It’s Pottery Barn Kid’s Halloween costume application, an app designed to help you envision your child (or unsuspecting co-worker) in one of their many cute Halloween costumes. Simply snap a picture of your child using your phone, upload and bingo – you can scroll through each costume overlaid on your child’s photo and get a sense of how they will appear wearing it. You can e-mail it to a friend, share it to Facebook and then hit the shopping cart when you have made the decision.

What I love about this app…

I tested this out at first on very tolerant coworkers. I snapped a test picture of my boss, and found it so shockingly easy to use I continued to capture almost every person on my team. And then I finally got my two-year-old child. After two days of toying with this I ventured out to Pottery Barn kids nearby with my little one in tow to purchase my selected costume.

As I embarked on the customer journey, a few of the key consumer insights came to mind that made this app make strategic business sense:

1. Pottery Barn Kids (at least this location) does not have fitting rooms. Therefore, having your child “try-on” a costume really isn’t easy (unless you insist and put them in it in the middle of the store as I did)
2. Many people do not even bother to try costumes on small children. How many costumes can you get an infant or toddler to try on anyway? I was able to get by 2 year-old into one of the two finalists, and even that received protest
3. While shopping for a seasonal costume, my child of course found many a toy in the store he would like to have… great timing with the holidays around the corner

Area of improvement (Suggestions for next year):

• Make it possible to upload an existing photo (currently you have to take a new one) — this would help make this app useful for the shopper who doesn’t have their child with them or a friend or family member
• Some of the costumes were only available online – while the app may help to encourage the decision to purchase a $50 costume for a young child online, it backfires when those super cute costumes are not even available to see in-store for those of us who want immediate gratification (and I really wanted that sold-out dinosaur…)

These two suggestions are minor enhancements to an already great app — the online comments are also very positive). You can find it here:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pottery-barn-kids-costume/id387049651?mt=8

There are many apps that are entertaining. There are apps that are informative. There are apps that can help generate buzz. It’s exceptional to see an app that does all this as an effective marketing tool and that can affect sales. Now I bet there’s an ROI for that.

RTCRM Perspectives October 2010

Wunderman recently released their Corporate Citizenship report featuring pro bono, cause marketing and social marketing initiatives from their network of agencies. Kind of like getting a pat on the back from your favorite uncle, some of RTC Relationship Marketing’s pro bono work was selected to be part of the collection. Ahem, page 11.

The report also includes summaries of the agency’s point of view on standards and policies on marketing ethics, social networking, privacy and security and press relations.

Download the Wunderman Corporate Citizenship Report.

Today’s costume celebrations culminate with a Costume Contest.  Winner gets a 4GB iPod.  Woot!

Pictures to follow.

This film is not scheduled for a DC release, so if you want to see it, here’s your chance.

But my presentation didn’t focus on the what, where or when; I focused more on the ‘who’ your message is created for. Because media has become so splintered it is increasingly important that we get the target audience information right, so we know who we are aiming our communication towards.

Mostly I enjoyed presenting because I got to see the cartoons I drew for the meeting projected 30 feet high. I would like to think they held up to the massive blow up.

So now that you’re here, stay a while, check out the site and let us know what you think by replying to this blog posting.

In that vein, logo blog "Logo Design Love" has a fascinating interview with Sol Sender, leader of the design team that created the Obama 2008 campaign logo at www.logodesignlove.com/obama-08-logo-design-options.

The most interesting part of the whole conversation is that while looking through the concepts, I felt the need to reach into my computer screen and slap Sender, yelling "Wasn’t it obvious to use the rising sun O design that was burned into our eyeballs for almost a year and a half?" (Note: I had no idea the O was supposed to be a rising sun until that 30-minute infomercial that aired a week before election day…)

But I think the experience should remind us of something – creative work is just that: created. It doesn’t appear fully formed out of nowhere to perfectly encapsulate the ideas we work so hard to put forth; but if it feels that way, as with the campaign’s imagery, you’re likely to find success in getting your message heard at a much higher level than you may have thought possible.