How's your rep?

"The more complicated the world gets, the more comforting the familiar will seem, and the better it will get for brands."
-Fortune Magazine

Every company has a reputation.
Everyone you meet will form an opinion about your company ... even if they have not done business with you yet. The challenge is to manage your reputation so that the opinion that people have of you is positive. This is what creates a brand!

But Brand is not about slick ads ...
It's about getting your target market to see you as the preferred choice. It's not just about what you do ... it's about what you do differently from everyone else. To become a successful brand, you've got to be relentlessly focused on what you do that adds value ... and communicate that to your target markets ... the same way ... every time!

In an amazingly complex and competing world where it's increasingly hard to know what's real and what's not ...
Your customers want to be able to depend on your brand to deliver the same, familiar experience every time. This is what builds customer relationships and ultimately ... customer loyalty. The stronger the relationship ... the more business they will do with you and the more likely it will be that they will refer you to others. Having your customers not only acknowledge, but support the promise of your brand is the key to building a thriving business.

Ask yourself ...
Is my brand promise clear, distinctive and easily understood? Does it express a unique, compelling benefit that my customers and prospects can believe in and feel comfortable with?

Develop your Anti-Brand to help focus your creative.

As a brand developer or a brand manager, you tend to be concentrated on who you are and what you do. You create logos, guidelines, essence boards, brand promises and creative platforms but how much time have you spent on who you are not. Have you created your anti-brand?


Whether you use your in-house creative department or you have an agency or design firm it is vital that you give as much information pertaining to a project in order to develop on target, strategic and successful creative for you brand. And in this time of budget cuts and lost personnel it is vital that we have an established efficient processes that allows your creative team to find the most effective and creative solutions in the most timely fashion.

Basically, quit wasting time developing concepts that can never and will never be approved. Concepts that are not strategic or on brand. But generate more on target creative and do it in a timely manner. This is where establishing your anti-brand is vital.


When you make a creative or deign brief, it is like giving your creative team a map. A map to the creative solution based on your brand. Based on who you are. When you pair that with your anti-brand, it is like giving your team a GPS system. You are giving them the quickest route to find a creative solution.

What is your anti-brand? Specifically it is what you are not. It is the other side of your brand story.

1. EXAMINE: Revisit your Brand documents to make sure they are still accurate.

2. BUT NOT: Take words that describe your brand and define them further using "But not". Ex: Our brand is Modern looking but not technology oriented.

3. Gather images to create an anti-essence board of those things that do not, and can not ever define who you are. Visually describe those "But not" phrases.

4. Define your brand mentors and those who are not your mentors. (Go Daddy.com usually enters in the conversation here)

You anti-brand will cut the number of concepts you have to generate and the number of revisions on a project. It will give you better and more successful work.


Written by:
Matthew Blazer
VP Creative Director, Breehl, Traynor & Zehe

Do small businesses really need strategic planning?

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke to a group of small business owners about business planning and marketing. The question they asked most was: "Do small businesses really need to do any kind of strategic planning?" The answer was "yes", but I understood why they groaned at the answer. In my experience, strategic planning is usually painful -- too long, too complicated and improperly executed -- if at all. But it doesn't have to be that way. At the risk of oversimplifying, strategic planning is just developing ways to build your organization and then actually doing those things. It's a roadmap to wherever you want your organization to go.

Another way to think about it is to answer these five questions:
- Where are we?
- What do we have to work with?
- Where do we want to be?
- How do we get there?
- How will we know we've succeeded?

In today's economy and fast-paced environment where short-term objectives become so demanding that it's difficult to think about your organization's long-term existence, strategic planning is more necessary than ever. It can help you anticipate change, identify areas where you may have issues or opportunities and do something about it. And it doesn't have to be a dreaded task. I've used a shortened version of the process with clients, and we've answered the questions and put together a workable plan without spending too much time or money and enduring a lot of pain. Was it hard work? Absolutely. Was it worth it? Definitely. If you haven't considered doing strategic planning, or if you've given up on it, give it a chance. It may be a cliche', but the old proverb still holds true: "He who fails to plan, plans to fail."

Cam Mordaunt is V.P. of Strategic Marketing & PR at Breehl, Traynor & Zehe.