Depending on the nature of the product, building product marketing can be a straightforward process, or it can be very challenging. For building products that are finish materials, like claddings and finishes, some photographs of a finished project are a no-brainer. When you are dealing with building products which are not part of the esthetic scheme of a design, or are hidden inside a wall never to be seen again, it is a much more challenging visual marketing exercise. When a not-so-attractive product needs to be visually demonstrated and displayed, 3d animations and video are the best solution. This case study demonstrates the power of 3d rendering and animation as an educational and persuasive sales tool, team training tool and customer support solution.
The Challenge
Explain what the Cemco Fas-Track and Deflection Drift Angle are (features & benefits)
Demonstrate how the product are installed in a wall
Express why one should choose the products
Take these rather mundane objects and make them look their best visually
Step One – Modeling, Texturing & Rendering the Products
The first step was to create 3d models of the products and create textures that realistically represent the building products for this animation. They are displayed below:
Tracksafe
Fas Trak Rendering – 4-9-13
Step Two – Setting the scene
I chose to create a scene that had enough contextual information so the viewer knows we are looking at an interior partition in a structure with the desired construction type to best showcase this product without distracting the eye.
Scene Setup / Context
Step Three – Setting things in motion
Once the scene was setup and the necessary parts were modeled, I began the animation process by creating a storyboard that tells what is going to happen at what time. Once the storyboard is edited back and forth with the client and approved, the animation starts to take shape. Once all the parts are moving properly and everything is checked to be accurate, we move on to step four – annotation and narration.
Step Four – Annotation and Narration
This is where the microphone comes out and the narration explains what is happening. Text and other graphics are mixed in to make the presentation as clear as possible.
The Final Product
Testimonial
“I’m a product manager and I cover the entire US. Obviously I cannot accompany each salesman during their sales presentation but having a 2-1/2 minute video point out all the highlights of the system is huge help. Our customer’s time is very valuable and many times you only have a few minutes to pitch a product. The video gets directly to the point, pecks their interest and opens up the dialogue.”
I’m sure you all can relate to my broken shelf in my former office. It was weighed down by the ubiquitous and industry standard sweets catalog of building products. It’s pretty funny to think back now of a huge volume of printed binders being the state-of-the-art for getting information about building products.
We can look back now and think about that tectonic shift from printed materials to online communication and laugh. The shift to mobile marketing is going to look very much the same and it is happening now. Building product manufacturers need to embrace mobile marketing and deliver engaging and interactive content that helps sell their products and educate their customers resulting in increased sales and increased customer satisfaction. This can be accomplished using high end visualization tools.
Mobile marketing is the next big shift
2012 internet trends report by mary meeker and Liang Wu documents the following :
Three years ago, 2% of adults owned a tablet or eReader, this year in 2012 it’s 29%!
Mobile internet traffic was 4% of the total in 2010, now it’s 13%
In india, as we speak mobile internet traffic is surpassing that of desktop usage
The global installed base of smartphones and tablets will exceed that of desktop computers in the second quarter of 2013
Prepare mobile marketing that works for desktop users equally well.
1. If your web site is not mobile friendly, figure it out – either have your web designer create a mobile responsive site that resizes itself automatically according to the size of the user’s screen, or have them make your site autodetect and redirect users to a mobile marketing web site.
2. Once you figure it out, deliver engaging content for mobile users – 3d Instructional Animations and stunning interactive demonstrations of your products.
Use 3d renderings, interactive demos and animations for mobile marketing
Reading large amounts of text is quite enjoyable on most mobile devices, but it is not what they excel at. Apple has put super high resolution retina displays in their iPhones and iPads which produce stunning visual clarity. 3d renderings of products, 3d interactive product demonstrations and animations excel on these mobile platforms.
– Create high end visualizations of your products that look great on mobile screens, see some examples here
– Using those assets have your visual marketing professional create interactive product tours that allow the user to interact with your product with his or her fingers. Think about millions of potential customers holding a sample of your product in their hands. Imagine how powerful that would be. See examples here
– Those same assets can be used to create instructional 3d animations that can demonstrate how your product works to a customer, how to install them for a do-it-yourselfer or a contractor. See an example here
We know the value of first impressions in interpersonal interactions, but they are also vital to the first time your product is seen by a customer. Get it right the first time, wow them from the beginning and realize that if you don’t take pride in your products, nobody else will. This article explains this concept more.
Some of the best sales people in the building product world are great teachers. They have a way of understanding the needs of their customers and can communicate solutions to real problems in an eloquent way. The act of taking someone from ground-zero and walking them step-by-step through a solution from beginning to end is an act of teaching.
The customer experience used to be done largely in person, when it comes to building product sales. A representative would put on a suit and tie, carry a large heaping pile of samples in to an architect’s office and make a great and informative presentation.
Arm your Sales Staff
I recently got a tour of a brick plant and one of the shocking things to me was there seemed to be more people, effort and expense going into creating the product samples than there was actually making the actual end product. The time and monetary investments are being made on the front-end of the sales process making the product samples look just right. That sample room is an arsenal of ammunition for the sales staff to use. Here is a new weapon for your sales staff – the 3d animation.
Bring a Machine Gun to a Knife Fight
Educate your sales team with 3d animations which demonstrate the what, how and why of your product in high definition detail. It is a very powerful sales training tool that can make sure that all the most important technical points and installation nuances are being addressed correctly.
Even the most boring and invisible aspects of a product can be illuminated and highlighted with a great 3d animation. Once the sales team is armed with this information, they can hit the ground running.
Take Customer Experience to the Next Level
The days of the boring powerpoint presentation are coming to an end. Your customers are completely desensitized to moving bullet lists and boring slides. Instead, if you show them full resolution, full motion 3d animated product tours and installation demonstrations, you will get their attention, you will educate them more thoroughly and they will be far more likely to remember the information you present to them.
