Christina resides in Rockville, Maryland with her husband and two sons.  Mendelson was born in New York City and earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in finance and marketing from The  University of Maryland, College Park. After college she conducted bank examinations for The Federal Reserve. A little over a year-and-a-half ago Mendelson joined forces with a friend to work at Marketing Incentives.

Heatherstone: Christina, as a full-server web development company, we become marketers for our clients, but almost entirely in the online world. Tell us a little about how marketing works in the physical world.

Christina Mendelson: That’s where we at Market Incentives fit into the picture. We create physical objects that help bring out the personality of our clients in a sticky way that keeps the client in the minds of their prospects and customers.

H: Sticky? How do you mean?

CM: “Sticky” here means that the person that receives the item will be continually reminded of our client because the item tends to hang around for a long time, delivering the relevant message over and over.

H: Ah, gotcha. So, you try to match the personality of your client. Could you give an example?

CM: Sure. Let’s say you have a company that produces technology solutions which reduces energy use, a “green technology” company.  We’ll look for items that are themselves made from recycled materials and, ideally, have some useful function that is environment friendly.  For example, we might pick a hand-cranked flashlight or a mouse-pad made from recycled tire rubber.

H: OK, so tell us more about the “relevant message” part.

CM: The relevant message is a combination of brand identity and a few words that help tie the item to the company and highlight benefits of working with our client.

H: Benefits! Excellent, we talk to our clients about the importance of highlighting benefits over features all the time.

CM: Yes.  The features of the item, like a utilitarian item such as a USB flash drive, help connect our client to good stuff.  When you are happy being able to store files in a readily transportable manner, it makes you feel positive about the person or company that gave it to you.  But the benefits can be harder to get across.  That’s why the type of item is so important.  I wouldn’t suggest a flash drive to a car detailer, but I might suggest a bottle of a high-end leather polish.  Then, the benefit “makes the leather in my car look great” gets connected to the detailer.

H: How about someone who is doing both online and “real world” marketing.  How do these tie together?

CM: These two actually work better together.  We routinely include a website address on our items.  When the client has good control over their own website, they will create a specific page on their site tied to the item-based promotion.  Then, the client can better track results of their promotion because the visits to that page are known to have come from our promotional item.

H: We get that.  We call it a landing page and that’s exactly how we track results of online advertising.

CM: Yes, and the website landing page gives our client a way to extend their message beyond what will fit on the item, which is often fairly short.

H: That’s great.  So, the name of the company is Market Incentives.  Where does the “Incentives” part come from?

CM: We actually have two sides to our company. I’m directly involved in the side of the business that provides promotional items.  We also have a side of the business that can develop an incentives or rewards program for an organization, whether that’s for employees or customers.  Think of programs where people earn points, then can come spend those points on products.  We can build those out and customize them to our clients – including providing the shopping experience, products, and fulfillment, a real turn-key solution.

H: Is there anything you might be able to offer our readers, something they can get for mentioning this interview?

CM: Sure, mention this interview and we’ll give them a great deal on our Air Tight pocket boxes. Make your sales pitch “Air Tight”, by offering this as your next promotional giveaway.  No minimums and Free set-up!  Features are water resistant, break away lanyard, and 1 1/8” thick container with locking latch.  Colors are  blue, red, yellow and white.  One color imprint included.  250 – $1.50 each; 500 – $1.25 each.

H: Fantastic. Christina, thanks for taking the time to talk to us about this.

CM: It’s my pleasure.  Here, have a flash drive.

H: Awesome possum.  You’re the best.

We’d like to send a special thanks to Christina for taking her time to talk with us and for helping to enlighten us about the physical world of marketing. Please be sure to check out the Marketing Incentives website to see the truly great work they do, and the great deals they offer.

At the same time, they wanted to be able to embed a lot of photos and manage that themselves. After all, it gets expensive to hire your web developer to upload photos for you all the time, especially when your site requires highly visual marketing and frequent updates.

We’re very pleased to have been able to rise to the challenge: a week later, the new First Impression Hardscapes site launched.

The header images that automatically rotate are managed via a WordPress page that is otherwise supressed from view. They do require sizing in advance, but our client only needs to upload a set of photos to the page’s gallery, use the drag-and-drop functionality to sort them, and they display in rotation as you see on the site. Getting the rectangular photos to site behind the curved header required some fancy CSS work, too.

On pages like the Rob S. project showcase, we made it even easier. The client uploads a bunch of photos roughly sized for full display (no more than about 600 pixels in either direction) and again, can sort them using simple drag-and-drop.

We automatically take the first image and place a mid-sized version at the top of the page. Then, by simply placing a WordPress shortcode (“lightshow” in brackets,) we take all the images in the page’s gallery and format the thumbnails, pop-ups, and the full-sized slideshow. Easy-peasy!

The lightshow and image rotater functionality came from the fine folks of Project Seven, but getting this to work well with WordPress instead of requiring processing in Dreamweaver was where we got to shine.

Congratulations to John and Mike at First Impression Hardscapes!

There are a host of features that made building this site particularly interesting. FOLMC needed the ability to display upcoming events, support local chapters through announcements, accept donations and sell memberships, provide directions to the libraries and bookstores, and provide secured areas to distribute information to help chapter leaders and librarians in their roles.

While there were some WordPress plugins out there that would support embedding both Google Maps and Google Calendar, there were a couple of things we wanted to be able to do to make it easier for FOLMC staff to work with these, so we wrote our own. Our calendar plugin, for example, supports multiple calendars easily so staff can do a mash-up of general events and those presented by a specific chapter on the chapter pages.

The best part for FOLMC staff has been the ability to manage their own content directly (via WordPress) that we build into every Foundation Website we develop. There was a day, a few weeks after we were first hired to do this work, when we were sitting down with a couple of staff members and pulled up the WordPress dashboard and changed something on an early draft of the site. There were audible gasps and one person said, “Oh! Until this moment, I didn’t get that’s what you meant when you said we could make changes ourselves!”

It just goes to show that what’s clear and obvious to a web developer is still remarkable and new to others. It was great to see our clients even more excited than they started.

Are you in Montgomery County, Maryland? Perhaps you can support our clients and a worthy cause by becoming a member of Friends of the Library. We did.