Category: a slice of STRATEGY

Pure, unadulterated strategy: marketing, brand positioning, & entrepreneurial wisdom. New trends with staying power. Old standbys with inarguable value.
What to embrace, what to avoid, and what to attempt — with steady discernment.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Brand is in the eye of the beholder

Posted on by Red Slice

Check out this fun little experiment in brand perception at www.brandtags.net. They flash a logo up and you type the first thing that comes to mind when you see it. From the site: "The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, a brand is whatever they say it is."  Then you get to see the tags that people typed in and where yours falls in the mix.

Just goes to show that while logos are just visual elements, it’s the promise, and experience of every interaction with the company that goes into its brand. However, if you have had no interaction with a new brand, you will rely on the visual cues (colors, shapes, typefaces) to get a feel for what they are all about. This is why its so important to build a strong brand strategy first, decide what you want to communicate and THEN design a logo. Not the other way around.

Recently, I got a phone call from someone asking about my services for her fledgling business. She asked me my initial impressions of her current logo, which she had paid a marketing agency a lot of money to design for her. Now I normally don’t like to just give spur-of-the-moment audits until I understand the brand strategy and what the company is trying to communicate and to whom. But she had described a bit about her business before I even saw the logo, so I understood some of what her main communication points were.

The first red flag I got for her was that this agency had never once asked her who her ideal customer was before designing her logo. How can agencies get away with such negligent behavior? How can you design something when you don’t know who is consuming it and how they need to feel about it? It kills me that agencies pull the wool over people’s eyes like that.

I gave her my honest impressions of what the color, graphics and font communicated to me. And she was not happy with my answers. She told me how much she liked her logo, and how maybe that was just one person’s opinion. To which I agreed with everything she said. I actually liked her logo, too, and yes, my opinion is just one. One honed by over 15 years experience in marketing communications and branding and understanding how to separate my personal preferences from the needs of the target audience, but yes, one person’s opinion.

My response to her was that my opinion didn’t matter and neither did hers in the end. I liked her logo, too, but it completely contradicted what she had told me she wanted her business to stand for – and quite frankly contradicted the more sophisticated and polished brand image of he website overall, which seemed much more aligned with what she had stated.

And that is what really matters in the end. I have no idea if maybe this logo does strike a chord and attract her target audience effectively – perhaps it does (this would take more work to figure out than just a phone call). But given what she said she wanted her brand to communicate and what her logo was communicating instead, these were my initial first reactions to the logo. And they were not what she wanted to hear. Especially after spending what I assume to be a lot of money.

Brand is in the eye of the beholder. And it’s true: if your target audience loves your look and feel and if it communicates to them exactly what you want it to, then you are right on target. However, everything – color, typeface, graphic style, size, etc – in the logo communicates something consciously and subconsciously. When you (or your designers) don’t do this due diligence in ensuring your visual elements communicate the exact message you want to the exact people you want, leaving room for misinterpretation, then the fault lies with you – not with the people perceiving your brand.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Brand at Work: Pink’s Original Bakery

Posted on by Red Slice

PinksLogo I love it when I find cool new branding while I’m out and about. Case in point: my neighborhood Tully’s has been promoting their new bakery items, which are supplied by Seattle’s Pink’s Original Bakery. With the colorful pink striped banners hanging up in store, I just had to grab their brochure.  And when I opened it, I found another example of what I mean when I say “delight your audience.”

Pink’s was started in 1987 by two “babes” (as they say) Molly and Anne. Their story is on the inside of the brochure, which also includes fun photos and clever captions of fresh fruit, cows – even a Polaroid of said “babes.” The vibe is casual, playful and a touch irreverent.  Fresh, organic goodness does not have to be so serious and poignant all the time. 

From the captions written in retro typewriter font, to the colorful comic “talk bubble” coming out of the cow’s mouth (“Moo!”), to their closing line of “We promise to keep working hard to brighten your day with a taste of goodness that can only come from using the best local ingredients and a ton of chutzpah” – you get that these gals are bold, funny and real.  So many bakeries look and sound the same (cue epic music while wheat fields quaver in slow-mo in the early morning sunlight….) so Pink’s stands out. They took the personality of their quirky founders and parlayed that into a quirky brand that made me smile. And made me buy their product.

