Take Your Message to the Streets
11.19.09

For over a century, business owners have labeled their wagons and motorized vehicles with their respective companies' names. For decades, precision painters scripted entrepreneurs names on the door of their trucks and vans. Decades later, vinyl lettering came along for faster, crisper installation of words and artwork. Then, a little over a decade ago, 3M perfected a product that could be wrapped around vehicles, expanding the advertising space to include almost the entire surface of a vehicle (I even have advertising on my roof).

Now, people can still get your dot com, phone number, and company name from those little white letters on your tailgate or rear window. But they could get more than information. They could get an idea of the kind of company you run, the culture of your staff, the type and value of the items or services that you sell.

With a vehicle wrap.

I recently had VSP Marketing Graphics Group of West Seneca, NY, transform my MINI Cooper with a vinyl wrap. [If you follow me on Twitter, you saw a live photo blog of the transformation process. I've also uploaded the pictures and process descriptions here.]

Already I've found several significant benefits stemming from this investment.

Brand Awareness
If your brand includes a modern logo and is well maintained across multiple media, a wrap will extend that professional image to people who would not otherwise interact with it. For a company looking for local or regional customers, there's no medium as ubiquitous as public roads and parking lots. Due to a non-compete agreement with my local client, I wasn't looking to gain local business from my MINI wrap. But in just the first couple weeks, I've had multiple inquiries about biplane from people looking at my car. biplane, a company run from a quiet-neighborhood basement, flew onto the radar of my community.

Wow Factor
I started designing cars when I was in junior high—aspired to that career in high school, when I drew over 500 vehicle designs. So, when the opportunity came to literally create the skin my sports car would wear, I spent well over a year mulling artistic elements. But that design time is atypical in the vinyl wrap industry, and the finished product matches biplane's brand image and stands out in traffic. I've literally seen heads turn and people point at it. You can't miss the vehicle, which means people can't miss your advertising. It makes a three-dimensional, moving impression. In traffic, you become the visual exception—the unexpected and colorful image that gets remembered.

Cost Value
Your vehicle presents a large canvas—probably much larger than my MINI. At a national average of $15-$25 per square foot (including installation), you can't ask for a better value in visual promotion. A typical wrap lasts 3-4 years. So, your one-time expense can end up costing you less than 48¢ per thousand viewers. Try that in newsprint, television, or direct mail!

Tax Benefit
In my case, wrapping my MINI allowed my personal vehicle to count as a business expense. Should I use this wrap for three years, as planned, the tax benefit should be roughly ten times the cost of the wrap. Consult your accountant and your auto insurer, but you may be able to turn one or more of your personal vehicles into mobile signs—with a net gain on your taxable income.

In advertising, we're constantly confronted with upgrade choices like black-and-white versus color, postcards versus brochures, or line ads versus display ones. Strategic choices of where to upgrade and how much can accelerate or decelerate your brand's growth in the marketplace. But a vehicle wrap should be a no-brainer. It's the best value in corporate promotion and constantly introduces your company to new potential customers who wouldn't know of you from any other medium.

Taking It Personally

As holiness grows in you, sinful habits and negative influences will shed from your life. But sanctification doesn't mean perfection or demur asceticism. It means "set apart," something different than secularism and the world Satan has fogged with deceit. Some Christians take this concept as an excuse to hide from culture, to avoid interaction with the secular—except on the church's terms or in cold-call canvassing.

From my experience, especially here in the Bible Belt, people want something different than both the dark realities of their habitat and the plastic facade of America's church culture. But they want the difference to be authentic, not manufactured—inspiring, not entertaining.

If we live from the core of who we are (and who we're becoming), God can use our personalities, interests, talents, and perspective for Kingdom benefit. So, rather than hide behind some clichés and coverups, we need to catch those who watch us off guard with our response to life—standing apart from the rat race, the status quo, even the American Dream. When we wrap our outside with what God is bubbling on the inside, we can pull out into life's traffic and expect heads to turn. We can then redirect them to "turn [their] eyes upon Jesus; look full in his wonderful face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace."

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