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Rangefinder Magazine
March 2004

Cubberly Studios’ Brian King by Larry Singer
A Call to Action

How does a photography studio in Ohio get over 2000 high school students a year to come in for their senior pictures? For Cubberly studios the answer is decades of name recognition, combined with making their young clients an offer they can’t refuse.

For the past eight years Brian King has been doing a great deal of highly effective marketing for Cubberly Studios, a six-decade-old portrait photography icon, spread out over four locations near Columbus, Ohio.

Over these eight years, King has directed a marketing strategy that currently persuades over 2000 high school seniors a year to sit in front of Cubberly cameras.

Not surprisingly, a successful strategy requires a personal commitment. For King this personal commitment mandates last minute long-distance calls on his cell phone to the printer of his mail-outs between rides, while vacationing with his family at Disney world.

A successful strategy also requires, King says, the flexibility to reassess—and possibly reinvent—itself every two years.

Conservative But Hip
“ We consider ourselves very family-oriented,” King says of Cubberly Studios, “When I assumed the role of overseeing our senior marketing campaign, we were starting to think that maybe people perceived us as old and stuffy. In many cases Cubberly Studios had photographed the senior portraits of parents—and sometimes grandparents—of current seniors! So we retooled and repackaged our product in a different format.”

The studio, King explains, wanted their family and children’s portraits to be light and airy and have a warm, fuzzy feel.

For their seniors, however, they wanted something with a harder edge. So first, they created a new logo.

To studio owners Scott and his sister, Monica Cubberly-Early, branding is very important, King explains. “We tried to create an image that is consistent throughout our entire marketing campaign—where everything has the same look and feel and where logos were consistent and recognizable. Now we have one Cubberly logo that goes on all our family and children product line, and a different Cubberly for our senior product line, which we tried to make a little more hip and eye-catching. We wanted something that would appeal to a senior high audience as opposed to a 35-year-old mother of three.”

The studio also strives for a cleaner look in their seniors’ images by getting away from gimmicky props. Instead, the studio, King says, allows the client to be the focus of the portrait.

“ I wouldn’t say these changes caused us to grow by leaps and bounds, but there was definitely an impact. When the kids see our work in other kids portfolios, and it looks different than it did before, or different than what they got from the studio they went to, they pay attention to that.”

A DVD 2 C
The primary informational introduction to Cubberly for the studio’s high school clients comes from a DVD.

“ With some of the schools, we arrange class presentations where we give the students information about our studio and show them an eight-minute DVD showcasing our photography and exposing the students to the Cubberly experience,” King explains. “This positions us as the place to be, and immediately after the presentation, we follow up by mail with a special offer.”

But even before that in-person DVD presentation, King explains, those same students had already received at least one or two mailings from Cubberly, to familiarize them with the studio’s name.

“ We market directly, face to face with the kids, whenever we can,” King says. “To the students from schools where we are unable to show the presentation, we market by mail, and then follow up with a call to action. Almost every one of our marketing pieces is a call to action, meaning there is a specific offer and a specific deadline.”

“ We spell it out for them,” he explains. “Here’s what you can get. Here’s what you have to do to get it. And here’s when you need you to do it by. We let them know if they don’t have their picture taken before the deadline, our offer is null and void.”

The message is clear: You snooze, you lose.

The Early Bird
“ In the spring we try and create an urgency by letting the kids know our schedule will soon be very tightly booked, and their schedules will also be very tightly booked,” King says. “The kids are not really thinking their schedules are going to get very hectic, so we impress on them that the earlier they come in, the more they can save.

“ We let them know that by August we are completely booked, and we give them a really good offer. We might tell them, for instance, if they’re photographed in May of their junior year—before they’re technically even seniors yet—we will include their session and portraits for one fee. To get this offer they must call us by a certain date and be photographed by a certain date.

“ That’s what we do after our introductory piece,” King continues. “There’s no offer on our introductory piece. We just tell them who we are and to start thinking about pictures.

“ Then we hit ’em with a really great come-in-early offer. From there we do our One Day Sale, where we set a specific day for them to call, and if they call on that day, they’ll receive a really great value for a really low price. Typically, we book most of our season off of our one-day sale.

“ If things go as planned,” he explains, “in the summer we’re running full steam, and we don’t have any openings, so we back off a little bit with the marketing.”

Data Management
As part of the studio’s data management program, when a client books his or her appointment with the studio, King explains, that name is removed from the studio’s master list. Then, the studio pulls all the students that have not been scheduled to be photographed and sends out a mailer telling them school is right around the corner. The crystal clear message is: Call now, and get your appointment because once school starts time is limited.

“ We’ll also send out another reminder telling them not to forget to make their appointment before yearbook deadlines,” King says. “But by this time,” he continues, “we strongly suspect they have gone to another studio or they don’t care.”

Digital Demands
King says, “We currently capture all our seniors digitally.” “Within about 20 minutes, we can deliver their images in a presentation binder, complete with sales information. I don’t know of anyone else in our area that delivers proof books on site at the end of a session. We do at all four locations. I believe that is one thing that really created a buzz about us.”

According to King, the senior portraits he pursues with tactical precision now account for about 60 percent of Cubberly Studios’ total studio business.

The Future
There are a lot of really neat things that can be done when marketing. It’s all a matter of what will work for your studio’s demographics and size. I have seen very elaborate campaigns, but for our studio and the number of kids we market to, some options become either too costly or too time consuming. That doesn’t mean we go to a bare-bones approach, either. Before we create something, we first analyze it from all angles to be sure it’s the right fit for us. Also, understand there is a difference between cost and value. Sometimes, costly campaigns can be very valuable. We always work with Farleygraphix, our professional designer. This partnership has always been a great value to us and that justifies the cost.

Maintaining the Name
“ We’ve got 66 years behind us,” King explains, “and we have name recognition—which is very important to us. We want to do everything we can to maintain that—maintenance of our reputation is one of our top goals.

“ It is vital to us to keep our customers happy year in and year out, because word of mouth is going to be more important than any marketing piece you can mail out,” he concludes.

Brian King can be reached by e-mail at bking@cubberly.com. The Cubbery Studios’ web site address is www.cubberly.com/.

Before producing hundreds of colorful, hearts, Larry Singer, a Fort Lauderdale writer was an award-winning newspaper photographer, art photography instructor and journalist. He has worked for newspapers in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina and taught art photography on a college, adult education and middle school level.