Brand names are a verbally communicated thing (word of mouth is still the most important brand builder). So how a brand sounds and the imagery it creates, along with the emotional response it triggers in the listener, becomes arguably more your brand than your logo.

People have a tendency to shorten long names which is why we have nicknames for things. Take for example the one syllable in coke, verses the four syllables in coca cola. It is important to keep this in mind when coming up with a name and think ‘short’, but avoid jumping to abbreviations for two reasons, first up this can actually lengthen the verbal brand (how many syllables does it take to say the letter W?) and second, people new to a brand that is abbreviated will not immediately know what the abbreviation is for and miss the meaning.

The ideal brand name is a simple one syllable word (or two, just so long as it isn’t easily shortened to one) that creates an instant, concrete picture in the mind (not necessarily product or service related – think Apple), or a strong feeling in heart of the market that is intended for.

The word you choose must sound good, be easy to spell (with no confusing letter swaps) and there should be no confusion when it is heard or read. This will save you lots of grief later.

If you are marketing to other countries it is very important to check that the word does not mean something offensive, or embarrassing in their languages, for example Pajero meaning wanker in Spanish slang.

Of course once you have your shortlist of names it is time to check its availability before locking it in, but that is another blog post entirely!

We recommend this methodology so you take control of your brand from the outset and do not leave it up to the market to create a nickname for you. This way you have a solid foundation to build your marketing strategy from at the very beginning.

If you have any questions about creating your brand name feel free to comment below.

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Happy New Year and on behalf of the Sponge team I wish you a fantastic year of growth and profitability.

It has been a long time since I’ve posted anything so this one will be brief. And I am committing to making time to do so more frequently this year. Hopefully I can persuade some of the team to do so too. While on the subject of the team, we have two new members for 2012, Ming and Ben, and are expecting another two within the next month.

Ming and Ben expand our web development team and we expect them to be awesome for the projects they have been assigned.

Finally, while we have a back log of projects being worked through right now by our web team, we do have some windows opening up shortly for brand strategy and brand creation if you have a project that you are itching to start this year, so get in touch now to avoid disappointment.

Have an awesome week…

Luke

P.S. For my first solid post of 2012 I am thinking of the topic of how crucial it is to get your brand name right first. What do you think?

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The days of the brochure-ware website is dead. Today, for the highest conversion rate, your website needs to have a specific objective (and ideally just the one).

In Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less he talks about a grocery store that alternated between allowing customers to sample 24 different flavours of jam & 6 different flavours of jam. With 24 flavours on offer, more people came to the table BUT only 10% as many people bought jam than when only 6 flavours were on offer. This demonstrates that when offered too many choices a human being is paralysed and simply chooses the default, which is to do nothing (your biggest competition!).

This doesn’t mean that your business needs to have only one product or service. It simply means that you need to rethink the one action you need your visitor to do on your website in order to get them into your sales pipeline. This will vary from business to business, but a great place to start is getting their permission to receive emails from you in exchange for something of value to them. Ideally this is something that doesn’t cost you anything to deliver (apart from the initial production of course) and can be automatic, like a free PDF report.

Now, if your website and what you offer is simply too complex, you may want to think about it differently. You can build specific landing pages for any traffic generating marketing campaign you run, that are built with the single focus and desired response. Today domain names are are so cheap that you can afford to purchase one for each campaign or offering. You will need to speak to your web partner about the best way to deal with these pages.

The beauty of the web is that you have the flexibility to test, measure and react in realtime. There are powerful statistics available for free like Google Analytics that show you what is working and what isn’t, so you can make any necessary changes as soon as you need.

With all this power and flexibility comes a challenge. Do you invest in a Content Management System (plus other design software) and training to understand and handle all the changes in-house? Do you commission your design and marketing partner to build a website and then pay them periodically to update it? Or do you work with a partner to lay down some long term strategy and get on a maintenance program with them where a fixed amount of time is regularly allocated (weekly, fortnightly) to review and make recommendations in light of what is working elsewhere on the Internet?

