Brand Building for Small Business
A Blog for Entrepreneurs Looking to Create and Develop their Corporate Identity
We’re big fans of Warren Buffett at Brand Building for Small Business, so we always enjoy a good Buffett quote. We particularly like when his words resonate in the world of branding!
As a small business owner, you never want to overlook any opportunity to brand your product/services – especially a chance that is relatively inexpensive and has the potential for earning goodwill.
Since the calendar is now showing the month of November and we’ve “fallen back” to that time of year that has us traveling home in the dark at 5:00 pm, my internal clock (after being set with a reminder for so many years) is telling me the time is right to start planning a new holiday card for the year.
Since design, production, and distribution all take time, you really should have at least a month (and preferably more) to execute this project.
Pick Your Celebration
While you can certainly elect to celebrate any holiday, Christmas and New Year are the most common for most businesses now choosing to make these commemorations less specific as a way of showing respect for the many celebrations occurring this time of the year: Diwali, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and many more. (For a complete list of holidays occurring throughout the year, see Wikipedia’s list of events.)
As a result, you may want to select Season’s Greetings or Happy Holiday upon picking the general theme and time of year for your celebration . . . and might want to select iconography that does not favor any one over the others.
Choose Your Medium
Traditionally, greeting cards were printed, addressed, and mailed . . . and recipients would frequently display all of those received as an expression of friendship and appreciation. For a variety of reasons, printed cards have become less common . . . so those senders that do go the traditional route very often stand out. However, be aware that mailing costs have risen and adequate time must be given to ensure timely delivery during this most busy of postal seasons.
The alternative, of course, is to e-mail cards. Assuming you or a member of your staff has both the IT and graphic arts skills to create your template and assuming you have collected the requisite e-mail addresses for marketing and/or operational purposes, this alternative offers a number of advantages. Specifically:
However, you can expect the greeting to have less longevity – most likely being deleted upon receipt as often as not.
To make the transition from printed to e-mailed greetings, some businesses have elected to use the amount saved on production and distribution expense to donate to a favorite charity and to use that gift as the centerpiece of the greeting message AND branding impression.
By the way, a few companies actually elect to do both – taking full advantage of the timing being different to spread their message across a much longer period.
Create Your Design and Message
The design and message of your greeting card provides an opportunity for branding. While you can certainly go to a local store or shop on-line, these generic versions eliminate much of your chance to customize your visual elements as well as content. For example, my old employer used to invest in unique screen-printed cards that had images that both reflected the season as well as the corporate logo and other typical iconography. Some people choose to show their building fully decorated for the holiday as the cover of the card — both setting a festive mood and reminding the recipient of the company’s presence. Similarly, quite a few businesses feature group photos of staff to communicate their greeting in a more personal way that allows customers and business partners to attach a face to a name.
In these latter two cases, you can very often take a sufficiently good photo yourself and use one of the countless photo reproduction services to get the final printed product – which gets your project done pretty quickly and inexpensively without absorbing the extra cost of a professional photographer or commercial printer.
To ensure a quality picture with a traditional visual, holiday theme, you can also go to one of the many sources of free images and download one that you can then use as the basis of pretty cheaply and easily building your own card that includes your logo and a very personalized message. For example, www.unsplash.com makes available free images such as these:
(Check back in the future to download a ready-to-use greeting-card template.)
When you go the route of designing your own, you can generally find an Internet vendor who will allow you to upload your artwork and provide a high-quality final product . . . very often including the ability to add an envelope with a preprinted return address – a great labor saver. (Some vendors are even able to take care of recipient addressing – at a cost, of course – allowing you to provide an electronic list of addresses from which envelopes are produced.
When crafting your message, you once again have an important chance to promote your brand as a business that:
Feel Good
One of the best benefits of sending out holiday greetings is very simply to feel good about participating in the spirit of the season. Both you and your staff can enjoy this moment of celebration and picture your card being circulated around the participants’ offices. This ability to keep a healthy work/life perspective is necessary and will be appreciated by staff and customers alike . . . and will become an important and memorable part of your brand.
As always, we welcome any thoughts or feedback, and we encourage you to comment by using the space provided below.
No image illustrates this point quite as effectively. Happy Halloween!
Recently, I saw a reference to National Blogger’s Day being October 27th. While I have never celebrated such an event (or frankly even heard about that one), I’m always interested in another excuse to have a good time . . . so I decided to look into the matter further.
I understand that we can now find 570 million blogs on the Internet with over 30 million of those in the United States. (See the First Site Guide article Blogging Statistics 2021: Ultimate List with 47 Facts and Stats by Ogi Djuraskovic that was last updated on August 26th, 2021.) Therefore, a National Blogger’s Day certainly seemed somewhat between possible and likely!
According to one of the keepers of such information (i.e., WhatNationalDayIsIt? (whatnationaldayisit.com)), their algorithm did pick up October 27th. However, the most recent reference was almost five years ago, and you’d be more likely to have heard of the event in Indonesia.
So . . . why bother asking the question or writing this article?
