From an interview with Ian West on the nature of brand knowledge:

Card sorting is a simple technique  for delivering sophisticated results in brand development. Read the post in the Brandmaster blog -
http://bit.ly/dgLnK3 to find out a little more, and there is a sample set of cards available on our downloads page.

We have all seen the branding gaffs made by even some of the world’s leading companies when taking their brands into export markets. Brand names or logos that make the products the butt of jokes or even offend, are legendary. But there are more subtle factors, which, while maybe not so obvious, can prevent the brand achieving its full potential in a market.  Worse, some things can positively hinder brand performance without the owners knowing.

We can help ensure that your brand gets a flying start in your chosen market with a fast, efficient and cost-effective Brand Internationalisation Review.

One of our consultants will spend a half day with you, looking at your brand, products and services, and discussing your export ambitions and markets. We will then review your export markets from a number of perspctives, including: culture, language, competitive positioning, protecting intellectual property, differentiation and credibility. Within 10 working days you will get back a detailed review listing practical action points for your brand performance. Our consultant will discuss the review with you and even signpost you to further resources to help you implement the proposals if necessary.

One Marketing has decades of experience working with brands in export markets with businesses of all sizes from SMEs to major blue chips. We work with language, culture and IPR specialists and brand psychologists.

The cost for this is a flat fee of £500 including review consultation, individual report and assessment, evaluation and action plan. Contact us now to find out more.

One-Marketing MD, Ian West is preparing for the Orchid Appeal charity bike ride of men’s cancers this weekend. Any support, donations etc will be gratefully received.

Currently preparing a programme for auditing and reviewing brands prior to taking them into international markets. Elements will include: language, culture, IPR, communications, environmental, accreditation, competitive positioning, business environment and legal barriers.

There is a new post on the Brandmaster blog, that discusses the issues of ‘concept branding’ and ‘concept marketing’. This impacts upon all aspects of creativity and innovation in business, marketing and communications. In essence, the creative process starts in a ‘glass box’, where all the background, research, analysis and planning is visible to all – it then passes briefly into the ‘black box’ where the fruits of this evaluation can be interpreted into something memorable, pedestrian or poor. Then it passes back into the glass box where the testing analysis and application process is visible and empirically understandable.

The key argument is that ideas do not spring from the ether. They are the product of pragmatic background processing. Sometimes this process is not formal, but part of the normal practice of the organisation. This in no way belittles the critical importance of brilliant creative minds who make the difference between great solutions and the mundane – but the best creatives are quick to acknowledge the importance of skilled planning.

http://bit.ly/9mYMd9

One Marketing has just completed a business development workshop for an organisation specialising in using music and allied creative disciplines to change peoples lives. The deliverers work in such diverse areas as the justice service, social care, education and the private sector.

One Marketing MD commented, “This is yet another area where a UK organization has developed a unique, world beating expertise that is flexible and exportable across the globe”. A key component of the workshop was the identification of opportunities and directions to build upon significant interest shown by potential clients in Europe and North America.

One topic that always crops up in our brand development coaching workshops with small and medium businesses is the need to think strategically about their brands – and this may often mean doing less.

First let’s consider the name – the corporate signature to give it its fancy name. When setting up a business there are a thousand things to think about, and the name is low on that list. So we tend to just say it like it is – ‘Anytown Plumbing Services’,  for instance. That has a lot going for it – it says what the business does and where it is: but things change. Let’s imagine that the heating side of the business takes off: we move into selling gas fires and that leads us into fireplaces and we open a showroom in big city down the road. All of a sudden the name seems less suitable. We are then faced with the quandary – do we change the name and write off all the investment and goodwill the brand carries, or perhaps create a second brand for fireplaces with all the hard work and investment needed to support a new brand?

The message is that we can’t foresee the future, so keep the options open. Of course it’s important in the early days to let potential customers know what we do, but far better to do that with a strapline or brand purpose statement such as ‘ABC Ltd – local, reliable plumbing and heating services’. The strapline can change easily while leaving the brand name untouched.

Don’t worry too much about the name. Remember it is just an icon for what you do and what your brand stands for – it is the values that are the important things. McDonalds, Apple, Ford, Kraft and Gucci don’t mean anything in themselves – their value lies in the association of the organizations behind them. Sure, if you can come up with a catchy, memorable name it may aid recall – and that is great, but don’t batter your head against the wall trying to dream one up – better spend the time focusing on your offer.

When thinking strategically it may be a good time to consider what your long term aim is – do you want to build a business to sell it?  If so, ask yourself the question whether it is a good idea to have your name over the door.

