by admin | Sep 28, 2012 | Blog, Content
By Sharon Givoni
Brand Names are valuable assets, and as a branding lawyer I often get asked to advise if you can register your own name as a trade mark. Trade marks give you ownership over the name and you can stop others from then using it for the same or similar goods or services that it is registered for. Bearing this in mind it’s an important question.
People often wish to use their names as brand names.
Think Elle McPherson, Kylie Minogue, Ian Thorpe, Lleyton Hewitt, Roger Federer, Andre Rieu, Beyoncé and Tiger Woods. All of these celebrities have registered their names as trade marks.
Even a simple first or surname can be monopolised eg SMITHS for Chips.
In the clothing area, Sussan Corporation (Aust.) Pty Ltd has registered the name SUSSAN for clothing in Australia.
Can you use your own name if someone else “got there first”?
The short answer is – someone can register a name as a trade mark and stop others from using it.
However, it all depends on what the brand name is and how close the goods or services are to one another.
For example, even though Gold Coast based company, Mischa Accessories, tried to stop actress Mischa Barton from trade marking her name in Australia she has still been successful and has had her name registered for clothing and back packs. Had they both tried to register exactly the same name (e.g. Mischa) the result might have been different.
The name HARRY POTTER was also the subject of a dispute in the Federal Court. A clothing business based in New South Wales used the name for a line of clothing with 17 stores in New South Wales and Queensland and filed a trade mark application. J K Rowling’s fictitious character was also introduced into the Australian market around that time but in the context of books. Today, the names are registered for clothing by Pretty Girl Fashion Group Pty Limited and also by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. for a vast array of goods and services including entertainment services. It was lucky that the Australian company had applied to have their trade mark registered back in 1998 or the result might have been different.
So – what does all of this mean to you?
When choosing a new brand name, it is really important to make sure that no one else has prior rights to that name – even if that brand name happens to be one’s own name. If you are already using your own name as a brand it is wise to consider trade mark protection.
Don’t let someone else get there first.
by admin | Sep 17, 2012 | Blog, Strategy
I uploaded a @YouTube video http://t.co/57RoyOLb ORC International
by admin | Sep 13, 2012 | Blog
Simply because they have got their definition of what branding is completely wrong. They have pursued brand building and developed great brands, but they just don’t call the process by its correct name like brand development.
Why is this important you ask? Because then business owners will find it so much easier to find the right information and educate themselves on the stuff that can make or break their business – marketing!
Here’s a case in point.
I’m reading yet another “Secrets to Business Success” article aimed at small business owners. It’s in the My Business Magazine July 2012 edition, that reviews Mark Bouris’s (the founder of Wizard home loans and subsequently Yellow Brick Road as well as the boss in the Australian version of The Apprentice) speech and advice to the SME business owners given in May 2012.
What gets under this marketing consultant’s skin is that SME business owners are still looking for and hoping for a silver bullet, a magic pill to fix all of their problems.
So what are the secrets and advice given by one of Australia’s leading entrepreneurs especially to the SME sector?
To be fair in today’s live presentation, that I had the privilege of attending in Melbourne, Mark Bouris, a great and inspirational speaker, states that there are no secrets, but it makes for a great headline that publishers love and readers can’t get enough of – something for all entrepreneurs to keep in mind when trying to generate their own publicity.
Before I provide a summary of Mark’s speech from My Business magazine, I have to get passionate, or in Mark’s words “fight” for what I know to be true – the fact that he has inadvertently stuffed up his definition of Marketing and Branding!
As a marketing consultant, I’m amazed that someone like Mark Bouris, can in the same sentence say that “…you’ve got to have something that’s unique. It’s not about marketing and branding; these three things are really important: the idea or concept, how hard you can work and are you more skilled in your area or is your product better?”
The actual word brand is all about being unique. Branding IS differentiation. Branding is already the most misunderstood word in the business language, so having someone who is a brilliant and successful entrepreneur and marketer, someone who has the influence and mass media exposure, muddy the waters, is only contributing to the confusion faced by SMEs!