Apart from the comfort in knowing your website will be supported ongoing, what are some of the benefits of a maintenance program?

Price – With a maintenance program your prepaid fees may not be subject to the same minimum time charges as the time is deducted exactly as used. The rate is often discounted from the regular rate on account of the reduced costs that come with a contract.

Priority – as a contracted maintenance client your website should take priority over non-contracted update requests, as ultimately if you are not getting significant value out of your agreement you won’t renew it. Look at what turn around time you are promised for your requests.

Expert advice – A great web partner should take pride in knowing what is going on online and how any new technologies and strategies can work for your business. Look for a partner who make it their goal to recommend any new developments that will generate a return for your business.

I will end this with a Lee Iacocca quote that I often think about for branding and marketing, especially when it comes to the web.

"If you are standing still - you are really sliding backwards."

Lee Iacocca

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Brand Positioning is a term coined by Al Reis and Jack Trout some 30 years ago in their book titled  Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, 20th Anniversary Edition Some things have certainly changed, but the principles still remain true. And while they may be speaking directly to businesses competing in an oligopoly with the directive to own a single word in the mind of your market, where it is simpler to do so, owning a distinct value position is just as important in a market of any other size.

What is Brand Positioning?

It is the distinct meaning, feeling or promise that is immediately associated in the mind of your market when they hear or see your brand.

Brand Positioning starts with understanding who the key potential clients are that you can provide greatest value for. Then knowing where to find them, what the optimal price point is, and the single most distinct and untapped story, or key attributes, that when used correctly will get them to buy from you over your competition, whether or not they are in the market to buy right now.

Armed with these insights, you then build a remarkable brand identity (logo, packaging, marketing material, etc), culture and value proposition that distinctly addresses each of the key discoveries to position your business as the only reasonable choice for these prospects.

So, how do you do position your brand?

Research

Study your clients, prospective clients and your competitors.

Define your main key buyer profiles or personas. It is common to have a hand full of different key buyers. Create a written profile – a buyer persona – for each of these buyers by asking questions like: Who they are? What are their responsibilities and challenges? How do your solutions fit for their particular challenges? What are their buying influences? And anything else that helps you understand how to sell to this buyer. It is helpful to give each buyer persona a name and describe their physical characteristics. Use these buyer personas as the target for your business communications. For more great information and insights into creating buyer personas I recommend you visit: webinknow.com and buyerpersona.com

Understand the true value of what you provide. Poll your current clients to learn where they believe you have provided them the most value and how they would explain it to a friend or colleague in their own words. At the same time you may also want to check the relevancy of your offerings for them at this time.

Talk with your prospective clients to see what value they are looking for from your business. Your prospective clients can tell you what they need or want which you are not currently offering. The answers may uncover a real void in the market just waiting for you to fill it. In some cases this could open up a completely new niche category for you to create and own.

Study your competition to know what the stories and value propositions they are using so you can understand the landscape and be able to be unique or distinct when creating yours.

Learn what other leading brands servicing comparative price points in different industries look like to your client. Consider their style, aesthetics and level of quality of design.

Create

Find the single most distinct and untapped value statement and build your brand around it.

These next processes can be very challenging. It is helpful to remember that while you are very important to your business, you are in most cases not the buyer of your offerings, so you need to step outside of your perspective during this stage and take the perspective of your primary buyer persona. It is also quite valuable to put together an advisory board of some of your clients and prospects to use for regular feedback during the development of these elements.

All the research you have done has given you a wealth of information to use to create your value proposition. More on value propositions here. A value proposition is your core brand story. It is the collection of reasons your clients buy from you. In it you differentiate your business from your competition and articulate the distinct value you provide, substantiated with examples of how you have helped similar businesses to those you are targeting. With a strong value proposition you are most of the way there and you lay the foundation for all your marketing efforts.

Next create a distinct, compelling and a sticky tagline (See Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die) or core message (sticky: short, succinct, easily visualised, interesting and immediately memorable). This should be an ultra-condensed version of your value proposition, ideally around three words long. This becomes the essence of your brand position.

