The Dbottino Weblog

We talk about tax freedom day - the day of the year in which the ‘average’ person ceases to work for the British Government and starts to work for him or herself. Thanks to the ‘prudence’ and ‘financial management’ of our current party this has gone from 24th to 31st May since 1997. Most readers of this article are likely to be higher earners and higher total tax payers - as a percentage of income - despite ICFBA services to help reduce that burden.

But what are you paying because of the bondage to the brand phenomenon? Modern consumerism is brand brainwashed. Your boy wants the latest Nike trainers, your daughter just loves Next, your wife is addicted to John Lewis, you - despite all your professional objectivity, stick rigidly to Hewlett Packard. You come home - order a meal from Pizza Hut - and go off to shop at Tesco’s.

I don’t deprecate these organisations. They are meeting a need and maximising their return on capital in doing so. That is good business. But that need is that of the lemmings who

- buy an item because of its brand, when a lower cost one would give the same or better value.
- buy from a higher cost channel, where a lower priced one would give the same or better service at a lower price.
- buy a higher spec and therefore more expensive article than is needed for the job.

Look at the unnecessary costs you are paying for: the enormous publicity spending, the large company overheads and the optimisation of profits. Sometimes perceived ‘better’ is just more standardisation - same sized potatoes - or more packaging or more additives. Manufactured goods probably come from the same factories in China - not always supplied at a low cost - due to the ’special demands’ of the ‘prestigious customer’. I could get controversial by citing the use of ‘fear, uncertainty and doubt - FUD’ to make you go for the ’safer bet’ - “Using this cartridge could void your warranty” - note could - not would. Even more political, is the misuse of patents and other intellectual property to heighten the entry threshold to a market.

In business it may be worse. Most readers are executives/directors of small or medium businesses. You have that position in the market because you supply value. People trust you. You would not let your hard won customers down by shoddy goods or inferior service. You do not have the resources to conduct studies into consumer demand so you use your experience to guide you and price your wares at cost plus a reasonable return. What’s more you are battling against those mighty corporations who even relish the bureaucratic regulations which inhibit your development.

I was analysing the expenditure of a public agency on the top 50 business supplies - computer supplies (40%), copier and other paper (25%), filing products, stationery, janitorial supplies and even tea and coffee. I took the price that typically would be spent by buying branded product from a leading business supplies chain. I then priced the goods on unbranded - or unpromoted branded goods - of sound quality from smaller reputable channels. I saved over 25%. On a business supplies budget of £20,000 that is £5000.

That is £5000 on to the bottom line. ICFBA is working on a programme to reign back your ‘brand freedom day’.

© Daniel Roberts
danielroberts@icfba.biz daniel@incartek.com

Daniel Roberts - January 2006
Published in ICFBA Advance

About Incartek
Incartek specialises in the office products and computer consumables businesses identifying opportunities for you to grow your business and then supporting you in exploiting them. It is affiliated to the International Confederation for Business. Incartek has three patents (granted or pending) in the design of inkjet cartridges.

About Daniel Roberts
Dan Roberts is a well known figure in the European electronic supplies and peripheral products industries. As a consultant to it since 1987 he opened up distribution channels and provided strategic guidance to companies such as Kodak, Verbatim, Memorex, EMC2 ICI Imagedata , and various office products, remanufacturing and computer leasing companies.

Between 1996 and 2005 he suspended is consulting activities to direct Europe’s largest master distributor of compatible inkjet cartridges - The Container Club.

Prior to 1987 he was Director of Product Planning for Unisys, and Director of Planning for the international operations of Memorex. In all, he has over 30 years experience in aftermarket distribution.

Let me tell you a story about Pete and a pizza. After a long day of fighting uncooperative pipes and fixtures, Pete P. Lumber, of Pete’s DuperRooter, was looking forward to a nice, hot, decidedly Atkins-disapproved pizza the stuff of which dreams are made. The week before, Pete was doing a bathroom remodel at Bob’s historical Chicago bungalow. The house had only one bathroom, so Pete had to complete the project as fast as possible. Due to a series of unfortunate events, some of which involved a repeated, forceful application of a rather large hammer, Pete stayed much longer than he initially anticipated. To bungalow owner Bob’s delight, Pete completed the remodel the same day.

Bob decided to take Pete out to dinner to show his appreciation. Bob knew that Pete liked pizza, so he took him to the MostDeliciousPizzaEmporium across the street. The restaurant was small, unassuming, and had the charming aura of a hole-in-the-wall. And it had the best pizza that Pete has ever tasted. Just the memory of that pizza he shared with Bob made Pete’s stomach growl. The crust was browned just right. The sauce had the perfect balance of tomato sauce and spices. And the toppings….there were over 20 toppings to chose from.

