Contents:
Branding 101 - What is a Brand?
A lot of small business owners might not give much thought to branding. It seems like an abstract concept that’s only applicable to widely distributed products backed by big marketing budgets from large corporations. But if you want to grow your business over the long term, then you should start seeding your brand into your customers’ minds even when you are still small.
Where should you start? Before we explore ways to build your brand, let’s start by looking at the question, “what is a brand, anyway?”
From Wikipedia, “A brand is a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the descriptive verbal attributes and concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme that convey the essence of a company, product or service.” This might be a really good textbook answer, but chances are you won’t remember it in a week.
In essence, a brand is the images and ideas that people remember you by. The images are visual, like your logo, color scheme, mascot, etc. For example, you might remember Nike’s “swoosh” logo. For Fedex, you might remember the purple/orange/white color scheme. The ideas can be as simple as a single word. What do you think when you hear Wal-mart? Cheap! How about a Volvo car? Safety!
If you are able to get those images and ideas into your customers’ heads, everytime they see the images or think about those ideas, they will automatically think about your company and your products. Next time, we’ll look at some general guidelines on building your brand.
Related Posts
The Business Benefits of Rest & Relaxation Part 2: Memory
Last time, we talked about how you need to relax to solve difficult problems. This is part 2 of 2, discussing how can improve your memory and skill by being sure to get a good night’s sleep.
Sleep isn’t just resting, your brain is working on processing your experiences so that when you wake up, you’ll remember things better, pick up new skills faster, and maybe even acquire some new insights. This is all backed up by studies showing how people performing a variety of tasks (ranging across memory, coordination, and math) do better if they’re allowed to sleep between practise sessions, instead of just relaxing while awake. Read more.
In fact, you get this benefits not just from nighttime sleep, but also from daytime naps. Since there’s a natural tendency to be tired in the mid-afternoon, this is a great time to take a nap, also known as a siesta in places where this is the norm.
If working smarter and increased productivity aren’t enough to convince you to get a good night’s sleep and encourage napping at your workplace, keep in mind that well-rested people have better moods, making it easier to work productively with others.
A high-stress, deadline-driven culture in your organization might pump out more mundane work for little while. But a proper appreciation for rest and relaxation can help you work smarter, developing more game-changing insights and skills. And it’ll make your organization a much better place to work, helping you to attract and keep great people to work with.
Related Posts
The Business Benefits of Rest & Relaxation Part 1: Insight
Have you ever been told that you work too hard? If you have, here’s one more reason to ensure that you lead a balanced life: working too hard can be bad for your business.
We all know the feeling of insight. You’re stumped on some problem, then in some idle moment when you least expect it, a-ha!, inspiration strikes and you suddenly have a solution. I’ve solved some of my toughest problems in the shower, or taking a walk. Archimedes famously cried out “Eureka!” when having an insight while getting into the bathtub. The Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman’s favourite spot to relax and seek scientific inspiration was the local strip club.
We’re often taught to focus to solve a problem, but if you get stuck on something, unfocusing and letting your mind wander is the best way to allow inspiration to strike. A Zen expert trained to focus his mind was having great difficulty solving problems designed by scientists to require insight. Then, just before giving up, he tried directing his mind to relax, and he surprised everyone by suddenly solving the puzzles faster than anyone else had.
What’s happening up in the brain is that when you’re relaxed, your unconscious brain is still hard at work making all sorts of random connections and associations. When it comes across something that it recognizes as an insight, it reports back to your conscious brain, and you think, a-ha!
The overworked and overstressed lifestyle typical of small businesses can make it harder to have real insights. Leading a lifestyle balanced with work and relaxation will allow you to get the day-to-day tasks done, without handicapping your ability to generate ideas that can take your business to the next level.
You can hear Jonah Lehrer talk more about this here. Next time, we’ll continue this by discussing another way a balanced lifestyle can improve your memory and make you smarter.
Related Posts
What’s Your Website’s Grade?
A common question asked by business owners is “how can other people find my website?” After all, even if you have the best website in the world, if no one knows about it, your business doesn’t benefit.
One common way is to hope people find you through Google or other search engines. But say, if your company sells cheese, how many results will turn up if they search for a “cheese company”? Hundreds of thousands. Chances are your company won’t even show up on the first few pages, unless you do some search engine optimization (SEO) on your website.
SEO is a big field that requires a lot of knowledge in both the web technologies and how search engines work. If you want to learn more about SEO, there are plenty of tutorials out there. But as a starter, if you just want someone to take a quick look at your website and tell you what you should change, you can take a look at WebSite Grader.
Website Grader is a free online tool for SEO beginners that tells you how effective your website is, and how you could change it to get a higher Google ranking.
It’s free, so give it a try. What’s your grade?
Related Posts
How Prices are Relative
Here are 2 options for a 1-year magazine subscription:
A) Web only subscription - $59
B) Print & Web subscription - $125
Which one would you pick? A study shows that 68% of you would pick option A, and 32% would pick option B.
