I experienced that the question of when to leave the safe haven of “letterhead, business card and website logo” to start using the created identity for marketing purposes, seems a mystery to many small business owners.
At first, it seems the investment in the re-branding stretches the strategic muscle to the limit of many business owners. The next step, actually using it to market, is an even bigger hurdle.
“Should we use it to express our message? What’s a campaign and what’s the difference in just saying who we are and what we do? How do we get there? Do we need to get there?”
I say to Consensio clients that corporate identity is like a passport. It identifies them on a superficial level, not on who their friends are, or what their personalities are like.
Getting to know a personality, you have to engage in dialogue. This is why we do it, when we market. How we do it, is using marketing tools.
Pressed for time and strapped for money, the call for brochures and websites is bigger than for meaningful strategy.
To resist the client pressure and develop a strategy beforehand, will benefit the client long-term, but it remains a matter of building client trust in strategy before action. Consensio has specialised in corporate identity and brand development since 2001.
Intangible assets remain definition bound and thus subjective. In brand and design practice, most professionals don’t acknowledge that what they are delivering as business service is considered a difficult return on investment for their clients.
There is a lack of consistent terminology in the literature relating to intangible assets and intellectual capital.Management scholars tend to employ either “capital” or “asset” terminology to refer to investments with no physical existence.
Lawyers refer to intellectual property, which has property rights in law. Accountants do not generally use the term “intellectual capital”.
Accountants refer to identifiable intangible assets, goodwill and intellectual property (with legal rights) under the umbrella of “intangible assets”.
Economists refer to intangible assets in terms of their source, as investments, and role in production, as capital. (Hunter, Webster, Wyatt, 2005)
As business-to-business services that deliver design, brand and marketing related services, practitioners should take note of the difficulty that clients have with working out expenditure justification. I think it is therefore important to assist the client in going through a transparent process of achieving mutual goals such as I described in my earlier post about the Consensio intangible asset chain.
We are not trained to listen to our own assumptions. In my current workplace , we highlight the dizzying effect of assumptions on our work environment and outcomes. In our rational thinking society, assumptions are part of the philosophy. It goes like this:
The human at work is a rational/economic being who will trade human discretion and social interaction for money. Managers make decisions, control is assumed, training is task oriented. People act as extensions of machines. A person is a redundant part.
Managers live in ‘Philosophy, assumptions and theory=”The Talk”.
Employees live in organisation and practice. =”The Walk”.
Leaving assumptions and being present to take responsibility for what is said and and done is one of my biggest learning curves every day.