Delight. That’s the stuff that gives me goose bumps when I experience branding done well. Yes, I’m a marketing geek, I know.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

The Dreaded “S” Word

Posted on by Red Slice

Entrepreneurs love being creative, dynamic, bold, innovative….but they often hate SELLING. Which is kind of funny, seeing as how that is the key to generating revenue. Women business owners especially struggle with what they perceive to be “annoying”, “slick” or “deceitful.” But if you don’t believe in the value of your goods and services – you as the person who knows them the most initimately and cares about them the most – how do you expect anyone else to?

Fiona Walsh spoke yesterday at a CRAVE Seattle Coffee Chat about igniting your sales. She’s a business advisor and has a a knack for putting sales processes in place no matter what your business. Marketing and sales go hand in hand, and a lot of her advice also stems from having a strong brand story. As someone who put marketing processes and campaigns in place to “stock the sales pipeline” for enterprise software sales reps, I thought she did a great job of breaking things down to the simplest terms, especially for people that may conduct consumer sales and not B2B.

Effective sales is about telling your story and addressing your customers needs. Its a conversation showing how your offerings can solve someone’s problem or help them achieve their goals. Too often we try to say what we want to about our company without addressing the value we provide and why people should care. Both solopreneurs and million dollar businesses are guilty of this. It’s also about empathy – putting yourself in the customer’s shoes, addressing their pains and offering solutions. She cited a recent Harvard research study that stated “empathy” was the #1 trait for a successful salesperson.

Here is Fiona’s list of the most common sales mistakes people make:
1) Assume it takes one call to close the deal: As we talk about with branding, you have to consistently be in front of someone at least 7 times before they may be willing to buy. There is a lot of noise, so you need to have multiple touchpoints and offer new and different value each time. Maybe send interesting articles, invite people to events, stay in touch about promotions and special offers. Don’t assume once is enough.

2) Not clearly communicating what you sell: I see this one over and over again on branding projects. You need clarity on what you sell and to whom. Who is your ideal customer? Who are you talking to? What problem are you solving for them? Fiona suggests having 3 niche markets and clear messaging to all of them.

3) Selling features, not benefits: I also see this one over and over. Don’t tell me about all the widgets and technology and “things.” Tell me how your product or service makes my life better, my family better, my business more successful. Then, once I’m hooked, you can start delving into the “how” you do all of this. A feature is an attribute; a benefit is a value.

4) Lack of qualifying: Not all leads are good ones, so you need to answer 3 simple questions to determine if someone is worth your time: Do they have a budget? Do they have a reasonable timeframe? Do they have the ability to make the buying decision? I’ve seen software sales reps on million dollar deals not answer these questions effectively, so you are not alone. If the answer to any of the above is “no” you need to get to the right people within the organization, or spend your time on more qualified leads elsewhere until those “no’s” turn to “yes.”

5) Failure to close: At the end of a killer presentation, you need to ask for the business. Many business owners do not do this and just assume if they pitch was good enough, the client will come to them. Set an action plan, a next step. Ask when they want to get started. “When is a good time to come in for our initial session?” “To get this work done by Christmas, we need to start on Monday.” etc.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Living your brand – inside and out

Posted on by Red Slice

I am digging these guys, Incite, who I  saw at an American Marketing Association luncheon yesterday. They help companies live their brand inside and out, especially within their operations, HR and employee practices.  These are my peeps.

As Red Slice always says, brand strategy is something that guides more than your marketing. It can help define the types of people to hire, the sorts of partners that are the best fit – and what internal policies you should put in place. For example, if your are all about “innovation” then should there really be a policy that you get fired if you try something new and fail? Or would there be 10 layers of bureaucracy someone has to cut through before their idea can see the light of day? If you are about “innovation” do you hire risk takers? Do you partner with firms who haven’t changed their business model in 30 years? 

These guys shared some interesting factoids about the dangers of your brand and vision not permeating your organization inside and out. In a Towers Perrin survey of 90,000  employees worldwide, 79% % of them feel partly or fully disengaged from organization. Worse, 8% are activelydisconected or  undermining the company. More than 70% of employees report they do not have a clear sense of their organizations vision or strategy (Branded Customer Service, Janelle Barlow and Paul Stewart).  And 43% of managers describe  they lack a clear understanding of the positioning of their own brand. (Branded Customer Service, Janelle Barlow and Paul Stewart)

If your own employees – the one’s who live, eat and breathe your company every day; the ones whose paychecks depend on your success – are not proper brand stewards, ambassadors or even know why the heck you do what you do, how are customers or prospects supposed to figure it out? And this is true whether you have 3 employees or 80,000.

