When you pass your business card to a potential customer, are you making the best impression for your company? When people drive by your business are they making accurate judgments about your business? Think of your logo as a silent salesperson—a marketing tool that conveys more than just the company name. Every potential client, every existing customer, all associates and employees, even your competition will see it and develop a perceived understanding of your business. An effective logo supports your brand image, acts as a visual link to your business and establishes expectations in the mind of your audience.

Creating a logo and identity design is a collaborative effort between you and your designer. We need your input, ideas and feedback; you need us to translate that to graphic elements that connect with the image you want to project. The first step to getting the partnership going is for you to share as much about your business and the audience that your logo will reach.

We meet with our clients to discuss their business and to begin defining what they are looking for in a logo. Your designer should want you to describe in some detail your clients and how you interact with them. A great logo for a company that describes itself as a friendly, fun, and value oriented would not work at all for an edgy, contemporary business servicing luxury clients. Color choices, font and graphic elements are all selected to make a specific impression about your company.

If you are developing a new identity for an existing business, give your design team copies of current marketing and collateral pieces, like brochures and print advertising, to give a sense of the various uses or applications for a logo. For all businesses, new and existing, be prepared to discuss all the potential uses for your logo. What looks strong on a business card may be too weak for an oversized outdoor sign so think about future needs, not just what you need today.

From there your design team begins creating your logo, developing several concepts to review with you. Most clients expect to see the perfect logo on the first review, but that very seldom happens—don’t get frustrated. Your design team will ask for specific feedback and will revise and enhance their work, offering advice and guiding you through the process. Together you’ll create a perfect logo that really works for your company and the beginning of your brand and identity package.

Claudia Trusty develops strong marketing and branding messages that drive results for small and mid-size companies. For twenty years Trusty and Company has produced communication solutions for clients in retail and service industries. Visit them on the web at http://trustyandcompany.com/

If you could cram all of your dirty laundry in the washer at once, wouldn’t it make more sense than putting in the recommended load?

After all, if it saves time and money, why not?

It’s simple: not only might you blow up the washer, but you become painfully aware that most of the "clean" laundry is still dirty.

It sounds bizarre, but you can compare the amount of space in a washer to how much space you have on your business card or advertisement in the yellow pages. When you try to get too much in, you end up not getting the result you want.

Just like the washing machine, your web site, business card, brochures, advertising, and other collateral materials need space. In graphic arts, this space is called negative or white space, which describes open space between design elements. Forcing too much text or too many graphics into a limited space won’t blow up your brochure or web site, but chaotic design will turn off potential customers and compel them to seek out your competitors.

It’s difficult for me to convince clients that "less is more" when they are paying per inch or per page. But I remind them of their goals though, and that usually revolves around generating interest, persuading to buy, or to informing. The goal isn’t to cram all the information and graphics into a confined space, which only confuses customers.

After all, what good is all that information if no one reads it? It’s just as good as a pile of dirty laundry.

If you’ve tried this cramming approach to your marketing, don’t feel bad, it’s an easy trap to fall into. You need help identifying the graphics and content that are essential to getting your message out to your customers and which ones you should leave out. Blank or negative space is essential on your business card, your web site or your advertisements.

Here’s a quick list of what blank, white or negative space can do for you:
* Entice your potential customers to focus on what you have to say or sell
* Add or decrease the emphasis on text and graphics by the amount of space surrounding it
* Control the flow of the design from one element to another, guiding the customer’s attention from the most important paragraph or graphic to the least
* Break information down into easy-to-digest components to prevent overwhelming your customers
* Provide essential "breathing" room for the customer’s eyes and brain to focus on what you intended

As a business savvy designer, I sit down with clients for as long as it takes and brainstorm on what we must include in the message and what’s okay to leave out. If this isn’t your specialty, or if you find yourself trying to cram everything in, do yourself a favor and hire a business savvy designer to help you determine what to make the most of the space you have, including make use of negative space. Does that make sense to you?

Jeremy runs the only business savvy graphic design firm who helps companies build more confidence and credibility into their business identities. “I help you take your business’ vision and shape it into a company identity that will make you look better, feel better and have more confidence about your business.”

Like the article?

Email Jeremy today at comments@candographics.com for your choice of a free insider’s bulletin: “How to Choose the Right Marketing/Design Firm for You” or “Top Ten Questions Designers Don’t Want You to Ask Them”. You’ll also want to check out the “Can-Do Confidence Builder”. Emailed weekly, the Confidence Builder provides you with essential marketing and design insights that help you get the most out of your marketing/design investments and help you to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Remember to include in your email your name, which Insider Bulletin you would like to receive and any additional feedback. Learn more about Jeremy and how you can gain a competitive advantage with a better brand by visiting http://www.candographics.com

Technology companies often want to emulate Intel’s success in moving from a hidden ingredient inside personal computers to a brand that consumers recognize, value, prefer and pay a premium for. For most, however, that journey represents a task much easier said than done.

