What you should know
OK, you've weighed up all the pros and cons and you've decided to go into business. Excellent! Now let's work out how to get people through the door.
- Branding, Marketing, Advertising - Isn't it all the same?
A common misconception, and it's vital that you understand the difference. Even if you're only popping brochures in letter boxes, it's essential that you get your head around it.
A brand is something that people identify with your particular business. Think of a rancher
branding his cattle - Hence the modern use of the term. Another word that means the same is trademark but we'll avoid using that term for
the moment, to avoid confusion with Registered Trademarks.
As an international example of effective brand recognition, consider the golden arch
logo of the McDonalds® restaurant chain. The Coca Cola® logo is another. Everyone knows them by sight without reading the actual words.
Rule #1: Your brand has only 5 seconds to attract a potential client. If it fails, they'll move on.
Branding can include your business name, your graphic design and slogans, the shape, smell, colour, or sound of your product or service. It is a set of things that makes your brand as
distinctly recognisable as possible.
The problem with shape, smell, colour, and sound is that they're often shared with innumerable other brands, which leaves you with only three opportunities to stand out from your competitors. Your business name, logos, and slogans.
Marketing, on the other hand, isn't
a tangible thing. It is simply the strategies that you'll use to get your brand out into the marketplace. It therefore stands to reason that your brand must be marketable. The best marketing campaign in the world will be rubbish without good branding.
And finally, Advertising is the end result of marketing. It is the physical advertisement in the paper, the paid ad on Google®, or the print ad
in your local phone directory. Advertising is the direct result of Marketing, so before it can even happen, your marketing and the branding that preceded it, must be absolutely spot on.
- Choosing a Business Name
This is the biggest marketing decision you will ever make.
Have you ever seen an advertisement for a business and thought, "What a totally crap name for a business?" Or "What are they trying to sell?" Their advertising has actually achieved the opposite of what they were hoping to achieve. You feel
resentful or at best confused.
Some business names are too clever or clumsy and consumers don't like that. People will only give you five seconds of their time and they want to feel good about it afterwards.
On a subliminal level, 3 to 4
syllable names make the strongest impression. Two is sometimes not enough to grab the brain's attention, and five can be too much. Any more than five, forget it.
Sometimes that's a hard rule to follow, but there are tricks to make long names easier on the ear. Take our business for example, Keppel Net
Business Solutions. What a mouthful, but at the same time, we need to explain what we do.
To overcome that, we focused on the brand, Keppel Net, and instead of saying "business solutions", which is quite vague anyway, we tagged on the slogan, "Inside every business is an empire."
Slogans are
good, and dramatic original slogans are unbeatable. A short brand and a splash of drama. It's entertaining to the ear, and the customer is drawn to find out more about you.
Rule #2: Choose a business name 3 to 4 syllables long.
- Checking Out the Competition
Ignorance is definitely not bliss. Know who you are up against. Determine their strengths and weaknesses. Let's look at the experience of one of our clients.
Angel Beach® is a wholesale supplier of niche equipment to the beauty industry.
Its name suggests a magical place where calm
ensues, which suits the clients it's trying to attract. At three syllables, it also passes the time test. Instead of a slogan, it goes straight to the punch and tells the customer what it does, specialist salon supplies. On the surface, that slogan may not seem dramatic, but in reality the use of the word
'specialist' is clever. It subtly plants in the mind, the idea that they are more special than their competitors.
People don't trust boastful statements, e.g. "We are the specialists". But plant that message subliminally, and people don't have the chance to reject it. They just accept it as
fact.
Moving on, we looked to their competition. One had a good brand, concise and descriptive, and didn't need a slogan. It was very good. Of the other seven companies we looked at, they were rather ineffective. One in particular had a long
name in flowery script with lots of French words thrown in.
Elegant, impressive. So impressive in fact, that it was too much to absorb in the 5 seconds my brain had allocated.
On reflection now, I can't even remember what their logos look like, and I have to hunt through Yellow Pages® to remember their names.
I can't even Google® them, because they either don't have websites, or they're
so poorly built that they don't show up in search results.
All of those marketing bloopers are great for Angel Beach®, and it won't be hard to become one of the giants in its field.
As a footnote to the above, if you're planning to own a website, and every business should, your business name should also be your domain, e.g.
www.keppelnet.com.au, www.angelbeach.com.au.
- Business Names versus Slogans
A trap to avoid is letting your slogan overpower your business name.
Your business name is by far the most important. It's your business name that people will look for in the Yellow Pages® and type
into Yahoo®.
Your slogan should elaborate, emphasise, or entice - That's all. Sometimes a slogan isn't even necessary. One of my clients is a good case study.
Bryn is brilliant with timber, and makes picture frames from old wood - demolished buildings, fence palings etc. He enjoys the
unique grains and properties of these very old timbers, and wanted to promote the fact that each frame was unique and would last forever. He also identified that Mums and Grandparents would be his key market.
We put our heads together and eventually identified that what we needed to emphasise about the frames was
their timelessness; their age, their heritage, their immortality if you like.
I came up with the name Frames Everlasting, then designed a logo in period font with a photo of Bryn's timber overlaid on the
graphic.
It was perfect. 5 syllables, memorable, and engaging, and it attracts his key market just as we'd hoped. He also chose the website option and registered www.frameseverlasting.com.au to showcase his
work.
- Registered Trademarks
As mentioned earlier, a brand is also called a trademark. There are two types of trademarks; common law trademarks, and Registered Trademarks.
A common law trademark (simply referred to as 'trademark') is one that has not been registered, and you will sometimes see the ™ symbol beside it. Using the symbol lets
people know that you claim ownership of the trademark. It's a warning if you like, and sometimes has the desired effect of scaring off would-be trademark thieves.
In reality though, it's rather pointless, so most people don't bother using the ™ symbol. Proving through the
common law courts that you are the owner of an unregistered trademark is very difficult and
costly. Court cases can go either way.
To protect your brand, you should register your trademark. A Registered Trademark is denoted by the symbol ®. It
is illegal to use this symbol beside a brand if it isn't a Registered Trademark.
To register a trademark, you must prove to the satisfaction of the relevant government registrar, that you are the rightful owner of the mark, for the goods & services categories you wish to claim. A sample extract of a
Registered Trademark is shown below.
foundation of marketing your wares.
We'll use a few of our key customers as living examples so you can see how they've applied our services.