Then build your brand identity and collateral material to look like you belong in the price bracket you are aiming at. The quality level communicated by your brand, in each and every client contact point, will impact on the price point you can demand.

Deliver

Make every aspect of your business clearly and authentically communicate your core message.

This means every single point of contact that your clients can encounter with your business needs to be consistent. From your signs, brochures, website, through to your on hold audio, it all needs to be about delivering your core message. This especially includes the way your staff interacts with your clients. Engraining your core message (by way of core values) into your company culture and then hiring specifically to fit it, can in some cases be more important than any other single touch point.

Evolve

Frequently check the pulse of your brand and evolve to fit the changes that naturally occur.

This is about staying current and relevant with your brand position and your offerings. A simple way to do this is continue to talk with your current and prospective clients regularly to see what they believe the value you provide is and that it is still relevant to them with the changing time. They can tell you what you are not currently offering that could help them which may turn into a completely new niche category for you to own. It is about listening for the new possibilities and evolving your brand position to suit.

I look forward to the questions that arise. Feel free to ask them below, or email me directly.

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Your answers to our survey have given us the top 10 services we offer that you want to know more about. They are:

1. Online Marketing Strategy
2. Brand Positioning
3. Website design and maintenance
4. Search Engine Optimisation
5. Social Media for Business (facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc)
6. Web Video
7. Business & Brand Naming
8. Google Adwords
9. Email Newsletter Marketing
10. Logo Design and Stationery (inc digital templates)

Over the next 10 weeks I intend to post an article each week working through this list, starting with Online Marketing Strategy. If you can’t wait for information about any of these subjects you are welcome to contact our team to arrange your own personal consultation.

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I have finally been able to review the answers of our recent Value Proposition survey. While there is still a sizable amount of work remaining to produce the intended value proposition statement, there were some wonderful comments that have made me and my team extremely happy. So, on behalf of my team I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for all your help!

I would like to share some of the comments right away, however I will be respecting the privacy of their authors.

“A refreshingly practical and commercial approach to the smoke and mirrors world of digital marketing and web development”

“Easy to work with. Great ideas flowed from the very first meeting. “

“Lots of positive feedback, comments that our website looks amazing, professional and makes our clients feel confident in our company & brand.”

“I have only ever heard positive comments relating to our brand name and design. They were fresh 7 years ago, and I believe will continue to be so for many years to come. “

“They make a brand exciting and give it new life.”

“Received many compliments from strangers and clients.”

“A real market presence and recognition of our brand.”

“They are not cheap, BUT if you want quality creative that works you need to meet with them before you go anywhere else.”

“A company with youthful energy, and ideas that are contemporary and innovative!”

“Different is such an understated word but it sort of is appropriate.”

“A simple engagement process and a team that is very easy to work with. No attitudes; No egos. Just a group of hard working, keen and very creative guys and girls that produce outstanding designs.”

“They are creative and cutting edge with their thought processes; their professionalism and willingness to work with the client (us) was very refreshing. They were always positive about achieving the results that we were going to be happy with.”

We love the work we get the privilege to do for you here at The Sponge and this kind of positive response is really special to us. So again from me and my team, a HUGE thanks for your help, your answers are invaluable to us.

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As one of our core services is creating (and managing) brands for new businesses, my team and I have the frequent pleasure of meeting with entrepreneurs. I think many of these entrepreneurs wouldn’t call themselves this, however Webster’s dictionary defines “entrepreneur” as: ‘one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.’, so in my opinion they definitely are.

I personally admire the bravery that it takes to invest in an idea. I feel a kinship with this type of person as it is something I do time and again (with varied success!). Even with the uncertainty that accompanies creating a new business, there is freedom in knowing you are in control and not at threat of being fired.

The economist and entrepreneur Paul Zane Pilzer informs us in his Entrepreneurial Challenge that with the current economic climate, you really have no choice but to become an entrepreneur and the time to do it is when the going is good, not to wait until times are tough. I am not saying that you need to quit your job today and invest in that idea you have stewing over. I am saying that it is definitely worth a discussion to see if it is feasible.