On the surface, the Intel Inside campaign looks like a simple stroke of genius. Shell out a few million bucks for some well-placed television commercials, and in no time consumers will be insisting that your customers put your name on the outside of their product, right? If only it were that easy. What most people fail to realize is that the remarkable success of the Intel Inside campaign — or any campaign that seeks to turn a commodity into a recognizable consumer brand — rests on two very important principles.

First, it requires the financial resources to support a lengthy consumer-oriented campaign. You don’t create a brand name overnight. Second, and more important, it requires a dimension of value that end-user consumers actually perceive as important. Without both of these elements, branding campaigns won’t have enough muscle to convince consumers to demand your product above all others.

Let’s address the money issue first. At last count, Intel spends about a $1 billion a year in cooperative advertising with their major customers, such as Dell and HP. Add to that the $1 billion Intel’s customers spend and the total financial outlay to support the Intel Inside brand comes close to $2 billion a year. Or, as we say in the business, serious money.

In general, Intel matches every dollar its customers spend on advertising that mentions the Intel Inside brand. For example, those hundreds of millions of advertising circulars that Dell sends out each year? Intel absorbs about half their cost. In fact, every time you see the Intel Inside logo or hear the Intel Inside sonic brand, you know that Intel paid for about half of the marketing costs. This enormous financial commitment is one reason why the Intel brand stands out from the crowd and why technologists easily point to it as one of their favorite brands.

On the end-user benefit side, the key word here is “perception.” In this case, Intel has successfully convinced enough consumers that a computer with the Intel chip inside is the fastest available and therefore can handle any application they can throw at it. As a result, consumers perceive real value in the Intel brand, which is why the vast majority of PCs rolling of the assembly lines carry that well-known sticker on the outside: Intel Inside.

Likewise, any commodity product or ingredient technology that hopes to develop a powerful consumer brand must similarly convince the buying public that their product is so superior that consumers won’t accept anything less. And that’s exactly what a little-known company called SanDisk is trying to accomplish.

Will SanDisk Be the Next Intel?

A leading provider of flash memory — the tiny wafers that store digital music, photos and videos — SanDisk is one of the primary beneficiaries of the soaring demand for cell phones, digital music players, digital cameras and game consoles. Over the past three years, revenues for the Sunnyvale (CA)-based firm have surged an average of 70 percent a year. This year, they’re tracking an increase of 19 percent, for a total of $2.1 billion in sales. Not surprisingly, SanDisk’s stock has shot up 40 percent over the past 12 months.

Despite these glowing numbers, SanDisk faces a huge challenge. For the most part, memory is a commodity business, and prices can be harshly cyclical. Pricing wars frequently erupt overnight, and prices can take a nosedive almost as fast. During the summer of 2004, for example, flash memory prices plunged precipitously, causing SanDisk’s stock to drop 40 percent in four days.

To avoid ongoing pricing hiccups, SanDisk is striving to develop a strong brand that consumers will recognize and value. At the most basic level, this means convincing consumers to ask for a “SanDisk one-gigabyte card” for their digital camera rather than just any one-gigabyte card. Just as Intel has convinced personal computer buyers to insist on Intel as the “chip of choice.”

From where I sit, it seems like SanDisk has the first part of the consumer technology branding formula right. They’re spending millions on a worldwide advertising campaign that targets retail stores, magazines and even prime-time TV shows like The Simpsons and Survivor. In terms of sheer dollars, SanDisk isn’t shelling out as much hard cash as Intel, but it probably doesn’t have to. If fact, most companies don’t need to spend nearly that much. They just have to commit enough financial resources to garner the attention of consumers.

SanDisk also seems to have the second part of the formula well underway by working hard to distinguish itself through technology that delivers real consumer benefits. Last year alone, SanDisk increased R&D spending by a hefty 48 percent to $125 million. The result has been a string of innovations — waterproof memory cards, titanium cards, and secure memory cards with embedded fingerprint readers — that have captured the attention of consumers because they offer compelling value.

SanDisk is also working with wireless carriers to help protect consumers from fraud and identity theft. When faced with a lost or stolen cell phone, consumers can contact the carrier to remotely disable the card and keep sensitive personal data safe. SanDisk has even successfully offered new products in the gadget business. Last August, for example, the company introduced an MP3 player that quickly raced to first place in the category, only to be knocked off by Apple when it introduced the iPod Shuffle.

Does SanDisk have what it takes to make the leap from anonymous commodity provider to a recognized consumer brand like Intel? Only time will tell. In the meantime, I plan to follow them closely to see how their branding campaign continues to unfold and, more important, how the market responds. As someone who lives and breathes technology branding, I believe we can all learn a great deal from SanDisk’s ongoing branding efforts.

