method: Just leave text information like "Countdown to x days" on the side, and leave the rest blank.

Note that this method is best used on the last day of the countdown . Certain selling points or suspense can be revealed in the first few days, and the blank space afterwards can allow them to associate it with the previous ones.

4. Erase some information, causing partial incompleteness

Part of the information in the poster is deliberately covered or smeared out so that the audience cannot directly obtain the complete content.

In order to continue watching the film smoothly and find out what is actually being said, speculation and searching are carried out together, which greatly stimulates the audience's curiosity and desire to explore .

For example, the countdown poster for the "Smartisan OS Conference" figuratively uses smashed tomatoes and splashing juice to cover the middle words.

If you look closely, you will find that it does not affect the acquisition of key information, but based on people's habits, they can't help but guess and figure it out before leaving it alone.

The countdown poster in Figure 4 below directly quotes an excerpt from a book and then erases a sentence from it, thereby triggering the audience’s memory and prompting them to look it up themselves.

Figure 4: Poster of the Nut Smartphone Special Edition Launch Conference

From this we can see that the greatest purpose of creating incomplete information is to leverage the audience's willingness to interact and participate, while deepening their understanding and memory of the information.

method:

1. When the copy is original, cover up a few insignificant words in the middle.
2. When quoting popular content such as famous aphorisms, book excerpts, poems, or songs, cover the entire sentence in a paragraph of text.

Be careful to strike a balance and don't cover areas that shouldn't be covered, otherwise it will have the opposite effect.

5. Reveal hints and guide guesswork

That is, embed relevant points such as brand, product, and activity into the poster, describe them to the audience as suggestive content , and then guide them to guess .

When Coca-Cola released its new brand spokesperson in May, it used a suggestive countdown method:

Figure 5: Countdown poster for Coca-Cola brand spokesperson

Countdown 3 days, prompt information: Aries, new friends (the Weibo copy also prompts that he was born in April and loves hot pot);

Countdown 2 days, prompt information: Actor (the Weibo copy also prompts "eye skills, sang in the Spring Festival Gala, and crashed the server during live broadcast);

Countdown 1 day, prompt message: add the zodiac sign to the name.

In fact, with key clues like Coca-Cola, most fans had already guessed who it was on the third day before the finale. The setting was too obvious.

However, because of the support of popular stars, it still attracted a large number of messages and interactions, and the publicity effect was great.

Method: According to the length of the countdown period, set the amount and degree of information prompted by each poster. For example, give a little hint at the beginning, go deeper day by day, and reveal the key information on the last day to whet the audience's appetite.

Note: try to find points that interest and concern the target audience as prompts; if you can utilize celebrities or star effects, the effect will be greatly increased.

Author: Strawberry

Source: Strawberry