Photography and your brand: Do you have a unique, recognizable style? Tips to ensure you don't look like everyone else. Especially competitors.
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2008 Newsletters
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Understand Your Options: Naming Your Company, Service, ProductIssue Number 28 | June 2008 Your naming initiative is underway. You've assembled a great creative team, analyzed competitors' names to clarify market positioning, and determined an overall brand structure to accommodate future growth. You've sketched out a URL strategy, identified 7 to 10 brand attributes to focus the brainstorming, and secured a trademark attorney. You've also agreed — hard as it may be — to let go of your working or internal name. As familiar as that name is, you know it isn't appropriate for a wider audience of customers, prospects, and investors. Before you take the plunge into the exciting, always choppy waters of naming, there's one last step. Make sure you understand the categories of names available to you — and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Naming, like any creative endeavor, isn't a terribly tidy process, but you can give it structure and discipline, if you decide, up front, which categories of names are right for your brand. |
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Presentations: 8 mistakes everyone makesIssue Number 27 | April 2008 Planning a presentation? You should know that public speaking is only partially about speaking. "War and Peace" is a brilliant novel, but if you stood at a podium and read it word for word to an audience, no matter how well you read aloud, you'd soon be reading to yourself. Your content and what you say are certainly important, but how you say it and how you present it demand equal attention. The most powerful presentations successfully blend four elements: relevant content, a logical organization, compelling visuals, an engaging speaker. As an audience member, you've been to your share of less than stellar presentations. The PowerPoint slides are out of order. The speaker reads her notes. The pacing is off. The visuals are boring. The flow is hard to follow. It's not a pleasant experience for anyone in the room, including the speaker. How can you prevent this when everyone's attention is on you? |
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Taglines: Your brand in shorthandIssue Number 26 | March 2008 It's hard to imagine Nike without "Just Do It." Or Target without "Expect More. Pay Less." But for every "What Happens Here, Stays Here," there are hundreds of taglines few remember. So what, exactly, is a tagline and why do we have them? A tagline is a succinct statement of your brand position, a phrase or sentence used to capture attention and communicate value. "The Uncola," "Betcha Can't Eat Just One," "M'm! M'm! Good!" (Come on, you know the products.) The best taglines convey a primary benefit in a memorable way — and have staying power, even years after they've been replaced. When you hear Chevy's classic, "Like a Rock," you can't help but think of trucks that are tough and durable. Let's take a whirlwind tour of taglines — old and new — to discover what's behind these distilled marketing messages. |