Get your free whitepaper: The 10 Biggest Technology Marketing Mistakes… and How to Avoid Them

Rod Whitson serves Townsend as President and Chief Brand Strategist. Townsend is expert at helping organizations with innovative products and services develop differentiated, compelling value propositions. Townsend is the largest integrated marketing agency in Southern California. Rod has personally led recent branding engagements with Intel, BAE Systems, Merck, DowPharma, Marsh & McLennan, and the University of California system. He has also worked with a host of successful and not so successful early stage technology and life sciences companies. Since Townsend’s founding in 1993, it has helped clients create market valuation in excess of $80 billion.

Visit Rod’s blog, Branding the Complex

© 2006 Rod Whitson - All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Copy makeovers can work magic.

Perhaps all you need is a little medicine… and not major surgery. Take whatever sales copy you have now and modify it. Recast, rework and repackage what you’ve got.

Chances are you’re sitting on some solid (yet hidden) sales material. Often simple copy makeovers can work wonders in terms of response. So, before you crumple it up and toss your sales letter in the trash, try tweaking it first. You might be surprised at the result.

Here are 3 simple steps to complete copy makeovers…

Copy Makeovers — Strategy #1: Create A More Compelling Headline.

This is critical. The headline is the first thing your audience sees. It either "grabs" prospects by the jugular… or it doesn’t. If the headline fails, nothing else matters much because it won’t even get a fair reading.

Make your headline and/or sub-heading alluring. Talk to your prospect about what is most important to her. Think in terms of the BIG BENEFIT your product offers and deliver it in a captivating and compelling way.

Craft a handful of words that attract attention, identify specific target markets, and deliver enough interest and intrigue to pull true prospects inside. If you’re struggling with your headline, just think about the greatest advantage your product offers and promise it right up front.

Copy Makeovers — Strategy #2: Take The "YOU" Point Of View.

You’re weight-loss story might be admirable, but what does it mean to your reader or prospect? Talk about yourself and the audience turns off. Talk to your reader one-on-one about something important in her life… and you’ve got her undivided attention – at least momentarily.

If you could re-shape your story… if you could express it in a way that was more meaningful to your individual readers, you’d quickly capture their interest.

There’s a difference between telling your audience that you lost X number of pounds… and telling them how they can lose X pounds, enjoy the process, and feel terrific about their slim, new look.

Remember the old marketing phrase "What’s In It For Me?" Everything your prospect reads gets filtered through this frame of reference. With each statement you make, your audience is thinking… "So What? What does this have to do with me in my situation? How does this help me?"

If the answer isn’t obvious immediately, off they go and you lose the sale. Many times the decision to stay or go is made in the blink of an eye – and often unconsciously.

Copy Makeovers — Strategy #3: Turn Your Bullet Points Into Irresistible, Benefit-Packed Mini-Headlines.

Make each bullet a "grabber" in its own right. Prospects tend to scan certain segments of an ad or sales letter, to determine if it offers something they really want.

While many marketers use bullets in their sales letters, most settle for weak bullet point copy — copy that lacks enthusiasm and passion.

If you’re going to employ this powerful sales tool, you might as well make the most of it. Craft your bullet points with the same emotion and magnetic appeal, as you’d inject into a major headline. After a while, this gets easier to do.

Bullet points are one of those sales letter components that have the power to quickly stimulate intense reader interest. Use them for all they’re worth by making each point justify itself. Each and every bullet point should be capable of compelling the reader to read on — with heightened desire and interest.

Before you do anything else, try implementing these simple copy makeover strategies. You just might notice an immediate improvement in your conversion rate. Read more at www.makeyoursalessoar.com

Robert Boduch is an author of dozens of best-selling books, reports and articles on the art and science of selling. A free newsletter targeted at anyone interested in selling more of anything is available at http://www.makeyoursalessoar.com

Most people would have a hard time selecting the best small software company in America. But if we asked Global Shop Solutions customers to vote, they would have no trouble identifying their top pick.

I recently had the great fortune of working with Global Shop Solutions in Houston. Their business works well on a lot of levels, but the most remarkable thing about the company is the tremendous value it creates for its customers.

Global Shop provides comprehensive EPR systems to small- and medium-sized manufacturers. It helps those manufacturers automate their entire business from the initial quoting of a project to cash collections and everything in between. The primary benefits to customers are increased productivity and profitability, along with improved customer deliveries. But most customers would say that Global Shop has taken their business from chaos to order and given them tight controls.

Global Shop has emerged as the market leader in its category by focusing with laser-like precision on delivering the basic value proposition of “best total solution.” In fact, it is executing the business strategy of customer intimacy as well as any company I have worked with. As a result, Global Shop now has more than 1,000 installed customers and has grown at a sustained annual rate in excess of 25% for the past several years.

Differentiation Through Training

When prospective customers build a short list of possible vendors in the ERP software space, they quickly see that Global Shop offers the best total solution. This makes a huge difference because the ERP space is littered with failed attempts and implementation failures. Automating every aspect of a manufacturing business is a daunting task, yet Global Shop enables companies to achieve success where most have failed in the past.

How does Global Shop offer a better solution?

