Small and So Useful

Small, compact, pleasant to hold and fairly inconspicuous, this little object has enormous practical potential. It might save your life when you find yourself lost and wandering through a rainforest, tundra, taiga or simply the deep forests of Šumava. The fire will then warm both your feet and your heart.

When you hold a fire starter by Fráňa in your hands, you can appreciate the perfect quality and aura its creator puts into every piece. And for us, there is also some very clear symbolism behind it.

Marketing is a fire starter too. It sparks a fire on both sides of the market. Sometimes it catches immediately. At other times, it is a process that leaves your fingers sore from pounding the keyboard - and quite often gives your head a good workout too. When you finally manage to create a powerful flame, there is reason to celebrate, and not only at the end of the year. The message is simple: the right spark can save you from a bitter winter, and sometimes it ignites something much bigger that has been patiently waiting for its opportunity.

Back to Brand

Marketing, digital and especially PPC have now gone through a second difficult year in a row. And it is hardly surprising.

When companies embark on a new adventure, they start feeding Google and working on SEO. During the first few months, business owners usually enjoy the excitement of an influx of new orders, which to some extent confirms that they made the right decision. You may have experienced it yourself. Especially if you started shortly before COVID or during its most intense phase.

But if you have been doing this for 5, 10 or more years, you probably already know that relying solely on bidding wars with competitors, reliable landing pages, colourful automations, the best offer with free delivery, distinctive copy, original graphics and an always ready marketer who fulfils your wishes day and night is simply not a sustainable long-term path. For anyone.

At Freelance Core, thanks both to difficult times and to our own development, we are therefore returning to the place we absolutely needed to grow into as marketers. Back to brand. First and foremost, it is always about a high-quality product, a genuinely useful service for the customer or an inspiring brand culture with a human dimension.

We will leave the seemingly mysterious abbreviations ESG and CSR aside for now (although, as a healthy organism, we are expanding in those directions as well and have big plans for next year). But generally speaking, one thing seems clear. The year 2024 in online marketing will be driven by a simple motto: “Back to brand!”

The Age of Discounts Is Consolidating

The age of discounts is reaching its peak, and we are heading towards a consolidation of the discount wars. Every era eventually comes to an end, and we can expect an important phenomenon. People will once again pay more attention to:

• who they are buying from and whether the product will last,
• whether they will buy it twice in a lifetime or twice a year,
• whether they choose a more expensive, high-quality product or a cheap piece of junk

Something similar will inevitably happen to us freelancers and agencies as well. Ultimately, despite all the turbulence, rapid dynamics and pressure, this is a great time. Why? The market will clear itself out of snake-oil salesmen (and there are plenty of them in the Czech Republic). Partnerships maintained only by inertia or by the naivety of one or both sides will fall apart.

So What Awaits Us?

We do not need to stare into a crystal ball to sense the arrival of a completely new marketing model. We can expect a system based less on cheap marketing built around a frankly rather repulsive discount funnel that ends below both the producer's margin and dignity, and more on the true craftsmanship of the product, or the thoughtfulness and usefulness of the service.

The future is embedded in a logically inevitable combination: higher price - higher quality - more demanding customer - meaningful production, including a responsible approach to materials and technologies.

Add durability and innovative design to the equation. We can expect UI (user interface) to play an increasingly important role in our lives. And strictly within the online environment, we should not forget UX (user experience), which in many places is still sadly lagging behind.

The offer of the future may be clearer than it first appears through the clutter of difficult times: everything will be served on a clean, user-friendly web platter, closely connected to a new generation of AI-powered search engines.

At this point, the author of this little Christmas reflection has to add a sceptical note: perhaps for the first time in his life, while watching the evolution of AI, his personal conservative tendencies are beginning to show, and the expected euphoria surrounding the development of artificial intelligence simply is not arriving.

Hopefully, the future lies somewhere beyond the work of stupid, annoying chatbots - perhaps in the direct generation of valuable, meaningful content from personalised web search results.

We Support Quality - We Support Fráňa's Fire Starters

We can see all the attributes of the marketing of the future physically embodied in the example of Fráňa's fire starters.

Each one is a beautiful piece of wood, handcrafted and made for a specific purpose. The well-designed fire starter is customised for personal or corporate needs. It is created for joy, practical use and with the intention of avoiding cheap junk from an online comparison site that falls apart in the client's hands after the first few attempts.

A fire starter by Fráňa offers a wide range of choices when it comes to the particular type of wood, including rare exotic species, colours, waxing, packaging, logo engraving, claims and symbols - naturally including environmentally friendly packaging. It produces perfect sparks, is easy to hold - and it lasts.

The added value? František's personal approach. He passionately tests his fire starters and shares his enthusiasm with many people. We wish there were more products in our oversaturated world that were the result of this kind of genuine love for the craft.

Let the Light Shine

If you receive one of these fire starters under the Christmas tree and you are not exactly a true outdoorsman, nor are you planning an adventurous expedition into the depths of the jungle, do not despair. This small, useful tool will still find its place beside the fireplace at home or an outdoor fire pit.

You can even hang one on the Christmas tree and turn it into an unusual decoration. Because, as Honza Verner's grandmother used to say: