Towards A Healthy Economy + Marketing World

This question I don’t really get asked its more I see when a person requests a quote and say’s “I would like a custom flag made using my logo the colors in my logo are navy blue, red, yellow and white”

After being a flag maker for many years I have found out that many flag manufacturers out there especially the one’s on the internet say that the custom flag above is 4 colors when they send the quote.

I would like to tell you right now!

This is not true!! The flag above is only 3 colors WHY?

White is not a color

When we screen print onto the flag material if there are 6 colors in your logo then we will use 6 colors eg: blue, red, yellow, green, black, violet.

The color white is not used, the material is white so when we make the film to use to screen print your logo the part which is supposed to be white we don’t use any color.

So next time you go to have a custom flag made be shore they don’t charge you for the color white. If you have white in your logo the flag makers will use white material, most flags are screen printed on white material anyway.

Jason Littlewood of Custom flag makers has been making flags for many years supplying everyday people with decorative custom flags see his and the teams work at http://www.custom-flag-makers.com.

Branding is perhaps the most important facet of any business–beyond product, distribution, pricing, or location. A company’s brand is its definition in the world, the name that identifies it to itself and the marketplace. A model may be beautiful, but without a name, she’s just “that girl in that picture.” Where would Norma Jean be without Marilyn Monroe, or who would imagine Coca-Cola as just a soft-drink manufacturer? A brand provides a concrete descriptor to customers and competitors alike, a name for a product or service to distinguish it from anything else. Bob may run a hobby shop, but trying to advertise as “The hobby shop a guy named Bob runs down the street a ways” is financial suicide. Each customer will have to describe the shop, who Bob is, and what the shop does every time someone asks about it.

This makes the process of recommending a good hobby shop too much work for the average customer, and far too much work for a user looking for hobby shops on the Internet. A customer looking up Bob’s hobby shop will have an easier time of it if he or she knows to refer to it as “Bob’s House of Hobbies,” and the customer can then refer others to Bob’s hobby shop by name, increasing the potential advertising exponentially.

Developing a brand involves more than just picking a catchy name and placing an ad in the newspaper–a brand is more than a unique string of letters denoting a particular product; a successful brand is a mnemonic trigger that makes a consumer feel a certain way when the brand is thought of. For those who drink cola-flavored soft drinks, which is more appealing on a hot day: a cold cola soda, or an ice-cold Coke? Coca-Cola has spent 100 years developing their particular brand of cola-flavored soda as a refreshing beverage and a seminal representation of a market segment. Coca-Cola has used a combination of direct marketing, give-away techniques, and multi-product cross-branding to achieve maximum brand recognition and visibility in not only its immediately competitive market, but in markets as diverse as Coca-Cola branded race cars and housewares.

Brand loyalty is an integral part of building a brand, as consumers usually have a choice of products in the same market segment, and so a successful company will come up with a way to keep consumers re-buying their product or coming back to their location rather than going to a competitor. These brand loyalty-building efforts may come in the form of coupons, incentives such as many grocery chains’ technique of “grocery discount cards” or “loss leaders,” meant to draw consumers into the store, where they will hopefully buy products along with the discounted fare at a higher profit ratio.

In exchange for these discounts and grocery cards, many companies collect information about buying habits and average spending amounts, the better to tailor advertisements and better-focus future promotional efforts. Once a consumer is hooked, brand loyalty tends to result in higher sales volume, as well as loyal customers being less sensitive to price changes of their favorite brands (within reason, of course), as well as less sensitive to competitors’ incentives. Studies have shown that it takes 5 times as much money to gain a customer as it does to retain one. That’s 5 times as much money as could have been spent on other things.

A brand is who your company is, and what it is selling–it is as important as naming a baby, and should require the same amount of effort to develop it, but if done well, can mature into a successful and profitable adult.

William King is the director of All Wholesale UK: http://www.uk-wholesaler.co.uk , Wholesale Pages: http://www.wholesalepages.co.uk and Wholesale-Canada: http://www.wholesale-canada.com. He has 18 years of experience in the marketing and trading industries and has been helping retailers, entrepreneurs and startups with their product sourcing, promotion, marketing and supply chain requirements.

A few days ago, I mentioned that an easyJet flight to Venice had provided me with an insight to Stelios (Haji-Ioannou), the founder of the ground-breaking low-cost airline, which has revolutionised European air travel.