For starters, the company’s training resources go far beyond the industry standard, and their customers know it. Not only does Global Shop excel at every point of touch, they also offer a variety of training options that allow customers to quickly build and maintain their software skills in a manner that fits each company’s unique needs.

Each week, the company holds training classes in Houston, where implementation teams immerse themselves in the requirements for successful implementation. Customers can send as many people as they want, as many times as they want — for free. Everything is included in the upfront cost of the software and the minimal annual licensing fee. The company also offers the best Web-based training in its category.

But what really differentiates Global Shop’s training is that many of their onsite training consultants are former customers who not only have a deep understanding of the software, they also intimately understand the inner workings of small manufacturers. They know the best practices of Global Shop’s diverse customer base, and can often make dozens of high impact, high leverage recommendations that lead to immediate improvements in the customer’s business.

Global Shop also has a unique way of keeping its software up-to-date. Every time the firm does a customization for a customer, that same customization is available to the entire customer base at the next upgrade — again at no extra cost. As a result, Global Shop customers know that every upgrade will contain the improvements they need to keep their ERP system at the cutting edge for the next 10 to 15 years.

Compelling Brand Personality

From a branding perspective, what impresses me most about Global Shop is its execution and presentation of its brand personality. A brand personality is the human characteristics we associate with a brand. It’s where we make the all-important emotional connection. It’s often the personality we identify with or the personality we aspire to. Global Shop’s execution of its brand personality would make most consumer brands envious, and it is proves critical in closing the sale.

Most of Global Shop’s customers think and act like small, owner-operated businesses, even those that have several hundred employees and an international customer base. Many are family owned businesses. These businesses typically operate under intense competition, with most feeling the pressure from offshore competitors. And despite their small size, these companies are complex operations that require heavy capital investment and expensive engineering talent and skilled labor on the shop floor.

I would characterize Global Shop’s brand personality as “sincere” because it presents itself as a financially strong, family owned business. Global Shop emphasizes the fact that it has been in business for three decades, and makes it very clear that it has no interest in selling out to a larger software company, as so many of its competitors have. Global Shop also makes customers aware that second-generation family members are being groomed to take over the company, and that all of the software code is developed inside the U.S. rather than offshore.

Global Shop has created a compelling brand personality that exerts a magnetic pull on potential and existing customers. Prospects and customers immediately conclude that Global Shop is “like me,” which leads to instant chemistry and a feeling of trust. One definition of trust is “the feeling of you being on my side.” Global Shop conveys this feeling from the moment you first meet them.

All of which adds up to a powerful software company with a powerful brand. I think their customers would certainly agree — Global Shop is the best small software company in the U.S.

Get your free whitepaper: The 10 Biggest Technology Marketing Mistakes… and How to Avoid Them

Rod Whitson serves Townsend as President and Chief Brand Strategist. Townsend is expert at helping organizations with innovative products and services develop differentiated, compelling value propositions. Townsend is the largest integrated marketing agency in Southern California. Rod has personally led recent branding engagements with Intel, BAE Systems, Merck, DowPharma, Marsh & McLennan, and the University of California system. He has also worked with a host of successful and not so successful early stage technology and life sciences companies. Since Townsend’s founding in 1993, it has helped clients create market valuation in excess of $80 billion.

Visit Rod’s blog, Branding the Complex

© 2006 Rod Whitson - All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Are you looking to have professional color printing? The number of products that you can purchase from color printing professionals will amaze you. In fact, with all of the products available, you will find that an array of unique services is on offer that can assist you in a variety of endeavors.

Maybe you are looking to have professionally printed brochures for your business. Why struggle with your home printer and panic while you search for just the right kind of paper for your brochures in your local office supply store? Instead, you can specify the type and size of brochure you desire and have your business brochures professionally printed and delivered right to your door. Of course, you will be required to specify the number of brochures you need and will be sent a proof of your brochure once it has been printed.

Perhaps you are in need of business cards. Again, professional printing could be just the thing you need. All you need to do is advise the printer what you want on your business cards, what design you like and within a few days you can be receiving your professionally printed business cards in your mailbox. With business cards, you will have the opportunity to select different styles and layouts from a number of templates offered by the printing professional. Finally, the printing professional may require that you purchase a minimum number of cards before they agree to produce them: typically the printer sets a limit of a minimum of 500 cards, but some printers will print as few as 250 cards at a time.

If your business is in need of catalogues, again a professional printing company can help you. You can give the printer all of the specifications for the catalogue with the layout and easily have them printed in no time whatsoever. You will be required to select the weight of paper you desire, to specify if you want black ink or colored ink, whether or not you want a glossy or matte finish, and what shipping method you prefer. Bear in mind however, that some printing professionals have a page limit on their orders. In other words, they will not accept orders under a certain number of pages. Once your catalogue has been created, they will send you a proof to look at before the actual work commences.