Branding is what people think and feel about when they experience your product or service. Like most business owners Mr Bouris’s definition and use of “marketing and branding” is completely wrong, in fact the 3 things he refers to ARE what marketing and branding is all about! Marketing is simply about satisfying needs not selling or promoting which is just how most business owners use these terms. In the words of Peter Drucker, businesses about two things and two things only; marketing and innovation.
Now to summarise the rest of the inspirational article.
1. Understand why you’re in business.
-Working for yourself?
-Being successful?
-Helping people?
Ultimately the question is about what drives you, what gets you out of bed in the morning?
2. Sheer hard work.
A self-confessed workaholic Mr Bouris concedes that his work habits have cost him two marriages (and a fortune in divorce settlements) and advocates that hard work is the key to being better than your competitors through ongoing improvement.
Although I agree that there is no escaping hard work, unless you enjoy it you simply will not be able to do it day in day out, and this is certainly no secret. The real secret should be to work smarter not harder and focus on the things that will make the greatest contribution to business. And it is this focus that is so damn hard to achieve for most of us, with emails and calls, and more distractions than ever before.
3. Understand what business you are really in.
This is a critical way to examine your business. Is Yellow Brick Road in the financial advice business or the mortgage business? No, that’s how they execute the actual business. Their actual business is helping people achieve their dreams and hopes. It’s the old ‘sell benefits not features’. To paraphrase Max Factor, who when asked what businesses he was is, replied by pointing to the factory and said “…in there we make creams and powders and then pointed to the street and said out there we sell hope to women.”
4. Be involved in an environment that’s a rising tide.
In other words go where the demand is, don’t try to generate it, as that’s not only to hard but also too expensive. Inventing something new and then trying to sell it to everyone is extremely hard to do.
5. Having the right culture is critical.
Without a team that is able to have fun together, take risks and stay together through good times and bad, there is no business.
6. Failures are successes too because they provide an opportunity to learn and adjust your course of action.
7. Having the right business partner, someone you can share highs and lows with, someone to bounce ideas off and to make decisions together with is critical.
I would add that having clearly defined roles will also make a partnership much more effective with each partner being in charge of a separate area will minimize disagreements.
by admin | Sep 5, 2012 | Blog
95% of the professionals on Linkedin are not realizing anywhere near it’s potential. Potential that allows you to:
- Promote your personal brand
- Be a Proactive Networker
- Check References and Backgrounds
- Look for a Job, Seek and Hire Candidates and be better prepared for interviews
- Generate Leads and Accelerate Sales
- Ask for Advice from your own network as well as “Crowdsource”
- Find Experts and Partners
- Improve your Personal Productivity with all of the different LinkedIn tools, Widgets, and Apps.
- Research trends and industries, gather opinions by running polls as well as track company news.
- Finally and most importantly, LinkedIn can provide you with the perfect and simple platform for a Referral System, which we all know, is critical to success in business.
You can read more here about WHY LinkedIn is the Greatest Personal Branding, Publicity and Sales Tool for B2B Markets here.
If you want to be a ‘power user’ and maximize your time investment into the most useful B2B Social Medium, then you’ll need to get the basics right:
1. Develop a unique profile; if your profile reads like everyone else’s then it will be much harder to stand out! Be creative, controversial, funny, but most importantly be yourself. Make sure that your profile is still considered ‘professional’ by your intended target audience; prospective employers, recruiters, prospective clients. What works in the advertising industry maybe simply too much for the banking industry.
2. Make sure you complete your profile; it’s likely to be your most public face to the world. People spend so much effort on their resume that they use intermittently yet their LinkedIn profile contains barely any information. If anything, your LinkedIn Profile should be more detailed than your resume. Today it’s absolutely fine to be an accountant by day and a fashion blogger by night. Your LinkedIn profile can easily and professionally reflect your many pursuits and passions.