He was listing his top five things he ‘wished I had known when I started’.

Previously I mentioned that he wished he’d been ‘clear on his strengths and delegated the rest’. If you missed it you can find this on the 18th of November entry of my blog, through the link at the bottom of the article.

Number two on his list states:-

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Focus - on your job, on your brand.”

This seems a bit of a contradiction to me, but the essence of the best part of what he said, for me is the second bit:-

“Focus on your Brand”

As I see it, this can be construed two ways. It can be the brand of the business or organisation you work within, or it can be your personal brand - about who you are in the work you do.

Working on any Brand means initially being really clear about what it is that you represent, where you are going in your offer and pulling all the stops out to consistently deliver that. To be authentic - all the time.

It is about questioning every action and measuring against the background of the Brand you personally, your business or organisation are.

Clarity and focus are what you must have as a constant magnet drawing you forward.

© 2005-6 Martin Haworth is a Business and Management Coach. He works worldwide, mainly by phone, with small business owners, managers and corporate leaders. He has hundreds of hints, tips and ideas at his website, http://www.coaching-businesses-to-success.com.

…helping you, to help your people, to help your business grow…

Stop and think before you delete! If you don’t, you risk killing your brand and ultimately your business. In today’s marketplace, ignoring the e-mail inbox could shorten your business lifespan by killing your brand image.

Think about it: Would you intentionally ignore your clients and send messages saying you don’t care about them or their business? That is exactly what you do when you ignore e-mail or respond slowly or inaccurately.

Brand image is built from the inside out. Every communication that takes place between a company and a client, potential client, vender, consultant and even competitor results in a positive or a negative brand impression. And when those impressions are added together, they make up brand image.

As consultants, our brand images are our lifeblood. They must reflect near perfection, if we expect businesses to trust our expertise and to want our advice and recommendations. Furthermore, we need to ensure that our clients’ understand the dangers of messy e-mail communications, both inbound and outbound.

A recent survey of the retail industry tells the tale of what looks like an approaching trend in the business world.

Current numbers from this survey indicate that most businesses are in a lot of trouble when it comes to their “customer e-service.” Twenty-six percent of retailers surveyed failed to respond to e-mail inquiries from customers seeking to make a purchase.

In the same study, conducted by Benchmark Portal and sponsored by eGain Communications Corp., the cross-industry response rate (all verticals) of 41 percent shows that businesses in general have a pretty abysmal record. Forty-seven percent of retailers, for example, fail to respond to customer e-mails within 24 hours, against a cross-industry rate of only 61 percent.

Conducted in July 2005, this study also benchmarked the quality of company responses to client e-mail inquiries. Among companies that do respond to client or customer e-mails, 35 percent of retailers sent e-mails rated by Benchmark Portal as “good” at answering customers’ questions while the cross-industry rate is a sad 17 percent. Twenty-eight percent of retailers sent e-mails rated “fair,” compared to a cross-industry rate of 26 percent; and nine percent of retailers sent “poor” e-mails, compared to the cross-industry rate of 14 percent.

Another study provides even worse news for e-centric client and customers, and ultimately for overall business success. This one, reported by Internet Retail, shows that 51 percent of small- to mid-size companies and 41 percent of large businesses do not respond to customer or client e-mail at all. And of those who do respond, 70 percent of small- to mid-size companies and 61 percent of large businesses do not respond within 24 hours.

Since brand image depends on every single representative of a company, no matter their functional area, it doesn’t matter who inside a business deletes or responds badly to e-mail communications. Doing so creates a destructively negative impression to the person who sent the e-mail. Since every external and internal communication creates an impression that impacts the brand, those communications also impact marketing and sales results, and consequently the bottom line.

eMarketer’s Senior Analyst David Hallerman also recently surveyed the state of business e-mail marketing and reports that more than two trillion e-mail messages will be sent out this year and nearly 2.7 trillion by 2007. Businesses cannot afford to ignore those numbers, even if only a tiny percentage of these e-mails fall into the commercial category. Alienating even one client hurts brand image and eventually sales. Alienating hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of e-mailers over the life of a business can therefore be deadly.

Brand image is all about client perception. When businesses delete e-mails or respond poorly, the brand suffers. Before long, current and future sales take a direct hit on the negative side. Furthermore, responding badly to e-mail opens the door to competitors who treat every communication channel with the constant attention it needs. This includes e-mail.

Acknowledging that businesses are managed by busy people who may not understand the damage done by not responding or by badly responding to e-mail, business leaders must recognize before it is too late that such numbers point to a serious crises on the horizon for those who ignore the e-side of their businesses. In our pervasively online technological age, shoppers, customers, clients, vendors and competitors are choosing e-mail more and more as their preferred communications tool. Furthermore, study results suggest that businesses may miss up to two-thirds their potential audience by not adding e-mail to their marketing tool kit.

When businesses treat e-mailers badly, they risk such responses as anger, rejection, hurt, frustration and revenge. In addition, ignoring e-mailers generates harmful word of mouth. When done right, word of mouth grows businesses, increases sales and expands margins. When done badly, the opposite occurs, and a brand begins to die a slow and painful death.

As consultants we must take an active role in solving communications problems that my batter either our brand or our clients’ brands. Here are a few tips for turning e-mail into a business “growth tool” rather than a weapon for business suicide: 1. Respond accurately to all e-mails with 24 hours. 2. Embrace e-mail as a marketing tool. 3. Use SPAM filters, if necessary (but only if necessary), to block e-mails originating from Spammers, but do so cautiously. Blocking e-mails from legitimate clients and others will hurt your business in the long run. 4. For best results and greatest returns on investment, customize outgoing e-mail messages by employing some kind of consolidated client and prospect database that allows you to specifically identify client groups’ needs, wants and desires. 5. Communicate customized messages that meet the needs, wants and desires of those client groups.

When utilized correctly, businesses bask in results-oriented e-mail marketing and brand building. Home Depot, for example, has grown its client e-mail database from 500,000 to five million contacts in just the last two years. Each one of these five million e-mails represents solid future sales.

In conclusion, by embracing e-mail, a consulting firm can grow sales by melding ingredients gleaned from its client data points and managing them so as to:  Collect the right data  Craft the right message  From the right sender  Through the right channel  At the right times

First and foremost, customers and clients count. They measure your value and develop a perception around that value. By ignoring e-mail or practicing it poorly, opportunities for positive perceptions may be missed, dismissed or destroyed, shortening your business’s lifespan. Treating e-mail like the winning tool it can be, however, holds the potential of extending your business’s lifespan (and profits) indefinitely.

Your logo is the most important graphic element in which you will invest for your business. You should own the logo in many file formats. Having a library of logo files will enable you to send vendors the types of files they need (for example, other designers, printers, or other service providers).

There are two major categories that I will cover in this article — color variations and
file-type variations.

Color Variations

You should receive your logo graphic from your designer in all of the file types
listed below in the “File Formats” section (unless otherwise noted) in the following
color variations:

Pantone color or CMYK color
Pantone color (if applicable) — If you intend to have your business cards or other
materials printed professionally, choosing Pantone colors makes the process less
expensive than printing in full four- (or CMYK-) color, unless you choose to use the
new printers available today. See my article on inexpensive printing options, coming
soon!. Full CMYK color — This is for four-color printing, full color ads, and for use
on any materials that you intend to print from your own desktop color printer, i.e,
invoices, statements, receipts, letters, etc.

RGB color
RGB color — For use on your website or in your email. You should get JPEG and GIF
formats in this color scheme.

Grayscale and/or black and white versions
Grayscale — If your logo contains more than one color, or if it has tones or shades
of one color, you should receive a grayscale version. You would use this when your
logo is included in the newspaper or in the Yellow Pages, or on any black and white
laser-printed materials you may create.

Black and white
This version would be used to produce the best-quality logo on
faxes or any materials you reproduce using a copier.

Depending on the design of the logo, sometimes only either a black and white or
grayscale version of the logo will be applicable. For example, for a logo with just
one color in it, only a black and white version would apply. And, if elements of
different colors overlap, a grayscale version will ensure that the different graphic
elements do not bleed together, as they would if they were all converted to black. So
you may not receive both grayscale and black and white versions, but having one or
the other should suffice. File Formats:

Original graphic
The original Illustrator, Photoshop, or other program-native
document. This comes in handy if you make a minor change to your company (i.e.,
if you add LLC or Inc.), or if you decide to change your color scheme.

