Brand is a whole bunch of smaller pieces
There are a lot of opportunities to make mistakes in branding. And once you make one, you can easily make a pile of others on top of it. Then you get more invested in the whole thing, so you add more potentially problematic pieces. Pretty soon you have an expensive mess. Like mine.
Naming is not easy
I started a company focused on visuals for a good reason, I’m not good with words. Certainly not in a clever way. Even naming my cats has been difficult in the past. I had Spinike because I had a Greek roommate and it was the only Greek word I could say (yes, Spinach). I had one named Miky for My Kitty, another named Yorky for Your Kitty. Told you. No cleverness.
It took me years to come up with VisualsSpeak. I know, pretty literal. I was working with visuals speaking.
What is wrong with it? Everyone misspells it. And we do not own the domains of the misspellings. No one can pronounce it clearly. Especially me. It’s just weird enough to confuse people, but not weird enough to intrigue them.
The designer logo
We hired a very talented designer to come up with the foundation of our brand. He did a great job, and I approved every single step. So this isn’t about him. When I hand people a card, they often comment on how attractive it is. People remember the dramatic colors and associate them with us.
But here is what we have learned about it as we have gone along.
Lime green and orange are not easy to print. In the photograph are three professionally printed cards using the exact same files. Monitor color differences aside, getting things to match when they are near each other is not easy. Like at a trade show where you have your cards, the manual covers, the bag logos and the sign in close proximity. It’s expensive and time consuming to even come close.The lime green in particular looks dramatically different if it is printed on a coated (shiny) paper as opposed to an uncoated paper.
That lovely gradient that makes the circles look dimensional? Not printable in all processes. Like the inexpensive screen printing on bags? You have to compromise with something lik
e this:
Or pay three to four times as much to have the logo embroidered.
The trademark
You can’t protect an idea, so the other option you have is to trademark your name. What you are really trademarking is the way it looks on your products. We had to send photos of our logotype on our manuals, bags, and signs. Our designer was clever and desgined the TM to hang off the end, integrating it into the design of the name. Great. It took over a year to get the trademark. Then it becomes a registered trademark, which is shown by a ®. Remember, its what the actual name looks like— with the TM that is trademarked. Now what? VisualsSpeak ™®?
The tagline(s)
If I am not good at naming, I am even worse at taglines. Our graphic designer came up with the first one, Image-based Training and Consulting. Unfortunately no one seemed to know what that was. Once our product came out we thought, Image-based Tools and Training. Not much more helpful for people.
Now we have tag line of the month. Or situational based tag lines. Tom often will try one, I’ll try another. I’ll try different ones on various social media sites. People don’t seem to know what we do no matter which one we use. Sigh. We have dozens of notebooks full of lists of ideas. We could probably have tagline of the hour.
Currently we are using:
- Facilitating Conversations that Matter
- Inspiring Connections through Images
We have asked for suggestions from lots of people, even hired people to help. Still looking for ideas. If you have any, we’d love to hear them.
All adds up to $$$$
Each piece of the branding has taken a lot of time, and has cost a lot of money. Each step along the way, we have gotten more invested emotionally with the rise in financial investment. And we aren’t sure if any of it is really working. At this point, certain people do recognize the VisualsSpeak name, even more than my name. But we don’t know if it is really serving us or harming us.
Things we invested in and thought we would just be able to cross off the to do list have persisted to be a pain on a daily basis. These are the types of things that suck my energy and attention on an ongoing basis without a lot of contribution to forward movement.
What would I do differently?
Select an easy to pronounce and spell name. Pick a logo that is simpler to reproduce. Select colors that are easier to print. Don’t build the TM into the type.
I might even develop the branding later in the process. So instead of doing it first, I might come up with a temporary solution to use while I test the market. After I get that more focused, it would be easier to develop a more targeted solution. At least I hope it would.
Still not sure what to do with what we have created. What do you think? Should we stay with what we have, or think about creating new?
Will you walk with us?
We really hope you’ll continue to share stories with us, and offer suggestions and ideas. It has been so helpful to feel the support and know we are not alone walking this path.
You can subscribe to this series by subscribing to the blog by RSS or email. You can also subscribe to our e-newsletter where we usually talk about tips and tricks for using our visual tools, but in the next one we are going to ask our readers for help.
