Make the Ultimate Commitment to Your Brand With a Tattoo [Video]

How do you feel about your company’s logo? You should be proud of it. After all, it represents your hard work, blood, sweat, and tears. Here’s the ultimate question: are you proud enough of your logo to have it tattooed on your body? Some business people are actually doing this, and their reasoning may surprise you.

You Can’t Be Serious?
You better believe it. Tattoo marketing is as real as the skin that it’s scarring for life. If you’re skeptical, then go to New York and talk with one of the seventy employees of Rapid Reality to show you their ink. They’ll happily roll up their sleeve or pant leg to reveal a permanent tattoo of their company’s logo.

Would a 15 percent lifetime raise be enough to convince someone on your team to become a “brand ambassador” for your company? Before you scoff at the idea, consider the fact that you’re getting a permanent billboard out the deal; it’s hard to put a price on that.

Tattoos: A Painful Way to Get Results
Unlike an online advertising campaign which can be measured in clicks and leads generated, it’s a little more tricky to know for sure how effective a tattoo is when it comes to increasing sales revenue. Although, one thing you can know for certain is that a tattoo of your company’s logo will certainly generate buzz and be a good conversation starter regarding your business.

At least, that’s the idea behind Rapid Realty inking their salespeople--the very people who are tasked with finding ways to talk about their job in as many conversations as possible. Think about it: at a party, a person asks one of your inked sales representatives, “Hey, what’s that tattoo about?” Boom. That just opened the door to a sale and the fifteen percent raise just paid for itself!

Other benefits to making tattoos a normal part of your business model are:

• Employee retention (they’ll think twice about leaving if your organization is permanently represented on their body).
• You can find out which employees are the most loyal--or the most desperate for a pay raise.
• And you’ll gain the reputation for being the roughest, toughest company in your industry. Depending on what your business does, having such a reputation could bode well for sales, and competitors will think twice about messing with you.

Just Try Not to Look Desperate
Using tattoos to spread the word about your business can be a fun and outside-the-box way to approach marketing, but there’s a right and a wrong way to go about it. Rapid Realty is doing it right, Mitt Romney did it wrong during his 2012 US presidential campaign. In order to generate some buzz about his candidacy, the Romney campaign paid one Eric Hartsburg $5,000 to get their campaign logo tattooed... on Hartsburg’s face. Yep:

Laugh as you may, but this marketing stunt made national headlines, which is a pretty good purchase for $5,000. However, in the end, Romney lost the election, perhaps because the face tattoo was in poor taste.

What do you think about tattoos? Would you consider getting your company’s logo tattooed on your body? What do you think it would take for your staff to become “tattooed brand ambassadors” for your business? Share your thoughts in the comments.