Improve the customer experience with video demonstrations that do not just list features and benefits, they demonstrate them in real time.
Why is YouTube the Second Most Popular Search Engine?
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world because people love video. Video is engaging and is particularly effective when you are trying to demonstrate a highly technical concept. We will be at a point where customers are going to expect a much higher level of sophistication from product manufacturers and I think that time is drawing near.
Support the end-user and decrease problems in the field
A multimedia demonstration can help contractors and do-it-yourselfers understand the processes and procedures that need to be followed in order to correctly use your products. A step-by-step animation, often the same animation that you used to sell the product, can also serve to reduce warranty claims, callbacks, complaints and litigation.
An end-to-end solution
I have a map on my wall from Mark Mitchell (seethewhizard.com) it is a map of all the different paths a building product can take through the building product channel. At every touchpoint from architect, to general contractor, distributor – every point at which a building material moves from manufacture to installation can be improved and even transformed by a simple 2 minute video like the one shown above.
It’s There When you Cannot Be
Here is a quote from a customer who had a product animation done recently “I’m a product manager and I cover the entire US. Obviously I cannot accompany each salesman during their sales presentation but having a 2-1/2 minute video point out all the highlights of the system is huge help. Our customer’s time is very valuable and many times you only have a few minutes to pitch a product. The video gets directly to the point, pecks their interest and opens up the dialogue.”
What does visual marketing of construction products have to do with McDonald’s?
Well here comes the stretch.
Ever notice how the images they use of a Big Mac in commercials are always so perfect looking? What about on those big pictures they throw up on their menus at their restaurant locations? They know the power of visual communication. There is a company they hire who painstakingly pours over every detail of the sample sandwiches they make with the sole purpose of photographing them for marketing materials.
Maybe I watch too much documentary tv on the science channel, but I happened to catch the show about how they do that. It’s intense and it has to be expensive, but they do it. They know what they are doing.
When I look at catalogs and marketing materials on web sites for building products, the products usually look lame.
Here’s a cold formed metal framing part – It fireproofs the top of a wall – or so they tell me.
Anyway looking around the internet to see what I am competing with when I do a rendering of this product, here’s what I come up with:
I think we can do better – way better as an industry and learn from McDonald’s a little bit. So there hamburgers never actually look as good as the products they show in the commercials and on the menus – maybe that’s not such a big deal.
Maybe we can take a page from this playbook and send our products to beauty school a little bit.
Here’s my attempt at it, for what it’s worth – 3d subdivision surface model and rendering of Cemco Fastrak 1000
I love factory tours. Everyone once in a while, I get to walk through a factory. Usually it is one of my clients who manufacture building products, but I’m also addicted to watching the show “How it’s made” as well. I’m always fascinated by how things get done. I did a pretty interesting 3d model today and thought I’d share a little window into how I do what I do. That will happen in the latter part of this post.
I Fired Myself Last Month
For those of you who do not know my story, I have been doing visual marketing as a side business for the last 15 years. Up until last month, I had a full time job as the Staff Architect at a local masonry trade association.
That’s right, I’m a quitter. John Acuff covered what it means to be a quitter in his book:
I enjoyed it and highly recommend it to anyone looking to be their own boss. It’s been an exciting three weeks since I became a quitter and I’m adjusting well to seeing more of my beautiful wife and sweet little 1 1/2 year old daughter.
Factory Tour – 3d model & Photorealistic Rendering of a new product.
I have to admit, when I got a snapshot photo of this product, I was a little concerned about creating geometry that would accurately simulate this product. It’s a pretty goofy shape. The photograph I received looked like this :
It is a drainage device for masonry walls, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that this thing is made of an open weave mesh and it is formed into this dovetail shape. It looks sort of like it goes into a press and gets pressed or stamped like a cookie sheet or something. Regardless I had to take some basic dimensions I was given and then make a flat object that warps up and down in a curved profile in this dovetail pattern.
I broke it down into the most reasonable repeatable unit, which conveniently is one foot wide – with one dovetail in it. I created a flat polygon mesh that measured the height of the finished product – 11″ and the width of this repeatable unit 12″.
It looks like this :
Then in two dimensions I subdivided the surface into a series of sections to control the mesh that will be created in later steps. I’m skipping a lot of boring stuff here, but all the extra lines will help me control the behavior of the surfaces, once I subdivide them. I have highlighted the faces that will be extruded out to create the desired shape :
Next I take those faces and extrude them upward creating the basic shape I will be needing. It’s still boxy and weird, but it’s getting there :
Now that I have all these control lines in place and the geometry the way I want it, I now can subdivide the surfaces :
Now we have a smooth mesh in which the subdivision system has used those control lines i put in to calculate a smooth surface. Thankfully I have drawn a similar product for this company that is also made of this open mesh material and have a texture already created for it. The texture involves taking a photograph of the mesh.
Using photoshop to make it tileable, meaning if it is repeated over and over it appears seamless. The same image is duplicated and using photoshop threshold filters, i turn the image into a black and white representation where white equals the actual object and black are the areas that will be transparent. Once I create the new texture, i simply define the blue color using the rgb values lifted from the original photo and then use my transparency mask to take out all the parts of the mesh you can see through.
This is what the transparency mask looks like – pretty strange looking, but the black parts will be transparent and the white parts will have the blue color from the original photo on it.
Texture applied – skipping a bunch of steps in the texture process but you get the idea. I then replicated the shape 5 times to arrive at the final product. Set up some lighting parameters and a ground plane and here is the result. Clicking on the image gives you a full size view.