Here are the related blog posts;
My business has cracked (be sure to read the comments, lots of shared wisdom and support)
Hi Christine,
I certainly don’t believe it was the logo or choice of colors, but what you do point out here is that you went straight for the big time bits with professional designers and maybe it does make sense to put this off until later. It strikes me that you fell into a “corporate” mode and maybe that’s not the niche. You created an attractive product with a method that’s fairly easy to replicate, and it leads to interesting results and insights. So far, so good. I considered buying the set, but if you knew me you’d know that I’m the last person to spend money on something that I’m not sure I’ll use more than two or three times. I’m as frugal with my company’s budget as with my own. I don’t run constant workshops, and when I do run a training I probably make the mistake of wanting to show everyone what I just learned, what excites me. I get bored doing the same training over and over, though it does tend to improve the training, of course. So I pictured passing the set of images around to everyone in the office who might be going somewhere do to a training. I figured after we might do this for a year or so, but then the materials might not be taken out. And that seemed a shame. Hard for me to justify.
But I loved the idea, and I started looking for visuals that speak. I signed up with i-stock photos for blog use and looked at the clip art from microsoft. It’s very cheap or even free per use. I created light boxes with images I liked and thought might be useful for something. What I’m missing from this experience is some of what your product offers: the ability to physically arrange and re-arrange them. Also, many of these stock images are dozens of views of the same model with different facial expressions, and while they do have images from other cultures, they tend to be slick images for advertising and not images that speak to me.
I have purchased some stock images for our new online learning site – each one less than $2 — but we also had a lot of our own images to use and people who were willing to let us use the interesting image they had for free if we linked back to them. I’ve taken lots of photos when I’m trying to get an image too. I though even of how maybe you’d like to share photos and enrich the collection. But I spent lots of time with the images ALONE, sometimes just looking for the right one, sometimes just browsing a genre, thinking about the blog.
For Christmas my husband bought me one of those digital frames. I put some family and vacation photos on it, but it really became interesting when he downloaded every image sitting on our i-Mac. It took all night to do that. Some photos we don’t even recognize, and with maybe 4000 images, it takes a while to cycle through. I don’t turn on the frame every day. It’s a passive activity, like playing cards or watching TV. The engagement comes with moving the photos, as you discovered.
Google’s Picassa program lets you select your photos and put them in a collage. You can resize them, turn them, drag them around with the mouse, choose a background color. This is probably your competition, now online. But what you bring is a sense of how to use this activity as a communication tool and then there’s something about group and collaborative work: making a collage together, using it to get unstuck. It’s a way to do mindmapping.
Feel free to edit or remove this comment and just keep it for yourself. I know you’re trying to work your business from a new angle and I thought this might be useful for you in thinking of where to go next.
Take care!
Betsy
I agree with your critique of your branding, but in fixing a business, branding is not the first thing that I would worry about. I would start with the business proposition or mission of the business, and then ask if there is any reasonable market for the service or product that you are proposing. Then I would decide the ground on which you will compete. To quote “The Myth of Excellence”, one of my favorite business books, you need to decide the basis of competing for business – will it be price, service, access, experience or product. You need only to be great at one, very good at another, and at the industry standard for the other three, to optimize the bottom line for your business. But which one you pick will influence your brand name and tag line. (e.g., Virgin Air – fights on customer experience, JetBlue fights on price). For me, defining your mission, your market, and your strategy are the first steps in figuring this all out.
I hope those thoughts help, and I wish I had known this when I ran my first business.
I agree with Gary about the need to put aside the visual look of the business (though since you’re visual that could be hard!) and focus first on what you do, how you do it, who you do it for, and, importantly, why you do it. All these really make up your brand anyway, so once you’ve identified what makes you unique, it will be easier to create a visual identity.
For answering the big questions, you might get inspiration and focus from Mark Silver’s materials:
http://www.heartofbusiness.com/
His “Getting to the Core” workbook helped me a lot.
I’ve always believed that brand follows focus. Focus on what you are good at and all else comes into play. Graphic Design, Business cards and bags are great but not if they take you away from doing what you are good at! When I think of branding I think of those poor sheep that get a burn mark on their butts, maybe thats an analogy. Don’t focus on the brand you may get burnt…
that said.. a tag line
Let the visuals do the talking
@Betsy Hansel: There are so many details to deal with starting a business. I have had a whole slew of advisors, who all provided ideas, but in practice as a business owner, you just have to guess what might work. And hope you guess right. I didn’t guess as well as I needed to many times. Oh so many times.
You really bring up something key. We created a product that looked simple but was expensive enough that it caused people to think about whether they would use it enough. Its an awkward market position, and something that will take a whole blog post to talk about.