Our policy of only accepting new “non-competitive clients” means our clients are spread across many different industries. With this variety of industries comes the privilege of experiencing and learning many different business models, processes and practises. One benefit is that we can share these practises with our clients in different industries, in some cases giving them first mover advantage. Similarly and sometimes more importantly, we can use them to shape a newly born idea, brought to us by an entrepreneur, into a fully developed brand and strategic business model.

We have two such projects in the development which I will touch on briefly now and share with you in detail in future posts once they have launched. One is an international business model that worked successfully ten years ago, but has been flailing in recent times due its laborious and out dated processes. We have streamlined this model into a completely scalable, cashflow generating online model with a powerful referral funnel and client retention system.

In the second of these we recognised that what the client thought was the product would work better as a free lead generator and the actual ‘profitable’ product is something else entirely. The new product has the potential to generate more than eight times the revenue from each client than the original idea. Furthermore if we are successful in adding the value we plan with this project, the repeat revenue is ongoing.

You may be thinking how does this fit in the realm of branding?

My team and I believe that client experience is a huge part of branding. If you get the client experience right, you will get the brand right. An awesome example of this is Zappos! Zappos generates over a billion USD in online sales annually, with 80% coming from existing clients. Their focus is their company culture and their client experience. I recently read to Zappos CEO Tony Hseih’s recently released book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose in which he goes into detail about how Zappos got to where it is today. I highly recommend it!

When evaluating a new idea for a business or a brand, we like to think of it from your new client’s perspective. In the formative steps of creating a business there is every opportunity to shape the client experience completely so that it is ideal. Naturally this is heavily intertwined with the business’ process, so to us it is a critical part of branding and something we care very deeply about.

This kind of work is exciting to us and we relish every opportunity to create something special. Have you got an idea you want to discuss?

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Recently it has come up in conversation that our brand design process is unique to that of our competitors. While we agree that it is a highly successful process, because it is the only way we know, it seems the natural way to work.

To understand what sets The Sponge apart and how time after time we achieve such striking and more importantly effective results, you can simply immerse yourself in the following narrative of our uniquely creative process and imagine how well it will work for you too.

Soaking it up

One of our friendly team meet with you to discuss your goals and objectives, as well as a carefully selected set of questions, focusing special attention on your Vision, Mission & Values. Our first and most important goal is to uncover your core message, or the pieces from which it will be masterfully created. This only comes through a comprehensive understanding of who you are (as an organisation/business) and what you intend to be as a brand. Only those who are prepared to invest the necessary resources, honestly bare all and then trust us to deliver will make the cut.

Each of the key members of our senior creative team is briefed with your answers.  We openly discuss them in the first of many forums in preparation for our chilli chicken session (a ritual of brainstorming over spicy Thai cuisine), so that each of us is crystal clear on the objectives. Any questions that arise are asked immediately of you via phone, email, or IM and the answers hungrily devoured.

Studying your competition helps reveals how and where you fit in the marketplace. If it is unclear, then we focus on what you do differently and/or what makes you unique, so as to position you in a space of your own. The team playfully explore “sticky” (memorable) words, or phrases that best communicate your position, to find a core message/positioning statement to build your identity around. The ideas generated here are shared amongst the team and used to fuel for the pre-brainstorm deep dive.

Pre-brainstorm deep dive, or lateral researching, readies the team with many possible design directions. We do this by deep diving in thesaurus, dictionary, quote books, Google search, photo stock, etc. Each new link is laterally explored, following each connection until we hit an end, then we jump back to a fork and follow a different connection until all avenues are exhausted. Every moment an inspired idea is revealed, it is documented or sketched for discussion at the chilli chicken.