To make these types of changes easiest, you need a file of the logo in the original
program in which it was created. If the logo was created in Illustrator (which is
preferable, because creating vector graphics in Illustrator will allow your logo to be
scaled up and down as needed), the type should not be outlined, unless your
designer has done so in order to modify the typeface.

If the logo was created in Photoshop, the layers of the document should not be
flattened, and the type should not be rasterized (converted from editable type into
pixels) — this will ensure that it will still be editable.

Ask your designer which fonts have been used in the logo, so you could purchase it
for use in other materials. This will avoid the lengthy and time-consuming process
of font matching, should you work with other designers.

You should receive several different versions of the software’s native file formats
from the designer, in case a future designer or printer ever uses an older version of
the software. For example, I provide Illustrator files in Illustrator CS along with
Illustrator 9.

EPS format
I recommend that your logo be in EPS 9 format. EPS can be opened
and processed by many different programs. This is also the file format most
commonly accepted/requested by printers.

PDF format
You will not be able to view many of the file formats of your design
that you receive unless you have graphics software applications. I suggest that you
receive the PDF files of each Color Version of your logo. You will be able to view the
PDF files using Adobe Acrobat Reader, available for free on Adobe’s web site at
www.adobe.com.

“Outlined” original format
The difference between this graphic and the original
would be found in the Illustrator files. The fonts in the outlined original format
would be outlined, which means that the letters are converted into shapes. In
Photoshop, the type should be rasterized and the layers should be flattened. This
outlined file should be provided in all of the formats listed above — original
program format, EPS, and PDF.

These outlined file versions should be provided to any printers or service bureaus to
lessen the chance that the elements in your logo could inadvertently be shifted
around. This will make sure that your logo will print with the right font should the
printer not have the font used in your logo.

JPEG and GIF formats
For web or email use. The GIF graphic should be created
with a transparent background.

TIF format at 300 dots per inch (DPI) resolution, in RGB color format — For use in
Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files.

TIF format at 300 DPI
Some printers, ad vendors (i.e., the Yellow Pages), or other
designers may require this file format in order to create additional designed
materials.

Having your logo in these formats will ensure that you won’t ever need to have your
logo redrawn or re-created for use in future projects. After all, you own your logo —
shouldn’t you be able to use it as well?

About the Author

Erin Ferree, Founder and Lead Designer of elf design, is a brand identity and graphic
design expert. She has been helping small businesses grow with bold, clean and
effective logo and marketing material designs for over a decade. elf design offers
the comprehensive graphic and web design services of a large agency, with the one-
on-one, personalized attention of an independent design specialist. Erin works
closely in partnership with her clients to create designs that are visible, credible and
memorable – and that tell their unique business stories in a clear and consistent
way. For more information about elf design, please visit: Logo design at http://www.elf-design.com

How many times have you been handed a business card and immeadetly got a negative impression on the person who handed you the card and the business they represent?

All too often, small business owners tend to skip investing in getting a decent business card designed by professional corporate identity designers. They either go for the ready made solutions that most online printers offer today or use templates that come with either MS Word, MS Publisher or some other application.

For a budget comparable to a good meal for two at a decent restaurant, a small business owner get a professional logo design and matching stationery design. A little more investment in a good printing company and you would have armed yourself with the most important tools that would help you win your battles on the market field.

Even though you are an honest and trust worthy business person, a cheap looking business card will definetly create a negative impression in the first 5 seconds of handing over the card to a potential customer. It is then an uphill battle to try and win over the customer by creating the right impression.

I am sure you spend a lot of money and effort into making yourself look decent and smart when going for a business meeting. But all that effort goes to waste if you are not backed by a professional image in the form of your company logo and business card.

Let the business card do the talking for you. A strong initial impression created by a professionally designed logo design on a business card would help you make the sale faster. The customer would make the sale themselves. Of course a professional image should be backed up by a professional service. I am not saying having a decent logo design and a professional business card would do all the work. I am just saying that it would add value to your business and enhance your image.

Jeff Marsh is a lead designer with Logo Design Works. He has more than 8 years of experience in helping small businesses create their brands.

For a Professional Stationery Design for your company contact Logo Design Works on 614 917 2177.