I didn’t know Picassa let you play with the images like that. I will certainly check that out, especially since I am looking at new ways to engage. I’ve always wanted to have a digital application, and have been waiting for the technology to become more affordable and available.
I greatly value every bit of your input. It is very helpful in helping me see where I have engaged you and what that inspires. Its not just about selling products for me, its also about opening people’s eyes to the way visuals can enrich their lives and work. Seeing that I’ve done that even a little bit is very helpful, esp right now when the mistakes seem more obvious.
Then as you are a visual person, look at focus being something you do to a camera lense… You get the subject in the frame, then you gradually twist the lense to gain a better perspective… any help – or just shut up Em
@Gary Woodill: I wish I could say this is the first time I’ve made these types of mistakes. There is so much to learn in small business, from having a few I’ve developed skills an inch deep and a mile wide. Just enough to make the kind of mess I’m in right now.
Asking if there is a reasonable market is something I am still trying to figure out how to do. I really thought I had done due diligence on this one, and sought out help from people with a lot more experience than me. Yet there has been a huge disconnect between what people said they wanted and what they actually bought.
Its just not in this particular case, but for any kind of purpose you use surveys and focus groups. How can you construct something that gives you the information you really need? Looking back I think people gave me the information they thought I wanted to hear. Not in a manipulative way, I think often they felt a personal connection to me and wanted to be supportive. And I wanted to hear that support since I am so passionate about what I am trying to do. I don’t want to make that mistake again. Any ideas?
@Cathy Moore: I promise I’m putting aside the visual, although as you noticed it isn’t easy.
I got Mark’s newsletter years ago, and recently have had a number of overlaps in our networks emerge. I’ve even been in his house while one of my friends recently housesat while he got his twins. Think the universe is telling me something…….
I keep getting caught in thinking I can effectively get this clarity this for myself since it do it for other people. Yet I don’t have the emotional detachment from myself, and am finding the pain of this mess can get paralyzing. Keeping any forward movement takes most of my focus, so there isn’t much left for facilitating myself. I know other people need this help, now I have to really get that I do too!
@Emma King: Just saying the word focus makes me nauseous. That’s the post I’m working on next. So totally contrary to how I think and where my strength lies, and probably at the core of my blind spot that is holding me back!
Has anyone figured out how to Vulcan Mind Meld? Might be the only way I can get this focus thing.
Your tag line shows promise. Maybe the visuals starting the talking? Hmmm. But only if it fits the focus
Christine, Boy do I feel out of it. I am slowly getting response here in Europe/Germany, and its all positive. That attention didn’t arrive until I focused on having this AMAZING tool called VisualsSpeak. Funny, but non-native English speakers don’t seem to be having a problem remembering what its called or how to say it. Not a problem.
I’m selling it to coaches, teachers, recruiters, personal branding folks, trainers – and what I have noticed is that they need to know the tool is valid. They need to know that we worked very hard at developing and designing this tool for a reason. I’m over here, perhaps the only little cheerleader on this side of the pond, and frankly, I’d like to sell, sell, sell! If I could produce it here, I would, in a heart beat. But honestly, you’re not a sales person and neither am I. But we can learn. And by-gummit, I can sell what I believe in. And you KNOW I believe in this tool.
I agree with everyone that’s telling you to NOT focus on the logo or the name, but to focus on what is RIGHT about VS. Do you have any other “sales” people who market for you?! How accessible is the tool for those of us using the tool and trying to get others to buy it? We have to order it just like everyone else. Again, I’m not a biz person (oh, do I wish), but I am passionate about making sure this tool gets out there and “planted” and grows. And I’ve got ideas, perhaps not perfect ones, but they’re there. We need to hit the breaking point. Before you go broke, of course. And more importantly – you need to keep going. I’m right behind ya. I got your back.
@Susanne: It’s just amazing to me how many little parts come together to form a small business. You can do some of them really well and still have the other parts make you crazy on a daily basis. I am grateful that the core process and product works really well for the people who use it. You are right, now we just have to get more people to use it.
I’m not focusing on any one thing yet really, more trying to get a very high overview. The day to day details have been so overwhelming that I’ve felt like I’ve lost the big picture overview. Its a daily challenge to walk amongst everything that feels like it needs to be done, and figure out what really is important. Harder when there aren’t people to delegate things to yet.
Appreciate having you behind me. I know you have been passionately committed to the dream from the beginning. Maybe VisualsSpeak will become a Europe based thing yet
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