Chilli Chicken

Even if it simply becomes a part of a custom typeface in a logo type, designing the symbol first is our first objective when creating your brand. A huge amount of potential communicating power resides in a strong symbol. We believe in thinking globally for your brand because of global trade and the reach of the internet. A graphic symbol crosses some borders far easier than words, for example we all know the flying kangaroo and we know the golden arches. There are a great many factors that come into consideration when designing an international symbol, i.e.  the nationalities and global demographics you are targeting, or hope to target in the future and their social, religious or cultural differences. Another veritable minefield is the international trademark databases and processes that need to be checked and navigated.

An open forum begins where each team member shares their findings from the deep dive and ideas and concepts are voiced. Ideas are quickly sketched with coloured markers onto the largest pieces of bond paper we can organise, the aim is not to create a masterpiece, but simply to convey the core ideas and open up a free flow of creativity. Dozens of ideas are scribbled down, discussed, improved, diversified, contracted, discarded or marked for development. Each idea is continually measured against the core message/positioning statement. Once we have well and truly pushed past the point of exhaustion of directions, as a group we decide which concepts are worthy of being taken to screen.

To Screen

The ideas that were selected are worked up in black and white in illustrator by our skilful designers.  It is important to get the design right in one colour first, for its many applications i.e. Engraving and Stamping. It also forces a certain level of simplicity, and enables a brand to own a single colour, something that is common amongst many of the world’s top brands i.e. Coke, IBM. Dozens of versions of each design are explored. Painstaking variations in size, shape, proportion, stroke, etc, are tested, each projecting a subtle change in response.  At this stage the concepts undergo further scrutiny as to whether they best communicate what they are intended too and what possible changes may enhance their appeal and concept strength.

From these many refined visual ideas we funnel down once more and select what we as a team consider to be the three most powerful and compelling visual ideas to progress onto typographic application. Careful thought is taken to choose a varied selection of fonts and typographic layouts that compliment the brand’s image and message. With thousands of typefaces to choose from, there are usually a handful that, with a little modification, capture the essence of the brand and compliments the icon well. If a suitable typeface cannot be found, a custom typeface will be designed.

From the assortment of typographic options of each of the final concepts, a further grading is done by the team. This new shortlist of designs conveying different character and strengths are carefully tested for balance by inverting on black so that the negative shapes become the focus. This highlights the balance of the shapes that create the logo, both internally and externally and enables further refinement. The designs that have the opportunity too, are refined further and tested again, and we still haven’t introduced colour yet.

Concept Podium

We move those concepts on to the next level of refinement where taking into consideration the tone we believe you need to convey, we explore colour applications and layout many variants and combinations. Each is judged by our team for the emotional and logical response the colour options command. Further suggestions are made and trialled. An official vote is conducted amongst The Sponge team as to which option works best for each of the three final concepts. The final choices are worked up as finished concepts and displayed in our proprietary Concept Podium presentation system. This is where we apply your new potential brand identities to present to you, showcasing them in various applications to give you a feel for each design and demonstrate the flexibility of each concept. The concepts are placed on the Concept Podium in our recommended order of Gold, Silver & Bronze as democratically voted by our team. The Concept Podium also provides a detailed written rationale of each idea and its intent.

We are yet to find a client who has not been exhilarated with our concepts and we challenge you to test our abilities. We love to be challenged and we love understanding new and different businesses.

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We have received some great feedback and now the new and improved BrandPulseCheck tool is officially live. Thank you for your help! Now it is ready for you to use it, benefit from it and share it!

This new tool allows us to freely share our knowledge with millions of people and gives you the ability to check your brand’s pulse in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee. In that short time you can have your own personalized report, bursting with actionable information in any area which could do with improvement. The brand pulse check and personalized report are all completely free.

Enjoy!

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After some solid blocks of work we are ready to show you our brand new online tool. It is called the Brand Pulse Check and it does just that. When you visit BrandPulseCheck you will spend less than 6 minutes answering multiple choice questions about your brand.After you are done with the questions you are given your Pulse (and a breakdown). You are also given a personalised PDF report with information and action steps for the areas in which you have room for improvement. The best part for you, it is FREE!

We have not officially released it yet and I would love to get your opinion on it before we do.

[Much respect to all the business people and authors whose ideas have inspired our practises and this tool.]

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