3. Optimise your profile. From the way you personalize your Public Profile and Website links to optimizing your keywords to make sure you appear in searches that matter when prospects look for professionals that have your skills.
4. Develop a Company Profile and make sure your entire team connect to it. Due to the simple and free nature of LinkedIn with all of its benefits we now recommend that start ups, from consultants to trade professionals, develop a great personal and company profile, especially until such time that they can afford a website that is professional. The result is a very basic but powerful online presence, while the website is being developed.
5. Connect with clients, suppliers and prospects. Make sure you personalize the invitation and provide a reason to connect when you invite people you know or just met. Make sure you have a policy on who you connect with, your network is a reflection on you.
6. Use the LinkedIn Productivity tools: Web Browser Toolbar, Outlook Widget, Events, Polls, etc.
7. Ask for Recommendations, they are your testimonials and are vital in developing trust and credibility.
8. Participate in Groups, make sure to listen first, and add value rather than sell! Social Media is about communication and education not promotion! Success comes from helping people achieve their goals.
9. Answer questions in Answers section.
10. Build relationships, try to meet people over a coffee, pick up the phone if you are in the same geographical location.
11. Social Media is about developing unique content and then promoting it. Make sure you do both. There are multiple ways to promote your content on LinkedIn, which is why it is an amazing online PR tool!
12. Get in front of the people you need to get in front of, through correctly using the search function and then leveraging your existing relationships to make the appointment by asking for Introductions or asking the connector to forward your message to the intended recipient.
13. Test LinkedIn Mail as well as LinkedIn Advertising.
If you don’t use it, you lose it! Start with 10 minutes a day, track your progress and get LinkedIn or become Locked Out!
If you need assistance with your LinkedIn Profile, or are looking for LinkedIn Training or LinkedIn Coaching then check out http://www.influenceyournetwork.com/linkedin-training
by admin | Sep 3, 2012 | Blog
One of the most important decisions that a small business owner will make is how much money to set aside for the marketing budget.
Successful and profitable small businesses understand that they need to allocate adequate funds for marketing their business.
Prospective customers always ask, “How much should I spend on marketing?”
The answer we give them is this:
1. No matter how much you have it will never be enough! Having worked in large corporate environments our marketing consultants know that companies with $30m budgets these big brands always want more; more advertising dollars, more sponsorship dollars, more PR dollars, more salary dollars for the marketing department and the list goes on.
2. Marketing Budgets will be much higher in competitive business categories and lower in general in less competitive ones.
3. The more unique your business or product / service offering, in general, the easier it will be (and cheaper) to promote it IF you are tapping into existing demand as opposed to trying to educate the market, which will always be horrendously expensive and most small businesses just don’t have the sort of marketing budget required to do this. In these unique cases actually having new entrants / competitors may actually be a benefit as together the task of educating the market is made easier.
4. If you are the new entrant in the market, you will have to spend more to take some share away from your competitors or create new demand in the market.
Here’s a great article discussing the different criteria for setting your marketing budget http://www.imageworksstudio.com/blog/how-set-marketing-budget-your-smb/index.html and a summary for your convenience:
1. Counselors to America’s Small Business (SCORE) and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) define the variable for a proper marketing budget to be between 2% and 10% of sales, noting that for B2C, retail and pharmaceuticals can exceed 20% during peak brand building years.
2. You have to spend money to make money, yet most small businesses are completely under budgeted when it comes to their marketing. Worse still when they do spend on marketing, much of the expenditure is wasted and becomes an expense instead of an investment.
3. The article goes on to provide some guidelines based on revenue quoting an average of 4-6% and making the usual disclaimer that many circumstances can warrant an increase or reduction in your marketing budget as a percentage of revenue.
4. Looking at what your competitors are spending can be useful
5. In the end your marketing budget should be properly allocated to position your organization, trump the competition, raise awareness, generate quality conversion and of course increase revenue growth and this is the most important point and exactly how a marketing budget should be considered.
