Whilst the Western Australian quality of health care debate continues to rage, his small business is making him enough money to cater for his personal need. Apart from his ethos, I admire his dedication to find out whether there was something wrong with his business practice. The niggling feeling can be examined by him without attending a ‘free business mentoring’ seminar.

No matter how small the practice and how busy you are, ask yourself:

• What is your vision about this business? Why does it exist?
• Do you want to stay this business size for the foreseeable future or do you maybe consider expanding in 2 or 3 years time?
• Do you have a one-page-business plan?
• Can you compare yourself to at least 3 other direct competitors and do you know their strength and weaknesses?
• Are there appropriate international industry examples you can learn from?
• What is your succession plan?
• How long is your cash flow holding up and when do you need to increase your marketing?
• What kind of clients do you want and what do you want them to tell others about you?
• What are your passive streams of income?
• How do you market yourself and what is your expenditure allocation per year?
• How do you know your marketing works for you?
• Who are your allies?

If there is one ‘I don’t know’ you reply to any of these questions, drop me an email or leave a comment so we can discuss further.

“Intangible assets are the the reason marketers get out of bed in the morning”.

According to Olding, assets that make up brands, reputation and customer value are only slowly coming to the attention of other senior executives particularly in Australia.

Quantifying brand performance has senior marketers and finance executives fighting to grasp each other’s language and context.

“Quite simply, successful brands require effective marketing and financial management”

Major contributing factors to the communication gap are:

• A culture of departmental silos
• mistrust in the marketer’s measurement skills
• underestimation of the importance of brand from the senior management
• limited and fragmented relationships between departments

Olding goes on to cite two Australian business case studies illustrating her point that only a joint collaboration and coordination between Marketing and Finance achieves deeper brand equity.

She goes on to quote Prof. Don Schultz, who is summarizing the standard of Australian brand management as too little up-front investment in resource allocation and too much time spent on measuring past performance.

This is a very poignant article which is very appropriate to all firm sizes and industries across Australia. How often does your CFO/Accountant partner with the Managing Director, and the CMO/Marketing Manager/Coordinator in your business to discuss the next year in a brand panel?

Much has been written about the influence of national culture and cross-cultural influence on globalized companies (see for example key culture writers like Hofstede, Tropenaars and Friedman). The link of one’s heritage and underlying assumptions to organsiational performance per se has held bread and butter money for generations of business consultants, HR professionals and psychologists.

It strikes me as interesting, that a quantitative measurement is often engaged to ‘measure’ the organisational culture, e.g. “…33% of our people are effective in their performance; 43% engage in after-hours social activities…”, as if behavioural observation was all that culture is; e.g. we hear culture defined as ‘the way we do things around here‘.

This may be a catchy way of remembering this ‘culture thing’, but it is not an organisational culture definition. Culture is deeper ingrained in people than behaviour that we observe everyday. We behave based on our beliefs and values which are fundamentally based on our deeper assumptions.

That’s why culture can be shared, even when the key people, who left the place, are not there anymore to demonstrate the behaviour. I call this the living heritage of organisations. To measure this, we need different instruments, don’t you think?

>>…is the process of converting knowledge and ideas into better ways of doing business or into new or improved products and services that are valued by the community. The innovation process incorporates research and development, commercialisation and technology diffusion. www.smartstate.qld.gov.au/strategy/strategy05_15/glossary.shtm

…a newly introduced practice or method intended to improve the current practice
www.mywhatever.com/cifwriter/library/66/4620.html

…introducing an object as if it were new.
oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth370/gloss.html

…Innovation is the process that translates knowledge into economic growth and social well-being. It encompasses a series of scientific, technological, organisational, financial and commercial activities. Research is only one of these activities and may be carried out at different phases of the innovative process.
www.arc.gov.au/general/glossary.htm

…All innovation begins with creative ideas . . . We define innovation as the successful implementation of creative ideas within an organization. …<<
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation

…Innovation in Organisations - assisting our Clients in identifying and managing innovation opportunities within their organisation.<<http://www.business.curtin.edu.au

Ambler & Neely (2007) pointed out that Marketing already has a robust platform as market connector and that therefore, cashflow forecasting and brand equity are indeed viable ‘measurable intangibles’ for ‘narrative accounting’ practices.

I think you agree, that the ‘innovation’ buzzword is another example of the ‘intangible asset’ murkiness which is lurking underneath the accounting and business process surface. What’s your ‘innovation’?

Very often, people are skirmish about naming because it involves thinking out of their comfort zone and maybe saying something in front of people that gets culled down with cynicism. In recent years it has become very difficult to name a company and trademark it without a due diligence process.

The ‘obvious’ names are taken or unavailable as domains. Simply going through the dictionary is not enough. Resorting to fantasy names is not often a clever idea if it is too impossible to pronounce the names. I know there are people who seriously use name generators on the net, but they are the equivalent to buying instant coffee..or trusting Babelfish for business translations…

That’s when specialist naming companies are called in (like Consensio for example, hint, hint).

The tasks of the naming specialist are to facilitate the process and doing the due diligence on the name. It is a difficult process because we don’t only have to come up with something durable, exciting and suitable, but also something that holds up to legal and commercial aspects. Sometimes you fall in love with a name too early, only to find somebody else has had the same idea and protected it already.

We have to ask:

• Is it legal? Can we trademark the name in our market, in our industry, in our country, globally?

