Paint Your Wagons

Rush hour is a marketing dream. You’ve got thousands of gridlocked commuters crammed bumper to bumper, with nothing to do but kick back and enjoy the scenery — including your fleet’s trailer graphics.

All the eyes around your truck belong to consumers. Most will be regular consumers, with a taste for ice cream or coffee, and a need for tires and groceries, and if you’re a private carrier, your trailer’s a great opportunity to showcase your product.

For the for-hire crowd, consider this: If you’re hurting for drivers, there’s also lots of truckers stuck out there in rush hour chaos, some of whom will no doubt be considering different employment options. If they see one of your trucks go by — looking clean, professional and prosperous — it might prompt them to send a resume your way. And then there’s a much smaller fraction of this captive community that will be buyers of shipping — obviously you want to look your best for these guys.

Your truck is a rolling billboard — for half the price of a stationary one. Consider this little nugget from the Seiko watch company. A study they commissioned to the Traffic Audit Bureau found that one truck emblazoned with their brand reached 40,500 people a day in Chicago. The price? Seventy cents per thousand impressions — less than half the price of billboard advertising for roughly the same number of impressions.

“A truck trailer is a great advertising medium,” says Phillip Meyersohn, Neilson’s VP of marketing. “When you look at the number of trucks on the road, each one is a billboard. And our brand is experienced in different ways in different contexts. We’re in the direct store delivery business and our trucks’ visuals and cleanliness is all a part of who we are as a brand.”

Neilson recently won the Private Motor Truck Council’s (PMTC) annual Vehicle Graphics Design competition in the tractor-trailer combination category on the strength of its 3D chocolate milk design. The trailer graphics feature Neilson chocolate milk bottles floating in a sea of milk.

“We want to have a consistent message across all the communications vehicles we use, whether it’s truck graphics, leaflets, or newspaper ads,” says Meyersohn.

Prescott, Ont.’s Kriska Transportation is also a big believer in using rolling stock to promote the brand. Kriska COO Paul Dean admits the company made a branding mistake years ago when they changed their colors to a red trailer with a smaller Kriska logo in white.

“I don’t think our old style from 10 years ago was very impressive at all.”

The company set about correcting the problem three years ago, enlisting Mississauga, Ont.’s Turbo Images to enhance their corporate image and aid them in going back to the company’s traditional logo — a K starting in black, with the straight line going into a grey towards the bottom and then a red arrow to finish off the K.

“We’ve had very positive feedback for the new design,” says Dean. “It’s a good, clean look. The bulk of our business is with the food and packaging industries, so we want to demonstrate a clear, crisp appearance — clean. Plus, it’s important to have a common identity.”

Before giving your fleet a makeover, ask yourself a few basic questions — first, who are you trying to reach?

For the for-hire carriers, that’s trending towards potential new hires, according to Simon Bois, regional sales manager of Turbo Images.

“It used to be common carriers would be satisfied with just having their names on the fleet,” says Bois. “Every single reputable corporate carrier out there knows that a good-looking fleet attracts drivers. More and more are corporations that are going beyond the ‘drivers wanted’ advertising. They’re using fancy fleet graphics, above and beyond their corporate image, to attract drivers and send messages to them.”

Private fleets have to ask themselves what product(s) they want to market, who they want to reach, “and then come up with the artwork that suits that specific need. For example, you’ve got Loblaws who is very colorful on the road. They want to reach everybody. The entertainment factor in fleet graphics is exponentially larger than any other advertising medium. If there’s an entertainment factor in this, you’re assured people looking at you two or three times — and it moves,” says Bois.

In terms of the actual vinyls used in applying your brand to the trailer, you really have two choices: Avery Dennison or 3M. According to Bois, an experienced graphics supplier will use one of these brands.

“The reason is simple — the support from both companies in cases of complication is equal and very attractive compared to what other vinyl manufacturers provide — especially regarding warranties.

“If you’re using Avery or 3M and there’s a product failure on 100 trailers, you’re looking at a claim of several hundred thousand dollars.

You’re looking at removing the defective graphics from the fleet, downtime on equipment, reproducing good graphics, and reinstalling it all — it’s a lot of money. Both companies will cover product and labor. If you go with any other products, they’ll give you a batch of product, but no labor.”

Most of what you see on the road these days is either digitally printed or screen printed. Screen printing is a process that requires a long expensive setup and requires an end-user to plan ahead for repairs and to keep an inventory of material for future repairs. Digital print is the leading technology. Eighty percent of what you see on the roads these days is digital print. The only downfall with digital is that it’s meant for complex images. If you’re looking for a solid color, your best solution would be screen printing.