Marketing and branding starts internally and gets conveyed outward.  It shocks me that more marketing departments are not in lock-step with groups like HR, who bring fresh blood into the company each year and paint a picture of the company’s mission, culture and values for recruits. How do they know what to communicate is they are not aligned with marketing and the brand builders? Worse, how does ANY department know how to act, what to value, which messages to convey and processes to implement if they don’t understand  the company’s DNA?

I love that these guys show companies the gains that can be made in productivity and eventually the botom line when an organization’s own people are aligned and can articulate the brand.  Of course, some companies don’t have a deliberate, well thought out brand – which means either they get lucky and everyone aligns as a happy accident. Yeah, right. Or you have rogue employees all spnning their wheels, doing their own thing, and trying to steer the car in every direction – resulting in your company being stuck in the mud while  potential customers jump on the bus of your competitor who actually has their @#$! together and is moving forward in unison.

Be a part of their national brand survey at www.incitepartners.com/survey1, launching in December.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Is your logo “sexy”?

Posted on by Red Slice

Excuse me? That’s right….Is. Your. Logo. Sexy.

“But, Maria, I sell packaged software apps to enterprise customers.” or “I provide coaching services.” What do those have to do with being sexy?

By sexy, I mean sophisticated, expressive, uniquely “yours” in the minds of your target audience. “Sexy” is in the eye of the beholder, for sure, but you just need to make sure it’s sexy within your marketspace.

Guest blogger Nancy Owyang, creative director of Eye2Eye Graphics has created a funky assessment to judge your logo’s “it’ factor. She also has some tips to share with us on what makes a logo effective. If you’d like to receive her PDF assessment, please drop her an email at nancy@eye2eyegraphics.com.

Is Your Logo SEXY?
Five Key Ingredients to an Effective Business Logo
By Nancy Owyang

First impressions have the ability to quickly make or break a deal. If you dress to impress for a first meeting with an important business client, doesn’t it make sense for your logo to always put your best foot forward? Having a “SEXY” logo is not just about looks—it’s so much more! It’s about pride, confidence, and knowing that your logo is telling your best story.

Your logo is the most visible way for current or prospective customers to recognize you, know what you do, and how well you do it. Here are five key concepts to ensure a quality, successful logo that reaches your ideal clients and brings the “SEXY” back to your business’s brand identity.

1. Is your business having a visual identity crisis? Your business should have a clearly defined identity with one logo and style that appears on your business cards, stationery, brochures, newsletters—indeed, all your marketing materials. Consistency sends the message that your business is stable and dependable. Your logo needs to visibly represent a business that is professional, successful, and at the top of its field.

2. Is your logo unique to your business? Just as your business is special and unique, your business’s “picture” needs to say “unique” as well. A professionally designed logo will ensure a meaningful identity mark that is memorable and captures the essence of your business.

3. Is your logo breaking the bank? Printing business cards, postcards and other promotional materials can be a major expense. Using color, as beautiful as it is, can be challenging price-wise; the more colors in the design, the more it can cost to produce.

4. Is your logo too complicated? A simple mark is easier to remember than one that is extremely intricate—two good examples are Target® and Nike®. Your logo must be “scalable” and look just as good in a small image on an ink pen as it does on a 10-foot tall billboard. Make sure that your logo also works in black-and-white to allow for maximum flexibility in printing choices.

5. Does your logo have a photographic image in it? Stay away from photographic images in your identity mark; difficult to reproduce and re-size, they often appear fuzzy. And always make sure your logo retains its integrity and legibility when photocopied or faxed; test it on the nearest black-and-white copy machine.

Take an eye-2-eye look at your logo; is it a worn out t-shirt or your professional best? Your logo is a key part of your business identity, communicating an image of your business. Is it the best one? Use these tips to ensure that your logo puts your business’s best foot forward—and moving towards success!

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

How much of YOU should you put in your brand?

Posted on by Red Slice

We had a lively group at our Ignite Your Marketing workshop last night. Whitney Keyes and I presented some brand and marketing basics, a 10-step formula for creating a brand strategy, and how to put that brand into action.

Feedback was wonderful!

“Well-crafted, simple, clear explanations”

“It made me want to brainstorm further!”

