Poll on printing ideas:

[jakprintsHAUNT]

Hey everyone, we over at Jakprints have been thinking about some ideas and ways to save the industry some money and wanted to get some feedback on which of these ideas you like best:

1. Offering group discounts such as is often done with 3D glasses. We would take up to X amount of customers before a preset date and offer a discount for everyone printing similar items together.

2. Helping to facilitate split cards or coupons with other attractions in your area.

3. Area "haunt guides" that could be paid for by sponsors, but would be a directory of all participating haunts in an area that could be a small and distributed at concerts or virtually anywhere...advertising multiple haunts in 1 shot. I believe this was done in at least the Detroit area at one point with fairly good success.

4. Stock Imagery to "rent" or purchase and use for your attraction's promotions coupled with your logo and info.

Let me know what you guys think of these 4 things?


Thanks
Mike "Pogo" Hach

[Spookyfinder]

Mike,

What about stock t-shirt designs that could easily be branded by adding a haunts logo to it? Stock "crew" shirts? Just some thoughts... -Tyler

[jakprintsHAUNT]

Tyler,

This is definitely one avenue we are exploring...kind of ties in with the stock imagery thing.


Mike "Pogo" Hach

[Killer Katie]

An area haunt guide would be an excellent idea!
Back when I was younger, we would have to do all the research ourselves on the haunts in the area, which sometimes we missed the smaller ones.
If you had a guide,with a map, and possible a "plan of attack" mapping the easiest way from one to another, I think everyone would benefit.
Good idea!!

[Jim Warfield]

"Stock" Images?

Isn't this business suposed to be somewhat indivually creative?
"Stock Images"!?
Please put a dead skunk in my mailbox instead.
"That smell seems very familiar, I'm smelled that before someplace, like maybe 40 other times along this 100 miles of road."
"But do you like that smell?"
"Are you kidding?"
Sorry, maybe it's just "ME"?
I see "life" as too short to spend it with a tracing pencil in my hand.
Don't be offended, it's just me.
Sorry.

[jakprintsHAUNT]

Jim,

I do agree, but there is surprisingly a pretty big market for it, many of the big designers even "rent" images out for yearly licensed use. It can be more cost effective than contracting to have a unique image created.

I think part of it and its success is that certain themes and images just work and are appealing to many. You can only draw a skeleton or jack-o-lantern so many ways, but it is a standard used theme in many haunts and haunt art/media. Same with haunt props, animatronics, designs, etc...its all in how they are used. I've been to a lot of haunts and have seen a lot of repeat rooms or props...but in most cases they work in each of their own situation. If everyone created their own stuff there wouldnt be much of an "industry" surrounding the haunt industry...all the prop companies would be out of business. I guess the same mentality can go for images. They are also sometimes editable to some degree to fit your theme, coloring, logos, etc...

I personally prefer something fresh and creative, and have generally been against buying anything stock without altering it in some way, but again not everyone's thing. As an artist myself I know that there can come a point where you pour so much of your creative energy into one thing, when it comes to other avenues...you just turn a blank. That's my personal analysis of it...but I could be way off...thats just how I see it. As I said to one of the top industry designers...I was actually surprised how much of a market there is for stock imagery...but again when you put it in perspective of things like props and such...its not that much different.


Mike "Pogo" Hach

[Jim Warfield]

Of Course

You have Very valid points, business-wise, profit-wise and as in all things.."What works..Works!"
Paying to own an image for a contracted period of time would not have allowed to have happen what I saw on a Halloween page in a newspaper where there were 8 different haunts and only four different images , so here were the same "house" all with different names and addresses, which made for customer confusion, I would assume, which also negated the effectiveness of those ad-dollars spent.
It just really looked very stupid.
I wonder if the choice of image was left to the newspaper?
If it was and this happened I would have asked for a full refund.

[jakprintsHAUNT]

Yeah that totally sounds like a mess up on someone's part. For this reason at least the bigger name designers that do contract images or rent them out will make them market exclusive to a specific radius so you dont have that happen.


Mike "Pogo" Hach