With about 7 million blog posts per day (see Blogging Statistics 2021: Ultimate List with 47 Facts and Stats), perhaps the bloggers of the world deserve a little bit of extra attention and should unite in adopting this date themselves to enhance the general recognition and raise the profile of the many bloggers sharing information and providing a valuable public service – often without much (or any) personal financial gain.
Whjaddya say?
You in?
What Is a Blog?
According to Merriam-Webster, a blog is defined as:
“1 computers: a website that contains online personal reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks, videos, and photographs provided by the writer
also: the contents of such a site
2 a regular feature appearing as part of an online publication that typically relates to a particular topic and consists of articles and personal commentary by one or more authors”
Blogs may take the shape of successful journalism such as the Huffington Post or range from personal diaries to business columns posted on corporate web sites to:
Regardless of the type of blog, the time, effort, and resources expended to communicate a message to an intended audience are considerable, and such commitment does deserve recognition (even those bloggers who may be motivated by less than completely pure and altruistic intentions).
What Can Be Done to Get October 27th Properly Recognized?
Well . . .
If all the bloggers in the U.S. chose to adopt this holiday as their own, that would be a pretty good start of 30 million people – 570 million upon recruiting fellow bloggers worldwide. If each of these bloggers then communicated their desire to celebrate to their audience, the total acceptance increases exponentially . . . and would demonstrate the power and credibility of blogging today!
(Sound far-fetched? Then read: Finally! Here’s How Cyber Monday Even Became a Thing.)
Clearly, such a process takes time measured in years, not days. That said, a famous Lao Tzu quote says “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” so . . .
If enough bloggers were to take such steps, perhaps October 27th might one day become a recognized “thing” like cyber Monday. If not and the suggestion fails to capture the public’s imagination and attention, we’ve at least given ourselves a platform for increasing awareness about the ground swell growth of activity and increasing importance of that discipline called blogging.
Note: In doing some research for this article, I came across the following: What is a Blog? – Definition, Information, Articles, Tools (marketingterms.com), which I have decided to pass along as some interesting extra reading, which can – perhaps – be saved until October 27th to add a little additional insight to your reflections on that day.
For many, the process of developing just the right logo is an excruciatingly long, careful, and utterly exhausting process ultimately rewarded by achieving a final product that was done well and communicates the correct sentiment. As a result, you are understandably and justifiably annoyed when you send the design out . . . only to find that some third party has made changes that butchered your hard work.
Sometimes, this result can occur because the available space to display the logo does not match the shape . . . so they “help” by disproportionately stretching, cramming, and squeezing the graphic to fit. A similar circumstance can happen with color.
Even more annoying is the situation in which the image is changed because that party happened to like their version better than yours! Fortunately, that last instance is somewhat rare. Most often, you will find that such changes happen as a result of handling errors because the end-user did not know the correct procedure for resizing an image to avoid problems such as disproportionate stretching or loss of resolution. Similarly, color correction errors seem to frequently occur when a palette gets changed from RGB to CMYK (or vice versa) or when the incorrect palette is used for a specific application.
So, What Can You Do?
Do you just accept the fact that your logo will get mishandled very often but philosophically hope that the good that’s done will outweigh the damage?
Do you just stop giving the logo out so the design can’t get messed up, accepting the fact that exposure will be lost even though the frequency of use ultimately determines the recognizability (and success!!) of your branding efforts.
Actually, the best solution – while far from perfect – is quite simple and involves little cost. You create an official logo download site and send that link to any party requesting artwork for a legitimate purpose.
If you read Carole’s article entitled A “Legal-Approved” Free Collection of Social Media Icons, you know that social media sites recognize the value of getting good exposure by sharing logos and have elected to provide a place to obtain a correct version.
Do other big companies do the same?
You bet! For example, McDonald’s has a “Media Assets” link on their corporate web site that provides various logos and iconography. If you are a business working with franchisees, the ability to share the right images and branding elements in an accurate and efficient way becomes especially important.
What’s Involved in Executing this Task?
In the past, Carole and I have been responsible for creating this function and found that we had the most success when supplying a fairly large number of the most commonly requested variations. For example, our logo download page would typically offer:
Aside from that final category, the file types typically used for downloads were either jpg’s or png’s.
By providing these various versions with a brief explanation of the most common usages of each type, we found that the number of instances of mishandling could be significantly reduced as well as the number of requests that had to be addressed by providing files to specific specifications.
Could we have given one very large, high-res variation and counted upon the end-user to make the adjustments required for a particular situation. While theoretically possible, we had bad experiences when relying upon the skill levels of a surprising large number of vendors, and we arrived at this compromise because we had “been burnt.”
Remember, the technology for such a page need not be very sophisticated. If you can create an html page that provides a link to an image file, you can probably create your own download page. (In a separate article in the near future, we plan to provide a template that can be used by you as a guide.)
Another Tip:
If you set up your download page to require some kind of registration, you can give yourself the ability to notify users of any changes to your logo/branding down the road and can provide immediate access to updated replacements. Since logo changes are notoriously challenging to accomplish expeditiously, this ability can reduce the amount of time needed to get your logo modifications out and circulating to the right people. Then, you’ll be less likely to find old versions still in use five years later!
As always, we welcome any thoughts or feedback, and we encourage you to comment by using the space provided below.
Brand Building for Small Business 