By Roy H. Williams (The Wizard of Ads)

The coming year will be fun, adventure-filled and profitable for people who have their wits about them.

A number of small business owners are positioning themselves to overtake their much larger rivals.

Will one of these companies be yours?

Not many years ago, General Motors and Circuit City were the dominant players in their categories. Today they’re both on their knees, having made the same mistakes:

1. They took their fingers off the pulse of the customer.
When you believe your marketing pipeline will allow you to dictate what the customer will buy, you’re in danger of being leapfrogged. In 1960, General Motors sold nearly 60 percent of all new cars. Today, even though Chevrolet maintains 4,200 dealerships, Toyota sells more cars than all 5 GM brands combined through just 1,400 locations.
LESSON: Having the right product is more important than heritage and convenience.

2. They quit taking risks.
When companies achieve success, they usually quit innovating and become guardians of the status quo. But yesterday’s perfect processes are obsolete tomorrow. Vinyl records were replaced by 8-track tapes. 8-tracks were replaced by cassettes. Cassettes were replaced by CDs. And now CD’s are being replaced by MP3 players. The same is happening with business practices.

LESSON: Success, like failure, is a temporary condition. Never assume you’ve arrived.
The leaders are going into hunker-down mode. They’re cutting back their advertising, assuming that everyone else will cut back as well.

When a leapfrogger sees a leader’s brake lights, he hits the accelerator. Are you beginning to see what I meant when I said, “fun, adventure-filled and profitable?”

Here are the trends to watch in 2009:
1. Frivolous purchases are being delayed.
We’re wearing our clothes longer and keeping the cars we’ve got. We’ll buy what we need, but only after asking whether we really need it.

2. We’re buying fewer things, but better things.
More attention is being paid to quality. Only the poorest are choosing by price alone. Information is king. Details are power. This is good news for makers of better products.

3. “Sustainable” is a concept that will grow in power for at least 10 years.
The lifestyle of the 80’s and 90’s was “upwardly mobile” and its leaders were marked by “conspicuous consumption.” But the chosen lifestyle of the next generation will be “sustainable,” meaning that we’ll strive to live within our means and embrace practices that are environmentally responsible.

Note from Tim: Roy Williams has been tracking societal trends and how they affect business for several decades. He has developed a system of predicting upcoming cycles that has been 100% correct. The coming trend of quality over quantity and more conservative buying habits is nothing new, it is just time for it to occur again in the pendulum of the U.S. business cycle.
Now is the time to consider how you can position your company to provide the kind of quality product and service to leap frog over your competitors.

KanobiComm teamed up with Graphic Concepts of Cincinnati (who provided graphics) to create a database-driven web site with a simple management system to updated member information.

Visit the site at www.NorrisLakeMarinas.com.

• Political Yard Signs
• Direct Mail to Registered Voters
• Phone Polls and GOTV Calls
• Push/Palm Card Design and Printing
• Billboard Design
• Web Site Design
• Press Releases
• Media Relations

The same phenomenon can happen in your business.  Most business owners I met pay a lot of attention to what their competition is doing.  We definitely need to keep an eye on the competitive  landscape.  But there’s a very fine line.

The danger in keeping track of the other guys is that you lose track of your own path.  We tend to move towards what we pay attention to.  And you don’t want to let your competitors determine your marketing strategy.  That’s a quick way to:

• Deplete your resources
• Look like you’re playing the “us too” game
• Lose the momentum of your key messages

You want to be the leader in your industry, not follow someone else.  The best way to beat your competition isn’t watching what they do.  It’s doing what you should be doing.

If you have and follow a marketing plan — you can enjoy the best of both worlds.  The marketing plan keeps you on your course.  Heading in the direction you have determined.  When you know where you’re headed and keep checking the map to see that you’re on course, you can afford to peek at what the competitors are doing.

Just make sure you’re following your course, not theirs.

marketing plan, marketing strategy

Here’s a 10 point check-list to use to give new life by PIMPING YOUR BRAND:

• Pimp your brand personality. Taking an objective view of the company, has anything changed that defines you differently than when you first started. Maybe you have become more socially minded. Perhaps you find that you have been more generous in donating time to non-profits in your community. If this bears some truth, you can Pimp your brand here by officially embracing philanthropy as a corporate policy. Embrace pet charities and let the world know who you are passionate for.

• Does your brand logo reflect your existing market? Has the demographic aged? If so, perhaps it is time to update it a little. Pimping your Brand logo could mean a complete revise or just a tweak here and there. Smooth out a few wrinkles, refresh its colors and attitude. Your brand image should reflect who your brand is.

• Survey your stake holders to look for any opportunities to embrace and any short-comings to fix. Pimp Your Brand with real world intelligence to make your product or service address true needs. Just asking, strengthens the relationships with each of your shareholder groups.

• Pimp your overall brand image. Do an image audit of the entire company. Make sure that the logo is used consistently every where in the operation. Are the corporate colors also consistent? Do your marketing materials reflect the image correctly? Pimp your brand image to define it.

• Pimp the sales staff. In the course of selling your products or services, does the sales staff reflect the brand correctly. Sit down with the sales team and pimp the deliverable. Raise the bar and win the hearts and minds of the sales staff and their customers.

• As the company leader (the visionary) pimp your attitude. Your employees are inspired or dragged down depending on your attitude. By pimping your attitude, you bring nothing but positive vibes to the company. Even when the economy appears to spiraling down around you, look for the opportunities and display this to the stake holders. A leader who fails to pimp their attitude stands a great chance of losing real talent to the competition.

• Pimp your workplace. Find ways to make the working environment more pleasant. This doesn’t mean more money, but how can you take some of the grey areas out of the work-a-day mix. Look for the little things that make doing the job better.