Other products that you can purchase from a professional printing company include customized stationary, postcards, greeting cards, booklets, posters, artwork, calendars, envelopes, presentation folders, statement stuffers, advertisements, flyers, CD covers, newsletters, bookmarks, note cards, door hangers, rack cards, wedding invitations and more. Thus, printing professionals offer a variety of services for a number of occasions. Whatever you need, check with your local printing professional to see what kind of services they offer - you may be surprised to find that they can handle your job quickly and with ease.

——————————————————-
Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to Printing
——————————————————-

What’s the best branding strategy for your company?

The answer is, it depends.

The latest thinking in the field of branding (which first began to emerge as a true field of study back in the early ‘50s) identifies five branding strategies that reign supreme in today’s corporate world. Although each strategy can be successfully employed by companies offering very different products and services, they all seem to work best within fairly narrow parameters that pertain to the industry, product or service and market being served.

Choosing the best strategy for your company, then, depends on matching the parameters of your product/service and market to the appropriate model.

Keeping in mind that entire books have been written on the individual branding strategies, here’s a quick snapshot of each one:

1. Mind-Share Branding. Success in this category requires owning and consistently expressing a set of abstract associations that customers relate to the product or service. However, the perceived benefits of buying and using the products (i.e., consistently low price, great selection) are very real to the customers. As the company consistently expresses the “brand DNA” through each and every transaction, it becomes firmly entrenched in the customer’s mind as the only choice in this product category.

Interestingly, mind-share branding works equally well at opposite ends of the product spectrum. Functional and low-involvement product categories (such as Tide, Southwest Airlines and Wal*Mart) and complicated, high-involvement product categories (such as Dell computers) can both prosper under a mind-share brand strategy. At each end, however, the goal — and primary benefit — is to simplify the buying decision for the customer.

Good reads: Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Differentiate or Die and The Disciple of Market Leaders

2. Cultural Branding. Cultural branding is probably the most American of all branding strategies in that it uses cultural icons and “brand religion” to establish and sustain a brand myth with which individual consumers can passionately identify. The focus is not so much on the product or service as it is on the relationship between the cultural icon and the product and the brand myth that the consumer buys into. The most successful brand myths address acute contradictions in society that touch people at a very deep level.

Culturally branded companies run the gamut from home décor, fashion and automobiles to food/beverages, entertainment/leisure and social movements. What kind of person responds to cultural branding? It’s the meek, mild-mannered accountant who buys the Harley Davidson hog in order to unleash his “inner self” on weekends. It’s the budding playground hoopster who just knows that he will never reach the NBA unless he wears Nike Air Jordans. It’s the thirsty consumer reaching for an ice-cold Coca Cola because “it’s the real thing.”

Good reads: How Brands Become Icons and The Culting of Brands

3. Emotional Branding. Want your customers to consider you a friend rather than just some faceless entity they buy from? Then aim for the emotional branding strategy. Here, the goal is to build deep interpersonal connections with each individual who interacts with the brand, so that you end up with a relationship partner rather than a customer.

Emotional brands have real personality. They are often expressed through a character or persona (Mickey Mouse, Ronald McDonald) that appeals to people of all ages. Emotional brands work best with services, retailers and specialty goods — such as Disney and Starbucks — where the company can tap into powerful emotions and create compelling experiences that evoke strong loyalty to the brand.

Good reads: Emotional Branding and The Experience Economy

4. Viral Branding. Thanks to plenty of media buzz, viral branding has rocketed to the top of the charts as the latest brand strategy of choice. However, the fact that the media has embraced it does not mean that all companies should. As the name implies, viral branding works by spreading the word through “brand viruses” such as influential spokespeople, early adopter customers and other forms of grass-roots marketing. Accordingly, it achieves the best results with new fashions, new technologies and premium and super-premium brands that eschew mainstream markets.

Viral branding appeals to people who see themselves as cool, hip and fashionable. It attracts those who get a charge from “discovering” a new brand and leading the vanguard of early brand advocates. Who stands out in the viral branding category? Google, Hotmail, Absolut Vodka and Vonage are names that immediately come to mind.

Good reads: Tipping Point, Spreading the Idea Virus, The Anatomy of Buzz and The Influentials

5. Sensory Branding. Singapore Airlines and Kellogg’s Cornflakes in the same branding category? Hard to believe, but true. Sensory branding takes the focus off the product or service itself and puts it squarely on the sensory experience it creates for the consumer. Hence, this category includes a broad and a diverse range of products and services, from fashion, cosmetics and high-end retail to automotive and travel/hospitality.

Sensory branding goes beyond the ordinary to create a full connection with one’s environment through the senses. We’re talking full-on sensory engagement here! Not just with the over-stimulated senses of sight and sound, but also connecting with touch, taste and smell. In some categories, the buying experience (how, when and where the product is purchased) helps to create the brand. Here the brand doesn’t really begin until customers actually use the product or service. The end result is an experience so full, rich and satisfying that customers refuse to consider any other brand.

Good read: Brand Sense

Choosing Your Branding Strategy

As an avid student and practitioner of branding, my experience is that all strong brands can usually be linked to a clear focus on one of these models. However, while it’s usually best to focus your branding efforts on one model, aspects of the other models can be used to strengthen a brand.

