The Power of Advertising Vans

When I went to the Western Isles I met a man called ND: N D Macleod who had the electrical business of the same name. He ran a fleet of yellow vans. There was no one on Lewis who didn't know that ND ran an electrical business out of Church House in Stornoway. He told me many things but one that stuck in my mind more than most was that the best free advertising is your vans. I don't think, many years later, that there were too many people in Stornoway who didn't know Coll Pottery's yellow vans.

A couple of years ago a hair dresser in Napier bought a couple of little distinctive vans. She parked one on either side of Kennedy Road (one of the main roads into Napier) and anyone using that road knew that there was a 7-day unisex hairdresser there. That's how I started going there. Apart from anything else parking was easy. But because it is a main road and the original premises were quite inauspicious many people who travelled the road daily (myslef included) wouldn't usually have noticed it.
This year I came back to find that the business had flourished and moved to very smart new premises.

More than that there had been an explosion in the number of little advertising vans from one-man businesses to The Mad Butcher.