By Jerry Bader

Do you have a plan? Most companies spend a considerable amount of time, energy, and money planning what to do and how to do it.

Let’s say you need a website, so you develop a plan, present it to a bunch of website designers, and get quotes or proposals. You’re not going to get caught with your pants down like the last time by some nerdy geek, you know the skinny kid with the scraggly beard, whose techno-babble gave you a headache, or the bizarre young lady dressed in gothic chic with the black lipstick and tattoo to match – yikes, no thanks, not this time, this time you got a plan.

Human Motivational Optimization

You read all the blogs on website design, you know all the ins-and-outs of search engine optimization, and Google Adwords. No one is going to pull a fast one on you. You know your business, your market, and your needs. Or do you?

How much do you really know about how real people interact with your website? How much do you really know about what we call Human Motivational Optimization? All the stats, logs, and number crunching analysis that forms the basis of many website development plans does not truly give you the visceral understanding of how to connect to an audience, and isn’t that what you want your website to do?

So maybe your plan is the wrong plan; it’s like planning a trip to Home Depot to buy a cabbage; it just doesn’t make sense. So how about a plan that does make sense, something simple, understandable, easy to implement, that is if you hire the right people to do it. But before we tell you the four steps to creating your very own Website Branding Plan, let’s talk about Don LaFontaine.

Every Company Needs A Movie Trailer

Chances are you don’t know who the late Don LaFontaine was, but you’ve heard his voice many, many times. Don was the most famous and influential voice behind thousands of movie and television trailers. He had a distinctive deep, gravely voice, and a writing style that reinvented the entire movie trailer format. But why should you care? Simple. Movie trailers are the ultimate elevator pitch, a short memorable performance that compels you to action, kind of like what a mission statement is suppose to do, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning, or rather, the end.

Branding Starts With Thinking Backwards

Most people like to start a project at the beginning and work their way through until they reach the end. Makes sense, or does it? If you don’t start with where you want to end-up, it’s unlikely you’ll ever get where you want to go. Remember our cabbage? Planning a shopping to trip to Home Depot because they got cool stuff, doesn’t help if what you want is a cabbage.

Branding is no different. If you don’t start with how you want your audience to think about you, they will probably never think about you at all. So now that we got that straight let’s start our plan where it makes sense, the end.

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By Steve McMains

Do you really need a brand?

Do you need to develop a brand identity?

If you want sustainable growth in your business and if you want to earn more than what you do today, you must develop a brand identity for you or your business. There is no alternative to this proposition.

At this point, many business owners will step back saying that branding means advertising and thus it would require huge investment. This is a very common situation as a beginner: The business owner do not have much idea about the actual rate of advertising in different media.

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By Wayne Attwell

Most small business owners/operators would probably agree that developing a stand-out brand identity is an essential part of the marketing package for corporates and large companies.

Many would add that branding is not that important for small businesses and see it as an additional expense on the P&L. So they head off to the local printer or graphic designer who designs a logo (sometimes even for free) that gets used on stationary, vehicles and other marketing materials.

From our experience in this field, we find that most logos designed for small businesses are simply graphic devices and not actually brands in the true sense of the word, and portray little about the value proposition of the company, its personality and service promise.

In actual fact, development of a meaningful, representative and outstanding brand identity is just as critical for small businesses and if properly executed, can actually be a powerful competitive advantage.

For corporates, an effective and powerful brand is a ‘must-have’, simply in order to be in the game.

It may not necessarily differentiate them but it does at least give them parity with their competitors.

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