For example, the mind-share model of branding tends to rely on the sight and sound senses. But it’s fairly easy to add a distinctive touch or smell from the sensory model to strengthen the brand.

Regardless of which strategy you choose, building a strong brand depends upon applying the appropriate model to your product category, the unique circumstances of your customers and your market. I hope I’ve given you at least a good start in identifying which model is right for you.

Get your free whitepaper: The 10 Biggest Technology Marketing Mistakes… and How to Avoid Them

Rod Whitson serves Townsend as President and Chief Brand Strategist. Townsend is expert at helping organizations with innovative products and services develop differentiated, compelling value propositions. Townsend is the largest integrated marketing agency in Southern California. Rod has personally led recent branding engagements with Intel, BAE Systems, Merck, DowPharma, Marsh & McLennan, and the University of California system. He has also worked with a host of successful and not so successful early stage technology and life sciences companies. Since Townsend’s founding in 1993, it has helped clients create market valuation in excess of $80 billion.

Visit Rod’s blog, Branding the Complex

© 2006 Rod Whitson - All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Cats have very different taste buds than humans. Unfortunately for pet owners (consumers), we’re the ones that end up buying the cat food.

Pet food companies have figured this out. That’s why you see pet foods in flavors that humans like. If Purina made cat food in flavors that cats would really want, humans would never buy them.

Ask a hungry cat what he’d really like to eat right now. What do you think he’d say?

Mouse Guts.

So why does Purina Cat Chow only come in flavors like Seafood Blend and Savory Chicken? Because we pet owners are the ones making the buying decisions for our cats… and we’d rather have them eat something that doesn’t turn our stomachs.

If cats could understand and act on advertising, here’s what you’d hear on the radio:

“Hey, cats… it’s a crisp, steamy fall morning, and you’re fresh from the morning kill. It’s what you live for… find a mouse, bat it around, and then proudly bring it home for breakfast. That’s why we created Purina Cat Chow with Mouse Guts… so you can re-live that moment and enjoy the taste you crave each and every time your owner remembers to fill your bowl. Purina Cat Chow with Mouse Guts. It’s what you want. Right now.”

To some of you, this is pretty funny stuff. To others, it makes you a little queasy. That’s good. Advertising is supposed to move you in some way.

What does your advertising make your customers do?

Some of you are writing advertising that only pleases you. You may think it’s really important that people know you’ve been in business since 1971. (Mouse guts.) You just remodeled your entryway. (Mouse guts.) Your delivery trucks all just got new tires. (Mouse guts.) It makes your mouth water to hear those things. For everyone else, it just doesn’t apply to their lives. It’s all Mouse Guts to them.

In fact, it’s worse than mouse guts. At least with mouse guts, people have a reaction of some kind. With advertising that only you care about, a much worse thing happens. No one else cares. And they tune you out.

The opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference.

Is your advertising suffering from indifference? If you’re not selling benefits that someone will drool over (the equivalent of a tender, juicy bar-B-Q chicken fillet sandwich), you’re wasting your ad money.

And if your ads only appeal to those people who don’t make a difference to your bottom line (i.e., cats), maybe it’s time you re-adjusted your advertising focus.

Here are the two questions you must answer: What do your potential customers crave? And how is that craving satisfied by you?

Let me repeat that, because it’s that important.

What do your potential customers crave?

And how is that craving satisfied by you?

Write that down somewhere. Bring it to your next team briefing or sales meeting, and ask everyone to answer these two questions, either on a sheet of paper or in a group discussion forum. Focus your energies on them, and listen to what the group is saying. You’ll find that the resulting advertising messages you create will improve measurably.

Everything else is mouse guts.

Bill Guertin, The 800-Pound Gorilla, was one of the youngest licensed Radio broadcasters in the state of Illinois at age 16. Bill’s 25+ years of real-world, on-the-street experiences in broadcast sales, service sales and marketing have given him a broad understanding of how and why people do the things they do.

He is currently the Director of Market Development for Riverside Medical Center in Kankakee, IL, and Chief Enthusiasm Officer of The 800-Pound Gorilla, a professional speaking and consulting company in sales, customer service and marketing.

Groups appreciate the fact that Bill is a “working professional”, on the streets and in the trenches every day. He understands the challenges of his audiences first-hand, and your group will immediately relate to him on the subject matter. He may be reached at (815) 935-3272, or on the Web at http://www.The800PoundGorilla.com

As professional communicators, we are taught to control the message, limit the spokespeople to those trained and credible enough to deliver our carefully crafted corporate message.

But blogs have changed this.

While not for every company, blogs are an incredibly powerful communication tool when put in the hands of the rank and file. The leveraging of blogs for the PR department and executive suite should be reconsidered and instead, the value of empowering your hundreds or thousands of brand ambassadors to speak their minds and hearts about their lives and your work should be evaluated.

But what if they share all your secrets? Tell your customers how they really aren’t respected? What about controlling the message?

