While killing time in a Chicago-area mall last week, I saw a large floor display for Discover Card (Discover Financial is based in Chicago, I believe) with a new branding approach. The solid orange letter “O” in the Discover logo was now lit up, and the one word tagline being featured was the word Brighter. Not having seen this marketing initiative anywhere else, I searched on the web, and apparently it is not a flash in the pan (pun intended), but part of a campaign. From a visual standpoint, the execution was OK, but the tagline just isn’t doing it…

How can you get a handle on your corporate brand? What is it your brand stands for? How can you determine what the perfect positioning strategy would be and how can you validate your findings to be sure that your brand experience is genuine? I think I may have just what you may be looking for to answer these and other nagging brand questions. I’ve just launched a digital solution that addresses many brand issues and shows you how you can re-build your corporate brand using a differentiating strategy. That solution is “DIY Brand Builderâ„¢”. DIY Brand Builderâ„¢ is a…

Regardless of the size of your business or the industry you operate in, aligning your business with complimentary organizations that can help you expand your reach and even your set of offerings can be a highly effective way to succeed, especially if you are a small business with limited resources. Business partners can serve a multitude of purposes in the course of a mutually beneficial relationship. Here are several examples: 1. Help you expand and round out your set of offerings – if you’re a law firm and want to also offer a lower-end “product”, you can align yourself with…

I had a meeting this week with an old business aquaintance of mine called Caroline Anstee who has a firm of IFAs which is run by women for women called Elements. We were talking and she was telling me how much her business had taken off in the last few years and that the “pink pound”, where women were concerned, was certainly alive and kicking. It seems that women want to do business with women, and that more and more often they either hold the purse strings to the family income or are very independent and are earning their own…

There lies, in the relationships you have with your customers, an opportunity to increase profits by developing products that could become important profit centers. Commodity relationships with customers is probably the greatest frustration experienced by sales staff world-wide. Day in and day out, your sales teams are bombarded with the demand to deliver the lowest price per product. Over time they are demoralized and endeavor to define their relationships with customers solely based on price and have hanging over their heads the reality that the customer will jump ship if you can’t deliver on lowest price EVERY time. You’ve heard…

When you start out in business one of the last things that you will do is interview yourself for the role of MD in your company, but if you were to then would you make the grade? Well a simple way to find out is to ask yourself have you got the ABCD to do business? A is for astute. Are you savy enough to know a good business deal from a bad one? Have you brokered deals in the past in someone else’s company? Were they good or bad deals? Are you astute enough to be able to run…

Today, I was driving behind a car that had a bumper sticker advertising some company (name will be withheld pending notification of next of kin). This company had a tagline of parallel statements that stated…well, precisely nothing. Built on Product. Powered by People. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t go through life thinking about how I need “product.” Specific products, yes – but having seen this bumper sticker, I am left without a clue as to what this company offers. As for powered by people – is there any company yet that was begun and maintained by…

A carefully developed brand is similar to a carefully sculpted physique. It must be honed and sculpted to meet desired goals. Like a body builder, a brand needs to be proportionally shaped from top to bottom. In the world of Marketing this boils down to whether or not your brand identity is built with enough brawn to shoulder your foreseeable growth. You don’t want to get to the point where you have to play a desperate game of catch-up with your brand’s new-found ubiquity. Like everything else in life and business, why not prepare for it while you still have…

I know it’s certainly got a strangle hold on our business. Of course this is an internationally read and contributed to site here at SBB so different business laws will apply to different folk, but generally speaking I do think as a business owner red tape is too constricting. And now I’m really going to sound like a moaning mini…but it rarely seems that new legislation is in the favour of the business owner. The government treasury seem to come out winners, employees seem to come out as winners, but the poor old chap simply trying to run his business…

Does your personal brand compliment the brand of the company you work for? Most people work to live. They probably believe that not much thought was put towards doing their jobs other than what it pays. Are we drawn to occupations that reflect who we are? Do blue collar brands draw people who also could be said to possess blue collar brands. Does a librarian’s brand reflect that of the library they work for? This concept reminds me of the comment that many people look like their pets. It is easy to understand if the occupation was chosen due to…