It’s no wonder that this week, Pete was looking forward to having pizza delivered from MostDeliciousPizzaEmporium. By the time Pete got home and was ready to pick up the phone, he could almost taste it. But, (these stories never seem to end well, do they?) he realized that he didn’t have the pizza place’s phone number. Pete didn’t remember the name of the place either the sign above the door had been tiny and hard to read.

Even if Pete had been paying attention, he would have had a hard time figuring out what the name was, since most vowels fell off the neon sign sometime around the Roosevelt administration (Teddy, in case you were wondering). It gets worse. As he and Bob were leaving, Pete had asked Kate, the hostess, for a take-out menu. She apologized profusely and said that they ran out four months ago and nobody bothered to reorder new ones.

The phone book turned out to be useless remember, Pete couldn’t recall the name of the pizza place. Scanning the restaurant pages didn’t ring a bell either. The only thing Pete could recall was the approximate address (across from Bob’s bungalow). Pete was too tired to go out and drive again, since he had just returned home. To add insult to injury, the weather person on Channel 5 news was gleefully pointing to the latest Doppler radar and cheerfully informing his audience that yet another 15 inches of snow were going to fall in the next hour.

That sealed it. Pete, who almost never surrendered, gave up. He ordered pizza from his usual joint, OKPizzaParlor. Pizza there was nothing to write home about. However, the proprietors always stocked a four-year supply of take-out menus and business cards. As an added twist, they gave out 4×6 magnets with “OKPizzaParlor” emblazoned on them with three inch high neon green letters with every order. Pete’s fridge was plastered with at least 20 of these.

OKPizzaParlor also sent their customers coupons and specialized promotional flyers. OKPizzaParlor even sent their customers a free 16 inch thin crust pizza coupons for their birthdays. Finally, all advertising materials prominently featured OKPizzaParlor’s contact information.

The MostDeliciousPizzaEmporium, didn’t get an order that night, even though Pete vastly preferred their pizza, and desperately wanted to order from them. MostDeliciousPizzaEmporium committed one of the cardinal sins of marketing: they didn’t bother with branding. The proprietors figured that their superior product would speak for itself, and decided not to waste their money on pointless advertising. Little did the MostDeliciousPizzaEmporium owners realize that skipping branding is like leaving the cheese off the pizza!

Don’t make the same mistake. Here are a few ideas you can use to make sure your marketing plan doesn’t follow in MostDeliciousPizzaEmporium’s footsteps and to remind your customers of your business long after they leave your store or web site:

* Create and maintain consistent corperate branding. A logo, font and a color scheme are the three crucial elements of an online image. Once created, use the same color scheme, logo, and font everywhere else on your brochures, business cards, newsletters, and signatures. Menus, magnets, employee t-shirts, name tags should all be consistent with your brand.

* Don’t dilute your brand. Having a web site and business cards with an inconsistent look and feel will confuse your customers.

* Reinforce the corporate branding in all communications. Every mode of communication should provide information about your business. This includes letters, invoices, e-mail, and so on. At the very least, include the business name, web site address and e-mail address.

* Use a signature with every e-mail. How many emails do you send in a single day? Wesend around 75 on a typical business day. This translates into 75 opportunities to remind customers about our brand every single day. Keep the signature short: your business tagline and URL or a link to your latest blog entry will do. The point is to do this consistently, early, and often.

Make sure that your business is the first thing that pops into your customers’ minds when they need products or services you provide. Make your brand memorable, and take advantage of every change to reinforce it. Not every customer is going to be like Pete, who drove out to the MostDeliciousPizzaEmporium the next day, and wrote down their name and phone number. Incidentally, that day he came home with 6 pizzas.

Biana Babinsky is the online business consultant, expert and author who teaches business owners how to make more money online. Learn step by step techniques to drive more traffic to your web site and make more money online in Biana’s Complete Step by Step Online Marketing Course at http://avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zcourse

I come across a fair number of clients who apologize for their companies… “We’re sorry that manufacturing label paste is not the most interesting thing in the world.” Or, “There’s nothing we can do to stand out… we’re in the business of finding cheaper ways to for demolition customers to dump trash. We don’t dump the trash. We just research the cheapest way for them to dump their own trash. It’s really dry stuff.”

Yes, neither of these companies is selling gourmet food, creating colorful board games, or packaging imported tea. Photographers often hear, “I’m not remotely photogenic,” to which they usually respond, “It’s my job to take a good pictureyou just be you.” Design is the same. You do your job well and you know your market. It is a designer’s job to make you look interesting.