Your company culture will be a big determinant here: if your culture is closed and secretive, this will never work. But if you can stand to hear the good and the bad, within reason (more on this in a moment), the blogosphere and your customers, partners, investors, will be better for it. Because blogs are all about being real, transparent, accessible. Who has more of these qualities than your front line brand ambassadors? Especially when your company or value proposition is complex, these daily touchpoints for your brand can be the clarifying experience your potential or current customers need.

Microsoft is a good example. Once a secretive company thought to be the second coming of the evil empire, it has embraced blogging by its employees, in fact, has encouraged it. With limits (again, more on this in a moment), employees blog about their work, projects, and lives. They also do a fair amount of criticizing Microsoft or addressing criticism already out there about the company. This is OK. As a tool for engaging in a dialogue, blogging should address the good with the bad or you lose that transparency and credibility. You’re quickly branded as PR party line and deemed irrelevant.

One thing you need to do before you send your employees on their way with links to blogger.com, is a little document that spells out what your company’s policy is about blogging, just to be clear, so that new product prototype doesn’t find its way onto the web before it should. Some good ones to review and possibly repurpose for your situation are Yahoo’s or Sun’s.

Get your free whitepaper: The 10 Biggest Technology Marketing Mistakes… and How to Avoid Them

Rod Whitson serves Townsend as President and Chief Brand Strategist. Townsend is expert at helping organizations with innovative products and services develop differentiated, compelling value propositions. Townsend is the largest integrated marketing agency in Southern California. Rod has personally led recent branding engagements with Intel, BAE Systems, Merck, DowPharma, Marsh & McLennan, and the University of California system. He has also worked with a host of successful and not so successful early stage technology and life sciences companies. Since Townsend’s founding in 1993, it has helped clients create market valuation in excess of $80 billion.

Visit Rod’s blog, Branding the Complex

© 2006 Rod Whitson - All Rights Reserved Worldwide

After ten minutes with Ed Tettemer in the offices of the agency he founded with partner, Steve Red, you begin to understand the agency’s passion for excellence. After an hour with Ed, you begin to understand the intensity of his personal passion. You begin to understand it but I have a feeling that, even after days and days of exposure to him, you probably wouldn’t get the whole picture.

"Passion," the word, may seem descriptive of a complicated set of feelings and opinions. Oddly, in thinking about Ed Tettemer’s passion for his agency and its clients, it seems rather simple. It’s just that he wants everything to be excellent: excellent clients, excellent co-workers, excellent marketing solutions, excellent creative executions, excellent everything.

"Where’d you go to college, Ed?" (A question most interviewers ask without expecting surprises in the response.) "Never went to college. Dropped out of high school and never looked back. Got my college degree at the Elkman agency and my graduate degree at Earle Palmer Brown."

Maybe it’s best to start at the beginning. Ed was born and raised and was "scared of the city," living in a rather parochial environment. His Father was a sheriff in Bucks County and his Mother worked as a secretary in the office of the small township where they lived. Theirs was a simple life, a good life in a small town atmosphere. He and his Dad fished a lot and they ate what they caught. The vegetables on their table came from their garden except for the mushrooms they harvested after heavy rains. It seemed to be an uncomplicated existence far from the pressures and tensions of traditional business, especially the advertising business.

Dad was pretty much occupied with his job and the politics of the community. Mom was more influential on the lives of Ed and his older brother. Neither parent made strong suggestions about what Ed and his brother did to prepare them for a career. They were good people and Mom, especially, influenced the way Ed has turned out. She was passionate about music and books. Ed is, too. She preached, "Keep your eyes and ears open." Ed tries to do that. All she wanted for her children was for them to be happy and she didn’t try to control their every move. Today, Ed appreciates that.

His childhood was a happy one. He liked to fish. He played a lot of baseball. He was a fairly typical American kid. Then, when he was in high school, there was a dramatic change. It was called the Viet Nam War. Consistent with how many people felt at the time, his older brother took off for Canada to resist the war. That had severe, negative impact on life in peaceful Bucks County. Overnight, the Tettemer family became pariahs. Friends deserted them. The community changed its view of them. Church changed. Bad stuff!

Clearly, that situation had a powerful influence on Ed’s psyche. He dropped out of high school and spent over three years hitch hiking all over the country. He found ways to make enough money to do a lot of both savory and unsavory things. He was a confused young man wandering the country during confusing times.

But he never lost touch with his Mother and Dad so, ultimately, he went home to Bucks County and found a job working as a glorified gopher for the Doylestown Intelligencer. He ran ads back and forth from the paper to its small, retail advertisers. He says, "I guess I was a junior account executive and didn’t know it." He delivered ad proofs, started helping small stores with their ad copy and quickly learned how those small retailers did their newspaper advertising.

During the year at the paper, he got to know and got to be friendly with many of his customers. He realized that most of them didn’t have a lot of confidence in the help they were getting from the paper. He believed that he could help them do better advertising, advertising that actually worked and could be tracked. He doesn’t know why he believed that but he believed it.