• Pimp your personal brand. When was the last time you met with your top customers? Call them out of the blue, and ask them for a meeting or lunch to ask them how they are being serviced. Give them a reason to remember you. If you have a retail store, introduce yourself to customers, give them a free coffee coupon at a near by coffee shop. Don’t advertise this - just do it and pimp your brand.

• Pimp your brand product or service. Can anything be made better? Can the delivery of your product or service be improved? For myself, I try to not rely on the impersonal email for ALL my client contact. Where the client is at a great distance I call on the telephone and if they are within an hour or so, I drop in on them. This alone has increased business opportunities. Email has its advantages, but I believe if you rely on it 100% of the time, you are doing it more for YOUR convenience and not for enriching your relationships.

• Pimp your public relations. There is a lot of companies who take public relations as an effort that is only used once or twice in the lifetime of the company. By pimping your PR you can increase your “public” awareness. Utilizing social networking websites can be a fabulous ingredient of your PR mix.

What ever you can do to pimp your brand, can only make you better. The smallest initiatives can have the biggest impact on your brand effectiveness. An eleventh pimp might also be corporate blogging. I’ll shut-up now, as there is so much we all can do to keep the wheels in motion as we pimp our own brands.

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That on its own is absolutely not OK. To make matters worse, the shredder didn’t even do that good a job - parts of some checks were still intact. Adding insult to injury, the shredder used was one of those old style strip shredders what were about 1/4 inch wide that even a child could easily piece back together.

According to the reporter, they called the company and the owners said they’ve been “using it for years“, that”this is the first time anybody noticed” and “they’ll stop using it now“.

I shudder to think how many uninterested businesses handle my personal information that way. Just because they have been using it for years and nobody noticed doesn’t make it right. The report did not say if they used their own customers’ checks or worse yet, got those from other businesses. Either way, this is outrageous!

In this advanced, technically inclined world of ours today, businesses like to talk about encryption, securing their web site, protecting customer data, tools and methods to keep hackers at bay and restricting access to customer data. These are all important. I am not discounting that. But all this focus on protecting electronic information is not going to help you much when your paper system is flawed.

Protect your customer data, whether it is on paper, verbal or electronic. It is the law. But really, what should be more important than that - you owe it to your customers.

P.S.: You might want to check out “Protecting Personal Information - A Guide for Business” published by the FTC.

P.P.S.: Upgrade your hardware. 80’s style paper shredders are not good enough. Go for cross cuts or confetti cuts at least. The smaller it can shred the better.

electronic information, hackers, paper shredders

If you’re like most people you have the generic answer, “I’m in the mortgage business” or “I’m an account executive” or ” I own a small business” and you hand them a business card and then you’re either off to the next person or you’re stuck in a conversation with someone that you have no idea if they have a potential want or need for you and your services.

We have been programmed to answer with either our title or our industry. These types of answers offer little or no marketing value. I don’t think that most people comprehend that these moments are actually the first part of the ‘marketing’ process. Let’s flash back to our definition of marketing- “Getting someone with a need to know like and trust us”. By simply answering with a title or industry we’ve missed a very valuable opportunity to actually qualify them to see if they may have a need.

So what is the solution?

We at Sticky Marketing Systems call it the “Talking Logo”. A talking logo is a carefully crafted reply to the question, “what do you do for a living?”. Your Talking Logo is created in two distinct parts. Part 1 addresses your target market, and Part 2 zeros in on a problem, frustration, or want that market has.

You’ll know you have an effective Talking Logo when you tell someone what you do and they respond “Really, how do you do that?”

For example if someone was to ask me what I do for a living, I could respond ” I teach small business owners and service professionals how to get all the clients they want.”

8 out of 10 times someone will ask, “How do you do that?

I answer them, “I use a simple 7 step process that is endorsed by Harvard Business school and Forbes Business Review, to create and install a marketing system .”

A Talking Logo is a short statement (or question) that quickly communicates your firm’s position and forces the listener to want to know more.

The Formula

Here’s the formula to create your own: action verb (I teach, I show, I help), target market (business owners, plumbers, teachers, home owners), how to xxxx (solve a problem or meet a need).

Once you get clarity and comfortable saying your Talking Logo you can even take it on step further by actually getting the suspect to acknowledge the pain point (hot button) during the conversation.

For example some times I will answer their question of “what do you do for living”, with a question, like this: “You know how some small business owners struggle to get all the clients they want?” [wait for them to acknowledge "yes"] “Well I teach them a system to get all the clients they want”.

You will be amazed at how many people say things like “you know my sister is like that….” or “that sounds like my accountant…”

The formula would be: “You know how some Target Market (business owners, plumbers, teachers, home owners) struggle to xxxx(problem or need), I action verb (show, teach, help) to (solve that problem or meet need).

So go ahead and create your Talking Logo today!!

target market, what do you do for a living

In reality, the return on the investment can be significant, even if you get a top notch professional to shoot your video. Some of the advantages are:

~ Delivers the intimacy of extended one-to-one communication.

~ Compared to TV ads, non-interruptive.

~ Allows three-dimensional views of products, show a product in use or a service provider in action.

~ With music, action and color, generates emotional impact.

~ Can bring your employees and their passion for your business to life.

~ Can be combined with CD, DVD, or streaming video technology to translate to an easy direct mail piece or web page content.

~ Is a powerful storytelling medium.

Wondering where you can use your video? Your lobby. Your website. Your e-mail campaign. Your annual meeting. Staff recruitment. New business pitches. And that’s just the beginning.

emotional impact, intimacy, perceptions, storytelling, streaming video technology, web page content, youTube