The potential for creativity is everywhere. Just because you’re in a boring industry doesn’t mean you can’t be creative and use design to make your organization more effective and successful. Industries that support creative design include food, lifestyle, and entertainment. Industries that don’t generally support creative design (the boring ones) include construction, accounting and law. If you are in a boring industry, you’re actually in a better position to benefit from having a creative brand, or even just a slightly controversial brochure or ad. That’s because your industry simply hasn’t caught up with the rest of the world in terms of creative marketing. For example, great packaging abounds in the supermarket. It’s harder to get a new cereal box on the supermarket shelf than it is to become a brain surgeon. The saturation of product packaging at a grocery store leaves little room for any new idea to stand out. On the other hand, a gravel yard or an accounting office is expected to be boring. What would happen with if the gravel company got a little creative in the form of humor or style in their sales materials? What if the accounting office created materials that were stylish and made tax season a little friendlier? As long as a company doesn’t go too overboard and sacrifice trust, creative marketing can only help.

How about the company that researches the costs of waste disposal? They need to look at what they do from a different angle. Bottom line is they save their demolition customers money by informing them it will cost less to haul garbage 100 miles to a landfill in Walla Walla than dumping it in the city transfer station which charges much higher fees. They prevent their customers from throwing away money. And there it is play with the idea of throwing away money, dumping money, and the creative ideas start to pour in. They can tell their customers to stop dumping money in a clever, well-designed package.

I once re-branded a construction supply company. Construction supply is not a very progressive, creative industry, but the new owner of the company is an innately savvy marketer. His store is only a few blocks from Safeco Field and Seahawks Stadium. He rents his parking lot during games. Knowing his market is full of sports fans, we developed a promotion rewarding his customers with free game tickets and parking when they give his company a certain level of business. The summer promotions have the feel of baseball gamea little retro with clean, bright colors. He stands out in his industry; very few companies like his take advantage of the fact that no one expects clever, well-designed promotions from a construction supply company, let alone free game tickets and parking.

There was once a time when a pen was a Bic, a stapler was painted steel, a computer was a big metal box, ketchup lived in a glass bottle and a paperclip was a paperclip. With the help of design (and, of course, technology) these products are no longer confined to their prescribed forms. Pens come in all sorts of ergonomic shapes, colors, and materials; staplers come in animal molds sized for a child’s pocket; computers now cheerfully match the décor in which they live; ketchup squirts from squeeze bottles and even comes in blue; and paperclips have more variations than there are pages in the Library of Congress. Those items have evolved. However, some items still haven’t: most offices I visit still have the same heavy, scratched metal file cabinets found in a guidance counselor’s office in 1975, suspended ceilings are still tiled with the same textured tiles hung high above in circa 1955 high school auditoriums, and our society has accepted the fact that paint comes out of a can that will invariably crust over and dry out whatever leftover paint we hope to save for touchups. (One manufacturer has introduced a plastic pouring bottle with a screw-top lid and another company makes little sponge-top bottles to store paint for touchups, but stores still stock their shelves with cans).

Design has touched many thousands of the products we use every day. It has transformed the food industry and the entertainment industry. Design created an industry now known as “lifestyle.” But like the file cabinet, suspended ceiling tiles and paint can, many organizations still believe that design lives in the realm of toy stores and supermarket aisles. If you work for one of them, it’s your turn to let creative marketing make you a more effective, efficient, and successful organization. Who knows? I just may make you the leader in transforming your entire industry.

Audrey Nezer is an award-winning graphic designer in Seattle, Washington. Her company, Artifex Design, creates playful, edgy and effective marketing and communication materials for companies and organizations throughout the United States. Visit http://www.artifex.net to learn more (and win a prize!)

Your consumers are bombarded
everyday with thousands of brand images and sales pitches. “In order to survive
the onslaught of choices, consumers make snap judgments.”

I read this in a book that was recommended to me entitled All Marketers Are
Liars. What’s fascinating about most of us is that we consistently make judgments
on very little information. In effect, consumers absorb little bits of information
(like seeing your logo or business card) and then make judgments and predictions
about your business based on the little input they’ve been exposed
to.

Don’t believe me?

Well, have you ever made up your mind about a political candidate without ever
meeting her/him? How about picking a movie based on the ads in the paper? If you
shop online, do you make a decision on how reputable the company is based on their
Web site? Yep, we all make snap decisions. This is the reason
that speed dating has been so popular and effective for peoplewe all make
snap judgments based on a first impression.

The truth is, that often, based on a first impression, we consumers make up our
minds instantlyand according to All Marketers Are Liars, consumers
stick to those decisions like a barnacle on a sailboat. Once the snap
decision has been made, consumers seek out information that supports their snap
judgments and ignore information that doesn’t. For consumers, this approach saves
an immense amount of time and keeps them from going nuts; for savvy business owners,
this screams, “My first impression better be a good one.”

So what does all this mean to you?

This is why having a professional, marketing-focused and consistent business
identity is so important. The truth is, your customers make snap judgments,
and once those decisions are made, they are tough to change. So you want to make
certain that the first impression your customers might receive from you (business
card, logo, phone call from you, Web site, brochure, signage, etc) is the impression
that you want to send to them.