Spend a little time thinking golbally too. The world presents massive opportunities to do business outside your own country – the web has made it easier than ever to exploit these possibilities. So look at whether your brand will be appropriate to other markets. Does reference to your home market help (The US baseball Co, English Teas Ltd) or will it be a hindrance? Does your name translate into other languages without meaning something inappropriate? Do your corporate colours have positive or negative connotations in export markets?

We all have a lot on our minds when running small and medium businesses and often it is as much as we can do  to deal with the day-to-day issues right in front of us.  However, spending a little time to think strategically about your brand can save a lot of confusion and reactive stress in the future. One simple thing you can do is just to consider some point in the future – say three to five years away – and imagine where you would like your business to be. Don’t hold back, be as ambitious as you want – think big!  Then look at your brand – will it suit where you want to be?

If your brand does not match your ambitions for your business at that point in the future, start planning for change now. That way, change can be evolutionary not revolutionary. A gradual development will let you change without damaging all the effort and investment you have put behind your brand to date.

There is a sound reason why we provide specific mentoring and coaching for owners and managers of creative businesses – that is because they are different.

The majority of creative based businesses are owned or controlled by the people who founded them, and these are creative people. Far from being ‘head in the clouds’,  these people are extremely well qualified to run and grow businesses.

1. Starting and building a business is a creative process in itself.
2. One of the skills that many non-creative based companies invest in is innovation and creativity – skills which are the stock in trade for these businesses.
3. These same levels of thought and approaches are applicable to all the business disciplines.

It is not that creative people need to learn new business disciplines to handle what some see as the essential, down-to-earth skills: what they need to do is to learn how to apply their own skills and innovative thought processes to the wider business disciplines. For these people training is not the right solution. If it can be argued there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach for business growth and development, this is doubly true for creative businesses.

Problems tend to occur with growth, when businesses replace entrepreneurial flair with accountancy expertise – while such skills are vitally important in business there is no reason why the hand on the tiller should not be a creative one

We advocate coaching and mentoring as the most efficient development route for creative businesses, where those valuable talents and energies can be directed in their own distinctive direction.

In creative based businesses there is tremendous intellectual and emotional energy – properly directed it can achieve miracles: wrongly focused it can be unwittingly destructive.

Please get in touch if you would like to learn more about creative business mentoring and coaching – we understand both business and creativity – it is what we do.

In the excellent piece in The Marketer, Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, hit the nail right on the head when he pointed out that there is no B2B or B2C, just P2P – people to people.

Many years ago I worked in an agency where we had two teams, a consumer team and a trade team. There was a belief that somehow trade buyers were not fully human, they did not need to be engaged, amused or entertained – just delivered with facts. Fortunately those days are gone… well almost, but it is interesting to look at the swings and roundabouts of our approach to marketing communications.

There were once four ‘P’s in the marketing mix product, price, place and promotion: at the last count I saw one list of 14! But the fifth ‘P’ that was slipped in was perhaps the most important one, ‘people’. It’s strange how they were missed out of the first round.

Back in the heady exciting 50’s and 60’s when modern advertising was taking shape, there were two key drivers – the first was psychology. We learned that human behaviour could be studied, measured – up to a point, predicted, and thus hopefully influenced. The second, which came out of methods used in psychological research was what we now know as ‘market research’. Of course, there were many snake-oil salesmen hiding behind the cloak of science, but the precepts were sound and some great advertising was executed – even if some was of dubious ethics by today’s standards.

Something strange also happened. The theoretical base for much of the psychology came from the dominant paradigm of the times, ‘behaviourism’. People like B.F. Skinner had taken the view that we can’t see what goes on inside the mind, but we can see the behaviour that it generates, so that is what we should study and measure. Now this should have led to a fairly hard nosed approach – but what we see if we look back is a time of real emotional engagement – humour, pathos, empathy… all are evident. It was the ‘creative’ leap, where the process moved from the glass box ino the black box, and back out again.

In the decades since much has happened: psychology seems to have slipped off the agenda and technology has given us tools for even more detailed and finegrained measurement. And, with some very notable exceptions, people, humanity and emotion seems to have taken a back seat. Social media may have given bigger audiences, but real conversations are rare still. We send emails rather than pick up the phone – or better yet actually visit somebody.

The best communications still engage, amuse, entertain and persuade, but once again these seem to have become the preserve of the ‘consumer team’. People buy from people, people sell to people… people make decisions – even about buying widgets. Those people all have emotions, they smile, laugh, anger and cry. Perhaps every communications practitioner should have a sign over their desk – ‘It’s the people, stupid!’