“Motivating, current, lively”

“Excellent resource for any small business owner or business owner re-thinking their brand”

“Loved it! All the stuff I should have done before I opened my business but didn’t!”

“I learned a lot about how to approach my own brand marketing as well as some valuable tools for promoting these values to clients. Useful for getting focused and taking the right steps.”Shout out to the great businesses who attended: Studio Evolve pilates studio, Champion Assistants online sales and marketing consultants, Ladies Who Launch Seattle community for women entrepreneurs, Andrea Rae bodywork, and Married with Luggage lifestyle and travel blog.

One of our discussions was around how much of your personality do you put into a small business brand, if you eventually want the business to be sold or “move on without you.”

Brand attributes and value should be authentic, but should really be grounded in what your customer base cares about. However, to be authentic, if the business is just you right now, then it should indeed reflect you, your traits, and your values. The brand can then be operationalized into the organization as it grows. We often forget many big companies are actually named for their founders, and the founders’ beliefs and values still live on in the brand – because they were consistent with what their customers wanted and needed. Think H&R Block, Disney, Nordstrom, Oprah. Some founders choose to name their business something else in plans to sell the business or move on, but the personality and values of the founder still come through in the brand (Virgin and Richard Branson come to mind)

So create a brand that is authentic to you, focuses on your values and beliefs – as long as those are of value to your customers. You can never go wrong if you do that, no matter what name you give your company.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Time, Time, Time….and how to sell it

Posted on by Red Slice

Today’s WSJ has an excellent article on how companies can use time to their competitive advantage. In a world with only so many high-level benefits can be offered (you can have sub-messages at the 2nd and 3rd tiers down, but really most benefits either increase, decrease or improve something) this is a great way to differentiate yourself- if you can keep in mind exactly how your product or service manipulates time.

They grouped the time factors into 2 categories:

1) Managing Time as Price. Helping people do things faster, thus saving time and helping people do more in less time. The reporters found 4 approaches to this benefit statement:

Doing it for them (ie, Roomba vacuums)
Picking up the pace (drive-through windows)
Shrinking the time committment, if that has been the obstacle to purchase (lunchtime facelifts)
Ending the wait (redesigned check out line processes for faster service)
2) Managing Time as Product. Turning time into something people will buy. For example, all the home-based cooking offerings out there, like Washington’s own Dream Dinners. It enables you to prepare a home-cooked meal ahead of time, pick your entrees on the web, and then stop by their local Dream Dinners on the way home to assemble the pre-chopped ingredients. They estimate they save people 20 hours a month in all the tasks involved in planning, prepping, shopping, preparing and clean up. So customers essentially “buy time.”

The article talked about giving people a choice on whether they prefer to save time or enjoy their time more. They cited Blue Nile, where you can buy jewelry and engagement rings online, as one who employs a choice strategy. He can research as little or as much as he wants, but once the selection is made, the transaction is pretty quick.

The article goes further to say companies need to continually check in on this strategy and benefit with their customers, as needs change over time. Their assessment of time costs changes as well so you must continually test new approaches. The goods and services that customers may have been willing to invest time in when they were new, may now require time-saving approaches and redesigns today just to stay relevant – and to meet changing expectations.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Brand Gap: What’s in a name?

Posted on by Red Slice

More from Marty Neumeier’s great book The Brand Gap: What makes a good company name?

I love this, as I get asked this question all the time. By no means a naming “expert”, I still have put on my branding and creative writing hat for clients on this – for example, coming up with the name for Betsy Talbot’s lifestyle and travel blog Married with Luggage (plug: check out her new series on how they saved up $75,000 for their planned trip around the world.). But Marty outlines some great points on how to choose a good name. With full credit to him on this (why reinvent the wheel on great advice?), here’s the 7 criteria for a good name:

1) Distinctiveness: Does it stand out from the crowd? He says the best names have the “presence” of a noun.
2) Bevity: Is it short enough to be easily recalled and used? Or will it result it being abbreviated into a meaningless acronym?
3) Appropriateness: Does it reasonably fit the business purpose?
4) Easy spelling and pronuniciation: Tech companies in the late 90’s/early 2000’s bit it on this one. Will most people be able to spell the name after hearing it spoken at an event or in an ad (or more importantly, via word of mouth?). Marty says a name should not be a spelling test, nor should it make people feel ignorant.
5) Likability: Sorry, can’t help but think about the Drinkability ads for beer on this one…Will people enjoy using it (How much do I love saying “Bing!” now? Ask my husband…), does it have a good “mouth feel” or does it stimulate the senses/mind? If not, it should….
6) Extendability: Can you use it in different places creatively or interpretively? Does it suggest an image or visual? This will greatly help you extend the name brand in wordplay and imagery. One of my clients has the name CareerBranches and I love it as we build out her brand, logo and imagery. So much with which to play.
7) Protectability: Can it be trademarked? Is the domain available? Consult with trademark lawyer before any final selection and at last make sure the name is defendable, even if someone else is using it in a completely different industry.

