Social & Education Marketing Specialists: Design, Advertising and Branding Manchester

App-watch: Spring into 3G

Spring has almost sprung and although we haven’t spotted any daffs yet, we’ve certainly discovered a crop of shiny new apps this month! With 4.5 billion apps estimated to be downloaded in 2010, apps are providing brands with opportunities to engage with their customers to provide new experiences.

This month we’re focusing on apps for retailers. Why not see if there any of these could apply to your business?

Next: shop on the move, including homeware as well as clothes, this app has had brilliant reviews and is so much lighter to carry than their Directory.

BA Flights: online check-in, arrivals and departure information…the only downside we can think of is that doesn’t come with a free flight!

Natwest: you’ve probably not used your phone to check your finances since the 90s (ah, remember the joy of those call centres), but this is fast and secure.

Tesco: no need for plastic cards anymore, this app turns your iPhone into your clubcard, you even get to scan it yourself…beep!

North Face: there was more snow in Scotland than at last month’s Winter Olympics, so use this app to check the snowfall in your ski resort with your own personal forecast.

We’d love to know which apps you rate and can’t live with out and so please let us know!

If you are want to talk to us about developing the perfect app for your business then email us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Make sure your customers find you!

Hungry, lost or need a bed for the night? We’ve all been there, but this should no longer be a problem with location based apps. These handy apps make finding locations, products, services…and late night kebabs simple.

There are hundreds of location apps available to download and many of them are free, the Tesco Finder app shows you their 24-hour supermarkets in your area when you’ve run out of nappies, the myStarbucks app locates their nearest store when you’re craving a latte or meeting a friend. The AA Britain app not only provides their maps, but also lets you book hotels and recommends places to eat, whereever you are at in the UK.

So have you thought about utilizing location based apps to your drive sales and raise brand awareness? Well with over 3 billion app downloads to date, it would seem that is plenty of demand.

To find out more on how we can make your business visible to the 3G generation contact us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Reporting the tell tale signs of cancer

Bowel cancer survival rates have doubled since the 1970s but there are still 16,000 deaths per year in the UK. According to the latest statistics from Cancer Research UK regarding the 5 year survival rates for people with bowel cancer, the figures show a significant disparity between survival rates for early and late-stage diagnosis of the disease.

When caught in its earliest stage the five year survival rate is 93%, when the disease is diagnosed late becoming advanced bowel cancer it is just 7%.  There is also is also an advantage of between 5% and 9% in five-year relative survival for the most affluent patients compared with the most deprived groups. If this deprivation difference was removed so that all groups had the highest survival, then over 2,000 deaths would be avoided in the five years following diagnosis.

As a social marketing agency with a proven track record working with PCTs, we can provide you with the support you require to access the available funds.

For more information please contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

£8m of DoH funding to help cut local cancer deaths

The Department of Health is providing £8m for PCTs across England to fund campaigns to raise the profile of the UK’s three biggest cancer killers – breast, bowel and lung cancer. Between them these forms of the disease account for 63,400 of the 155,000 cancer deaths in the UK each year.

PCTs will be able will be able to bid up to £100,000 to spend on advertising campaigns, outreach work, and ensuring that more information about these cancers are available. These campaigns are to urge people to report tell tale signs of cancer to their GP in an attempt to reduce the 10,000 deaths caught by late diagnosis of the disease each year.

As a social marketing agency with a proven track record working with PCTs, we can provide you with the support you require to access the available funds. 

The support package includes a strategic social marketing proposal and utilises the support of leading nationally recognised professionals within Psychology, Mental Health and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

Our experience of social marketing has reinforced the importance of applying recognised academic theory to the scoping and evaluation stages of a social marketing campaign.  We provide a unique social marketing approach through our team that includes leading professionals within Psychology, Mental Health and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.  This ensures that our campaigns deliver significant levels of behavioural change and the results that our clients require.

For more information please contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

3G Apps in mHealth targeting Mental Health

Today’s online experiences have expanded beyond the traditional, browser-based portals to include social media and then expanded again to included the latest mobile devices.

The 3G network has enabled mobile applications to capture the imagination of many and created unprecedented excitement across many industries. The numbers are amazing; with 2.5
billion apps available to download in 2009 and 4.5 billion apps expected to be available to download in 2010.

One area of opportunity is Mobile health or mHealth. This is the use of IT and mobile telecommunications to monitor patients remotely, and could help governments, healthcare providers and healthcare commisioners reduce costs related to chronic diseases and improve the quality of life of their patients. mHealth applications include the use of mobile devices in collecting community and clinical health data, delivery of healthcare information to practitioners, researchers, and patients, real-time monitoring of patient vital signs, and direct provision of care via mobile telemedicine.

Following on from the IAPT communications campaign, Perfect Circle is working with a group of leading nationally recognised academic professionals within Psychology, Mental Health and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to develop a range of 3G apps that will help those suffering from mental health issues.

Experiential Campaigns - Bluetooth to Apps.

To enable our clients to deliver memorable experiences for their target audience we’ve utilised some interesting media that has delivered these experiences including; surprise inducing talking bus shelters, one of the UK’s most successful ever Bluetooth campaigns, interactive SMS text backs and social networking sites that build communities around campaigns.

For our latest campaigns we are developing more iPhone apps that will allow our clients to build unique 3G experiences for their target audience and also help them to generate passive
income streams.

For more information about utilising the latest forms of media to deliver experiential marketing campaigns then drop us an e-mail at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Mental Health Social Marketing Campaign to Launch

Mental health problems cost the country an estimated £77billion a year in health care, benefits and lost productivity, with around one person in four experiencing mental illness at some point in their life and at any one time one person in six has a mental health problems. 

To address these issues Perfect Circle is working alongside NHS Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale to help launch their (IAPT) Improve Access to Psychological Therapies programme, as part of a Government initiative to treat 900,000 more patients who suffer from depression and anxiety over the next three years.  This IAPT social marketing campaign will launch towards the end of January 2010 and as usual will include a creative methods mix! For more information you can visit our case study page.

Finalist Global Social Marketing Awards 2010

Perfect Circle are delighted to have been selected as a finalist at the Global Social Marketing Awards 2010.  The nomination is for the Most Effective Creative Communications Campaign, for which we submitted our Burnage Media Arts College Social Marketing Campaign.  This highly prestigious awards event will separate the mediocre from those of truly outstandingly high caliber achievers, people who can really claim to be at the forefront of changing the world we live in

This award will be presented to the agency that is best able to demonstrate the most effective communications campaign- Hopefully that will be us!!! The Burnage Media Arts Campaign was a stand out campaign that possessed a strong focus on creative execution, pushed the boundaries of communications to achieve its objectives, including creative bus shelter wraps, to Bluetooth SMS, Interative Sonic Bus Shelters and ‘Real Life learning’ activities that involved the students of Burnage Media Arts College in Manchester.

Please keep your toes, fingers, and eyes crossed that we scoop the award so that we can continue to deliver our dream of successful people, living healthier lives in a sustainable world.