Would you like to check out more of All Marketers Are Liars? It is written
by Seth Godin and is available to purchase on Amazon.com. If you are a business
owner looking for an edge, pick up Seth’s book. If you know another business owner
who might benefit from reading this article, forward their name and email address
to me at comments@candographics.com

Jeremy Tuber runs the only business savvy graphic design firm who helps companies build more confidence and credibility into their business identities. He is an atypical designer with a passion for marketing as well as design. Jeremy infuses solid marketing expertise into design projects that he guarantees to bring satisfaction and results. Clients often remark that he brings a terrific enthusiasm and a “can do” attitude to each project. In 1st quarter 2006, he will introduce his first book aimed at helping aspiring artists run a more profitable, enjoyable design business called, “Being a Starving Artist Sucks”.

Learn more about Jeremy and how you can gain a competitive advantage with a better brand by visiting http://www.candographics.com

I was chatting with a couple of friends, all of us are either copy writers or graphic designers…or both….in the advertising industry, so, naturally, our conversations leaned towards the topic. This one particular friend who works in an American advertising firm is now an Art Director, so, needless to say, he considers himself a notch higher than us mere freelancers and employees. After all, he is the one person who decides on the direction of a whole advertising campaign. He is also in-charge of a couple of large International brands of products. And during this conversation, he told me about this story that inspired me. He says that branding is so important to a product that it can either make or break a product…or even the company.

For instance, he was trying to come up with something unique for a particular brand of body wash (he thought the smell was awful because it smelt like mud…wet and totally disgusting). Guess what he did? He went the NATURAL WAY……

Obviously, it worked wonders for the product! He came up with headlines like

“So natural, you’d roll around in it”

“Just like a second skin”

“Aroma-therapeutic”

“Go back to nature”

…and the likes.

I was impressed. So happens that he brings back a lot of samples of products each time he comes back to Malaysia and this time he had the said product handy to show us - to although I didn’t think it was disgusting (he has a way with words, shall I say?”), it wasn’t your conventional bath wash. It sure didn’t smell like anything else I can get here in supermarkets.

Joe, my friend from America, said that he steered the product in the realm of conservation of the environment, going natural, using natural products, natural cleansing properties….etc and it worked wonderfully. When combined with a superb design and ad, the product sold like nothing else he had known! This was the product he thought smelt like mud, remember? And with good direction, copy and design, the product is as good as sold.

The theory is that, people’s mind accepts what they want to accept. Let me give you some examples of beautiful copy work for International brands.

“milk bath” - Johnson and Johnson. Sounds simple enough? But accordingly, many people bought the products, not because it was superb or any better than all the other Johnson and Johnson products or bath gels, it was because the ‘milk bath’ copy suggested that whenever you use the product, you’d be bathing in milk, pampering yourself, making your skin whiter and smoother. Asians will buy anything that you say can turn their skin white.

“Not perfumed, Not coloured. Just kind” - Simple.

This is a very unique stance taken by a skincare company because Simple is the first brand that suggested that you don’t need anything extra have superb skin. Simple is….well, simple, but it gives you good skin because it doesn’t make your skin look worse.

“Against animal testing” - The Body Shop.

The products being sold by The Body Shop, without a doubt, is produced without being tested on animals. This, they claim, is because the properties used to produce their products is very natural. I think placing the words “AGAINST ANIMAL TESTING” in bolded letters in all of their labels is a good idea. Anyone who loves natural products and are animal lovers will definitely stay true to The Body Shop.

“The beer only a true man knows how to appreciate”

This is a tagline being used by a well-known beer company. I am not certain of the exact words being used, therefore, I decline to name the brand and beer type. Anyway, this tagline suggests that if you’re a man at all, you’ll like this beer…..and if you don’t, you’re not a TRUE man. I am a woman and I like the beer because of its richness in taste but I absolutely object to their tagline. I suppose they have their reasons. Their target market were mostly men and if they were women who drink, they will let the tagline slide because they like the beer so much.

So, you see, the kind of branding, the kind of tagline and headlines that you use determines the direction of your product. If you use a tagline like ‘lustrous long hair”….don’t expect a lot of male customers who takes you up on your offer. So, decide on a tagline once and for all for each and every one of your products, take them very seriously and if you can’t think of anything, hire someone to do the thinking for you. Branding and copy writing is SO IMPORTANT that you’d rather pay for it than be stuck with one that gives out mixed messages.

Marsha Maung is a freelance graphic designer and writer who has been working from her home in Selangor, Malaysia the past 6 years. She is also the author of “Raising Little Magicians”, “No products to sell” and the popular “The Lance in Freelancing” and other books. For more information, please visit http://www.marshamaung.com and for more info on her books, please visit http://www.lulu.com/marshamaung