• Commercial? Can we get the URL that matches our name?

As a rule of thumb, generic words that are in the common language domain cannot be trademarked for your commercial interests- as they would disadvantage your competitors. For example, if you had the rights to the word ‘Engineering” a whole industry would be excluded from using the word. However, you could call yourself “Berti Beetle Engineering”, if there is no other Berti Beetle in the IP register trademark registered in your country.

Consensio, like many other naming companies, use a process, whereby we utilise a naming work sheet to involve clients in the naming brainstorm. With a point system we check it against the IP register, Domain availability and the name categories. After a thorough check, whereby as as many stakeholders as possible have contributed to the list and gave points to the variable selection, we are very clear what ‘cuts the mustard’ with the market and our client.

I love this part of brand positioning, because we witness the birth of a new identity. After all, good brand names go from good to great by being durable. (Read PART 1 here or PART 2)

The best names capture the core essence of the business- what you stand for. And this means not necessarily a descriptive name. People tend to think that once you put “what you do” in it, it’s taken care of- but we know, that APPLE, YAHOO and other big brand names are not descriptive of what they do- they are descriptive of “how they make you feel”. That means there are different categories for names.

Here are the common name categories:

Functional Names: either named after a person, purely descriptive of what the company or product does, or a reference to functionality. (Joe’s Metal Roofing, Joseph Archer Architecture)

Experiential Names: Bound in reality, familiar. Usually literally, but presented with a touch of imagination. (Firefox, Playstation, GoPC)

Invented Names: a made-up name or non-English name that is not widely known (Consensio).

Evocative Names: evoking association, memories or stories that are not directly associated with the usage of the service or product.

Some Naming companies (yes, there are naming specialists!) use also “Metaphorical” “Conjoined”, “Acronyms” and “Playful” as categories. (For an excellent book on brand process see “Logo Savvy”, by WOW Branding. In my opinion the best brand naming agency presented on the net is IGOR International).

For the process (the bit you actually need to do the brand name process) please read PART 3!.. or find PART 1.

So how do you do it (without a beer drenched night and a birthday names book or Dictionary on your knees)?

In professional brand terms you are going through a process which is described as part of “positioning a company in a market.” At this stage you may have a good idea what the company can and won’t do and what you want it do (apart from earning a million bucks) and what your business objectives are.

In this case you are miles ahead (congratulations, if you have already a written business plan that’s bigger than the serviette you scribbled it on yesterday during lunch time).

I know these things are hard work and usually are ONGOING. So let’s say you have done research and you are in the know about

1. your company structure and culture
2. your customers/clients
3. the business environment/market you enter
4. your competitors
5. your pricing strategy
6. your service/product distribution

Meanwhile, I know, that as a start-up, things don’t usually pan out this linear. However, for the neatness of this, bear with me and let’s imagine this ideal path, where the above mentioned is in place. Larger firms and people from in-house departments may look at their plans now and hopefully find above mentioned. Otherwise, please do one of the following:

• dial ext. for your marketing department and call an immediate meeting to FIND the information
• if you ARE the marketing department, burn the midnight oil and document the information before you embark on a naming strategy either on your company division or product
• OR email me so we can work out a brand audit

Either way, let’s further pretend we have all this information from 1-7 (I got sidetracked, didn’t I?), and you want to go ahead with finding the name of your new company or service… now continue to Read here PART 2)!

>>I know strategy workshops are boring. Somebody stands there waffling on about an impenetrable subject and you are pretending to take notes and actively listening. I can’t stand looking at one more powerpoint slide! Somebody accidentally switch off that projector or, even better, let me out of here!<<

Why is it such an art to involve people in a workshop or presentation? Apart from the skills of an entertaining, informative and skilled presenter/facilitator, what makes people go: ‘Ah, I get it!‘.

The magic connection is emotional involvement. What increases my care factor, increases the attention span. Business bigs like Steve Jobs don’t just have an easy presentation audience because they pull out gadgets that everybody wants.

Why do I want them in the first place? Because I want to believe, the presenter will be giving me emotional satisfaction on top of information.

So what would be my list of things to consider for keeping me interested?

The Consensio presentation wish list:

• In long workshops his or her presentation style keeps me interested by getting me to do things. If I can get up, walk around, contribute on the white board or sit in an informal circle, I want to be there.
• In a short presentation, I get to see a maximum of 5 well designed slides or a short movie, or no pictures, but a whiteboard drawing.
• Samples and materials are passed around. If it’s pleasant enough, I get to touch and smell what is being described.
• I don’t want handouts before a presentation. Instead I get a URL at the end, where I can download what I want.
• If it’s a long workshop, open the windows, or release people from the aircon room at least every 2 hours for a few minutes.
• Facilitate people’s comments, don’t censor them, but don’t encourage the pesky guy who has to relieve himself of his 10 million superfluous questions while I sit there and get you.
• I like funny clever. But please don’t try to make me laugh.

At Consensio we find the involvement of employees from all areas of the company is our priority in brand development. Our clients want to achieve information and commitment, but we find it is only in the interaction with the brand, that the idea of visual information sticks with people. Unlike other brand developers, Consensio has developed a process that starts before the presentation of visuals and truly makes our client the co-author of the brand communication.

This process is seamlessly working with internal HR processes and organisational development goals. It enables our clients to build trust through information, collaboration and shared visual identity. Brand portfolio strategies come alive when the client is the custodian of it.

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.