6. On the subject of organic growth – Many small businesses start out and grow their clientele by word of mouth alone and are very successful. But they usually hit a brick wall. That’s where building a powerful brand is critical. When you rely on organic growth alone, you risk losing revenue from business you did not get because a % your target audience were never made aware of your product or service! And you cannot underestimate the lost sales from those prospects who perceived your current brand negatively and left your website without you ever knowing about it. This is why it is so important to build the brand correctly. Why risk millions to save thousands?
Finally I’d like to use 3 examples we can all learn from:
1. The highly successful Real Estate Agency Hocking and Stuart entered the market by investing around 20% of the Net Sales back into marketing and became one of Australia’s most successful real estate agencies.
2. Swisse feels better by increasing its marketing budget! Millions of dollars spent sponsoring sporting events and paying high-profile celebrities to spruik its products has paid off for Swisse Vitamins, which has more than doubled its profit.
a. 131 % rise in net profit to $8.9 million for the year ended June 2011.
b. Swisse revenue climbed to $77.2m, up from $45m the year before.
c. Annual marketing expenses doubled to $26m, accounting for 94% of the total cost of sales at the fast-growing company. In contrast, market leader Blackmores, which made sales of $234m last year, spent just $22m on marketing and sales activities.
So Swisse allocated approximately 34% to marketing as a % of Total Revenue whilst Blackmores allocated only about 9.5% to marketing as a % of Total Revenue.
3. LinkedIn, the world’s biggest professional-networking website, is expected to reach around $900m in sales and marketing and sales expenditure more than doubling in the last 12 months to around $76m or 8.4% of Total Revenue in a category that sees LinkedIn play in 3 different markets with varying levels of competition:
a. Professional Networking – subscription fee model where they have little or no competition other than that of consumer attention deficit caused by every other social medium
b. Advertiser Media Dollars excluding Recruitment, which is an incredibly competitive category dominated by Google’s Adwords
c. And finally competing for recruitment advertising dollars that LinkedIn is vying for by hoping to take share away from other recruitment portals.
Regardless of your industry or stage of development “You’ll Feel Better If You Budget For Adequate Marketing Investment” and invest your marketing budget wisely!
by admin | Sep 3, 2012 | Blog
“Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment”, part four of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” provides a path for changing attitudes and behaviour, which is after all the main objective of advertising and marketing communication.
Whether we are discussing leadership in an organisation or thought leadership in an area of professional expertise, great brands are leaders in consumer advocacy in their product or service category.
Here’s the original list compiled by Dale Carnegie:
1. Begin with praise and sincere appreciation.
2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly
3. Talk about your own mistakes before criticising the other person.
4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
5. Let the other person save face
6. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement.
7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.
One of the most powerful techniques in selling, be it in person or through communicating in any media, is asking questions and either letting the audience arrive at their own conclusion or suggesting one for them! “Tired? Stressed? You’ll Feel Better on Swisse”.
Brands that have admitted their mistakes and promised to learn from them tend to have recover quickly but those that try to defend their actions and shift the blame tend to lose trust and damage their brand reputation.
Things will go wrong in business and mistakes will happen, and today in the world of social media, where there is nowhere to hide, the strength of a brand’s relationship with its customers is about how it deals with failures.
Domino’s pizza did this in 2011. In the ads, Domino’s admitted that its pizzas were terrible, explained that it redesigned them, and asked people to give them a try.
“Viewers of these ads described them as “bold” and “refreshing,” and gave the company credit for acknowledging what everyone already knew. More important, people tried the pizza and found they liked it. The result: store sales rose and quarterly profits doubled. Domino’s took a failure point — its horrible pizzas — and made it a rallying point. The company saw negative comments as a gift from customers, an opportunity to improve the product, rather than a liability.”
Ref: HBR Blog Network: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/03/the_art_of_admitting_failure.html
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