Therapy comes in many forms. I know a radio personality who refers to her time off as ‘mental health days.’ Personally, I see the sauna, a great massage, shopping or a long walk as major reliefs. Other times, I may end up on some friend’s sofa. Where ever the help comes from the goal is [...]
You got to get your name right. It’s your first message design assignment and can cost you business if you get it wrong. The tagline and everything else related to the story behind your brand comes later. You get the name right — something memorable, something that rolls off the tongue — and effective marketing [...]
When it comes to establishing a small business brand, it’s less about your marketing budget and more about the message design decisions you make. In fact, your initial and most important marketing efforts cost time (not cash — that comes after you have a strategy). Every personal and small business brand begins with a story. [...]
You can do a lot of things right — the right team, the right product, even the right timing. But if you get the language wrong, this faux paus could kill your brand before you get out the gate. Marketing messages designed for relationship are the life blood to small business. After looking at the [...]
There’s one step in your marketing that has little to do with words, but it just may be the key to your message design strategy. Starbucks, one of the top 100 global brands for 2012, does a great job with this. Your brand can too. Just as thoughts of social networking often start — at [...]
Selling everything doesn’t make you memorable. Effective message design is about discovering and promoting the primary things that you do better than others. Make those things available to your audience and promote the heck out of that message. Message design requires you to remember who you came with. Amazon.com’s original tagline was “Earth’s biggest bookstore.” [...]
This car company has a large team and amazing technology under the hood. But it’s the message design strategy that can help you update your personal or professional brand. The Car and The Tagline BMW is the #12 Global Brand for 2012. According to Interbrand one factor to their success is “BMW’s handling characteristics.” Said [...]
Your brand is about one core thing. The moment you forget, you lose. Message design is challenging, but twice as hard for professional brands without a clear mission. It’s true for Google, the #4 Global brand of 2012, and it’s for you. Every Business Has a Core. No matter how big you get or how [...]
Size is no excuse. You’re small, but you’re still a brand that stands for and solves a specific problem. Below are three message design lessons that business owners can learn from Apple, the #2 global brand of 2012. It just stopped working. So I replaced it with an Apple. First an iPod instead of my [...]
Even though Coca Cola has billions to brand their beverage, micro-business owners can learn one CORE and affordable lesson in marketing and message design from the 2012 #1 global brand. What’s In A Name? According to Interbrand, Coca Cola, a 126 year old company, has “a name that is more universally recognized than any other [...]