Given this, I ‘m very happy with having selected Red Slice…..!

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Make Marketing Matter to Your CEO

Posted on by Red Slice

Many of us in the corporate world have at one time or another struggled to justify marketing expenditures to the powers-that-be. If I had a dime for every time I fought with a CFO over why we needed to pay for certain marketing activities (“No, I don’t know how to code HTML, thank you very much.”) I’d have enough money to have paid for those initiatives 10 times over.

And what happens when you are the CEO of your own company? How can you justify those expenses to yourself and still sleep at night?

CEO’s care about cash flow, sales growth and bottom line earnings growth. If you can track back your marketing efforts to any of those things, you wil score big.

You must first answer the question, “How does this work produce cash flow?” As a former marketing leader I worked for once said, “Marketing exists to help salespeople sell more easily.” So if you want markting to get the budget it deserves, you need to change the conversation with your CEO.

You must talk in terms of topline sales groth or bottom line earnings growth. You must care about ROI and have an infrastucture in place to measure it and track it back to specific markting efforts. You must say that your marketing activity will manage the lead pipeline, overcome price pressures, or help the sales funnel flow faster and reduce the time it takes to get from Lead to Sale.

So, where does this leave branding? The psychological, awareness activity? The activity that cannot be so easily tracked to the sales P.O. or the purchase decisions? We all know branding can work powerfully, but how do we prove it?

What I’ve always said is this: Branding and awareness activities in and of themselves do not drive sales. You can not just stop there and hope to move a person down the line towards the purchase decision. The buying process has 4 phases before getting to sale: Awareness, Consideration, Evaluation and Purchase. But…effective branding and awareness upfront will increase the ROI and effectiveness of your more “direct” marketing efforts later on. It provides air cover and context to all your direct marketing activity. If you try to do just the direct marketing efforts (a webcast invite, an email campaign, etc.) with no awareness or branding leading up to them, it’s like burning money.

Think about it this way: You as a businss need to earn the right to show up in someone’s email box. You need to earn the right to offer a special deal. You need to earn the right to get them to spend their precious time and money coming to your event. How can you do this if they don’t know who the heck you are? It’s like some sales guy showing up at your door during dinner. Who invited him?

You earn this right the old fashioned way: by introducing yourself to them and letting them know who you are, what you are about and what value you offer. That’s branding and awareness. That’s what advertising started out doing (before the Internet). No, you may not close the sale from just branding, but neither do you propose marriage on a first date You have to earn that right. If you “date” for a while, they will be much more receptive to your proposal than if you get down on one knee on the first blind date.

That is the function of branding. Creating an image, a story, fulfilling a need in the prospect’s eyes over time, so that when you want them to act (attend an event, trial a product, purchase) they will already know you, love you, and most importanly, trust you. And that is what makes the money spent on those direct marketing efforts a better investment, yielding better returns. Spending $50,000 to get $5,000 in sales is less impessive to a CEO than spending $250,000 on combined branding and direct marketing efforts and getting $2,500,000 in sales, don’t you think?

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Top 10 Tips for Effective Branding and Messaging

Posted on by Red Slice

A helpful primer with some top branding tips I’ve culled over the years. Have some others? Would love to see them in the comments!

1. Know yourself, know your business

A good brand stems from authenticity. This means being consistent in messaging, visuals, and experience and not just giving lip service. If you claim customer service is your most important differentiator, then return calls and emails in a reasonable amount of time and don’t leave people in an automated telephone maze to get the help they need. If you claim quality, you had better make sure your goods are up to snuff. No one likes to be lied to and no one likes when their experiences fall short of expectations. Apple’s hip brand works because of their quality, design, and cutting-edge products that set trends and push the boundaries. They deliver on their brand promise.