He remembered Pete’s Place in a rather nostalgic way. Pete’s Place was a restaurant in Ottsville just north of Doylestown. Their ad always ran on the same page with other restaurants. All of the ads were the same size, were laid out in a conventional rectangle and had many of the same messages: good food, low prices, family atmosphere, etc. Pete’s Place was pretty much the same as a lot of places in that part of the country. Except for one thing. Their logo and sign was a big wagon wheel.

After Ed convinced them to try to look different, their next ad was designed to be round. It stood out nicely on the page with all the rectangles. Someone once said that good advertising should zig when the competition’s zags. While Ed didn’t refer to that specific quote during our interview, much of what he said about Pete’s Place and about Red Tettemer’s work seems to support that "Zig if they Zag"idea. Ed reflects, "I think I made six bucks on the work I did for Pete’s."

The result? He worked with mostly small retailers for four years and developed a keen understanding of how the retailer thinks and of what it takes to motivate consumers to respond to advertising and promotion. In his own words, "I guess I didn’t really know what I was doing but I liked my clients, worked hard and made a decent living."

Marriage followed as did a move into Center City where he, wife Lyn and daughter Jessie still live. His first job in the city was with the old Elkman Agency where he claims to have started "Knowing nothing." His boss, Creative Director Jim Block, promised to make him into a copy writer and further promised that he would like doing it. Jim did what he promised and Ed did like it. He had five productive years there but was always the junior writer. He needed more.

Off to Becker/Kanter (now Panzano & Partners,) he soon learned the logic of focusing on vertical businesses. He was a senior creative director there working almost exclusively on shopping center advertising and promotion. The "vertical" idea had great influence on him in the early days of Red Tettemer when they spent most of their effort with cable TV and entertainment accounts.

He was recruited to Earle Palmer Brown where three factors influenced his thinking and his behavior. First, Brian Meridith, then the head of creative at EPB, showed him how important it was to have a good idea at the beginning of creative execution. "What’s the idea? What’s the idea?" was hammered into his consciousness. Second, he formed a new perspective about "vertical." While it’s valuable and, at times, necessary, to focus on specific industries, it’s also valuable and stimulating to have a broader base. Today’s Red Tettemer is definitely broad based and probably always will be.

The third factor was, perhaps, the most important. In early 1992, Ed just didn’t know what to do with his career and his growing, positive reputation. "I was disillusioned. I just didn’t believe in the people I worked for."

Fortunately, he was allowed to do some free lance work and frequently collaborated with Steve Red with whom he had a marvelous working relationship. He got a call from Steve about working with him on several large assignments. His copy, Steve’s design skills and their ability to work together so effectively brought out his assertion, "I had the time of my life working with Steve."

It took Ed three years to convince Steve to join with him to form Red Tettemer in 1996. They live by their mission statement, "Energize our clients and their businesses." Ed is proud when he reports that they try hard to make their clients’ competitors envious. They’ve followed those convictions while moving from "vertical" client groups into more general accounts. Some of their recent acquisitions are SEPTA, University of Pennsylvania Health System and Hatfield Meats.

Neither Ed nor Steve has much tolerance for the traditional approach used by many agencies. So, they’ve successfully created a fun environment. Their office space is designed in creative ways. The décor is imaginative but comfortable. There are surprises everywhere: a conference room with no conference table, eclectic art work all over the walls, small nooks and crannies with interesting appointments and two balconies which allow for panoramic views of the City. The physical experience of the offices is sure to be pleasant and entertaining for every age group: traditionalists as well as employees, whose average age is under thirty.

What’s the smartest business decision you ever made, Ed? Instantly, the response is, "Being in partnership with Steve Red. In fact, that may be my best life decision." How about your worst decision? "I waited too long to expand from our "vertical" focus. also, I think I’ve been too reclusive." (Maybe this article will help, Ed.)

Fun for Ed? Trying to understand client needs and finding solutions. Cooking. Reading. Joining the fire company near his beach home. Remarking that he thinks he made his Mother and Father proud. Red Tettemer’s annual retreat. Family. Many things.

One more question, Ed. "What would you do with a couple of wishes?"

Thoughtfully, he responds in a way that further demonstrates his passion. He says that he’d like to keep in closer touch with all of his employees, that he wishes he could reenergize the agency more frequently and that he’d like to take time to celebrate their good fortune more frequently.

If life is dull, if you need a shot of passion in your life, if you’d enjoy being stimulated by the innards of an ad agency, if you respond to another person’s motivation and, yes, passion, visit Red Tettemer. While you’re there, try to spend a few minutes with Ed. As his Mother taught him, "Keep your eyes and ears open." You’ll enjoy the visit.

Allan Kalish founded, managed and sold Kalish & Rice, one of Philadelphia’s largest ad agencies. He is currently chairman of Trichys, providers of intranet and extranet solutions for online collaboration and online document sharing.