OK, how about if we add in one more option:
A) Web only subscription - $59
B) Print only subscription - $125
C) Print & Web subscription - $125
No, there’s no typo. Option B and C are the same price, but option B is missing the web access. Now which one would you pick?
Surprisingly, by adding in a dummy option with the same price, the study says that only 16% of you would pick option A, none of you would pick option B, and a whooping 84% would pick option C. Want to know why? In short, because we often judge value relatively. A choice is good because it is better than the other choices, not because of the intrinsic and objective value of it. Think you can use this to your business advantage?
Find out more about these sorts of psychological quirks in this book.
Related Posts
Send Email Updates to Get Repeat Customers
If you sell products online or offline, you might be familiar with this all-too-common customer story:
1 ) Maria wants the product you sell.
2 ) She finds you through Google, eBay, or a friend’s recommendation.
3 ) She buys your product. You do everything right and she loves your customer service.
4 ) In 2-3 months, Maria completely forgets that you exist. Next time she wants a similar product you carry, she finds your competitor instead.
The best way to convert this into a happy ending is also one of the simplest. Send updates through email. Here’s the alternate ending:
4 ) When making the sale, you ask Maria if she’d like to get updates on new products and discounts through email. You promise to email her a coupon for 10% off her next purchase. She’s happy enough with your company that she gives you permission.
5 ) Once a month or so, you send relevant updates about new products or sales.
6 ) Three months later, Maria sees your email and thinks that she could use something in red to go with her original purchase, so she buys another.
7 ) Six months later, Maria sees a new product that you announced through email and decides to buy one of those too.
8 ) And they live happily ever after.
Send your happy customers email updates to remind them about your company once in a while and introduce new products or discounts. This is one of the most effective ways to increase sales without spending a fortune on marketing.
Other Posts
A Mini-Wikipedia for Your Company
You’ve probably heard of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia and the 8th most popular site on the internet. The main idea behind it is that anybody can contribute knowledge by adding a new article or editing an existing one. This idea has allowed Wikipedia to grow enormously quickly, with broader content and faster updates than traditional encyclopedias.
Have you ever thought of setting up a mini-Wikipedia within your company? This is a great way to organize all sorts of information. You can share it with other people, especially newcomers, and anybody can update it, so it’s easier to keep complete and accurate. No more digging up old emails to find information that might be obsolete.
With an internal mini-Wikipedia, you can collaborate and keep information on almost anything:
- A checklist for the order-taking process
- Ideas for new products to carry
- A list of advertising opportunities
- Your quality inspection guidelines when receiving products
- A list of employee expenses to be reimbursed by the company
- A selection of customer testimonials for marketing purposes
- Phone numbers and email addresses for everyone within your company
Here are two websites that allow you to do this for free, while controlling who has access to the information:
- PBwiki
- Google Sites
Try it out, and enjoy improved information sharing within your company!
Related Posts
Decisions under Pressure
Business owners need to make a lot of decisions on a daily basis. They range from small ones such as whether to do a questionable refund or not, to big ones such as how much money should they allocate for marketing. For small business owners, it might be difficult to make the right call when these decisions are tightly tied to their own personal finances. This is especially bad when the owners are faced with influential emotions like greed, stress, and pressure.
The easy way out is to maximize short-term profit in those situations. Questionable refunds? Just keep their money. Marketing budget? As little as we can afford. Hiring for talent? Just tell the current staff to do more.
When these situations are laid out on paper, most people are able to make a good decision that balances both the short-term gain and the long-term benefits. The tricky thing is to make a good call under stressful circumstances.
Here are a few tricks that might help you in those situations:
1) Stay calm. Try to detach yourself from any negative emotions so that you can make a more rational decision.
2) Get away for a while. Remove yourself from the environment, even for just 5 minutes. This can help clear your head.
3) Remind yourself of what’s important. Your beliefs in the fundamentals such as integrity, customer satisfaction, etc. can help you get over greed and pressure.
4) Set a policy. Make one good, level-headed decision so that you don’t need to think about it every time.
Do you have any stories to share where you had to make a tough business decision under pressure? How did you handle it?
Related Posts
Unhappy Customers are Good Business Opportunities
There are a lot of articles on the internet on how to deal with unhappy customers. Usually, they involve tactics to help deal with that single problem. Instead, you should look at unhappy customers as opportunities to improve your business.
Bill Gates talked about it. He said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” We couldn’t agree more. But what’s more important than learning is changing.
Big businesses are more sluggish in changing things in response to customer feedback. This is where small businesses have the advantage. If you learn how to improve your business to serve your customers better, you don’t need to go through all the different departments and management hierarchy like they do in big businesses. You just do it. Probably overnight too.
So, next time you need to handle an unhappy customer, not only should you think “how can I make this customer happy?”, but also “how can I make sure nobody will be unhappy in the same way again?”
Related Posts
Home