2. Make your customer real

Determine your ideal customer and market to that person. Don’t aim for some amorphous blob of people out there – make it about one customer (or a persona for all the different customers you serve) and pretend you are talking to that person. Know their likes, dislikes, where they live, where they work, what magazines they like to read. The more detail you can put around this picture, this persona, even if you have a few different customer groups, the more relevant and on-target your marketing and communications will be. When you try to reach everyone, you become relevant to no one because you are too generic and vanilla.

3. Invest your marketing dollars wisely

Only invest in marketing programs that make sense. Duh – this seems obvious, but don’t buy that booth at the show unless you know your potential customers will be there. Even if it costs just $200, it’s a wasted $200 if the 5000 people in attendance will never buy your product. Do the research, ask the questions. Go where your customers are, don’t expect them to come to you just because you think it would be “cool” to be at that event or produce that radio spot. If your ideal customers don’t have time to watch TV, don’t invest in producing that ad.

4. Give meaning to your “look”

Work with a brand strategist or gifted designer who understands how placement, typography, and color all work together consciously and subconsciously to communicate a message. Ensure you really map out the message you wish to convey before you create the materials or graphic elements to convey it.

5. Give brand marketing a chance to work

People need to experience things multiple times before they stick. Be clear but be consistent – they need to see your message about 7 times before they remember it. The Nike swoosh did not create meaning overnight but Nike spent years and lots of money making that mark mean something to people. Don’t expect one ad to get you to your sales targets, or a website to get you all your customers. Branding is not the same as direct response marketing – it takes time and it should be integrated across all your customer touch points. Of course, if you need to course correct if it’s not working, you can do that, but don’t change it up every month – you may be sick of your own messaging after 2 months, but others will not have had a chance to absorb it. Do the work upfront to make sure your message is on target and stick with it.

6. Be realistic

If you can’t afford to produce luxury goods or services, don’t market them as such. People still need cheap, efficient, no-frills products and services on certain occasions. Just find your audience niche and market to them only what you can provide realistically to them specifically.

7. Create a style guide

When you design a website or a logo, ensure the designers leave you with a Style Guide that has all your colors used (in PMS, HEX, CMYK), font types and sizes, any copy guidelines (ie, we never use contractions, we use a very playful, snarky tone), layout guidelines, graphic guidelines (do we use photos or illustrations?) etc. This will help you maintain consistency when you either need to do things yourself or have others step in and make changes, do other projects, etc. This should be part of your operational guidelines and shared with any employees or partners who do visual/written work with you.

8. Understand trademark and copyright

Anything you put in a fixed form is automatically copyrighted by you, whether you file for the copyright or not, as long as you can prove when they were first used. This means copy, presentations or articles. But names or logos might need to be trademarked. If you come up with any branded product or service names, at least do an online trademark search at www.uspto.gov – this includes company name and taglines. Doesn’t mean you have to necessarily file for a trademark, but at least you will know what is already in use to avoid getting sued or being asked to cease and desist. And always consult a trademark lawyer on whether you should or should not trademark certain things. Better to spend some time and money to check up front on usage before investing lots of money on naming or design, only to be told to cease and desist by someone already using those things.

9. Keep the end in mind

When getting a logo designed, keep in mind how you will use it. This can save you money in the long run. Will it always be shown in digital format, or do you plan to print it out or place it on promotional items? This will help you determine if you need a 4-color logo or 2-color logo. It is often more expensive to print 4-color than 2-color or even black and white. Also, ensure you are using mostly standard PMS or CMYK colors so as to avoid needing to pay extra for custom print colors. And think about how your logo will show up at both big and small sizes. A very minutely detailed logo may not reproduce well on websites or in event programs at a very small size.

10. Use known analogies

If you are introducing something new or unfamiliar to your target audience, try to use analogies to help them make the connections more quickly. Take what it known and convey that meaning for quick comprehension. Here’s an excerpt from the fabulous book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath:

“When the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) was trying to convey that movie popcorn was unhealthy, all their statistics and facts caused most people’s eyes to glaze over. So the CSPI called a press conference on September 27, 1992. Here’s the message it presented: “A medium-sized ‘butter’ popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings — combined!”

The folks at CSPI didn’t neglect the visuals — they laid out the full buffet of greasy food for the television cameras. An entire day’s worth of unhealthy eating, displayed on a table. All that saturated fat stuffed into a single bag of popcorn.

The story was an immediate sensation.”