While being remembered is essential, it is becoming harder every day. A strong brand stands out in a densely crowded marketplace. Translating the brand into action has become an employee mantra.  There is substantial evidence that companies whose employees understand and embrace the  brand are more successful.  What began as corporate culture under the auspices of human resources is fast becoming branding, and the marketing department runs the show.

Click Here To See Interesting Commentary From Cristiana Pearson at Millward Brown

www.desantisbreindel.com/whitepapers/content-the-new-creative-desantis-breindel.pdf

Give them a visit at www.desantisbreindel.com and follow them on Twitter

Click Here to Read the Full Article

Today with the increasing size of most large corporations it’s become more difficult for them to evolve and take risk when it comes to incorporating new technologies and ideas into their corporate management structure. No one wants to rock the boat. Change can be scary, cost money, and might not work. On the flip side change can still be scary, save a company lots of money, and can open doors that lead to new products or services.

We encourage companies to set aside a portion of money to be invested in small businesses in all kinds of sectors. The amount of money invested in each business can be as little as $20,000. We consider it R&D for management. Just one breakthrough from a company you invested in links you to a new solution to make your corporate management structure more efficient and profitable. Additionally, being on the ground floor provides a first mover advantage as you take this new concept out to market.

Kompani Group believes companies must be flexible by allowing new ideas and solutions that are not the norm to be introduced into the corporate structure. It can be uncomfortable at times but when you’re too comfortable with status quo you’re probably not growing and someone else is going to sneak up behind you and then leave you in the dust.

Myth no. 1 – Once you register a trademark you own it forever and for everything

Myth no. 2 – Registering a domain name offers all sorts of legal protection

Myth no. 3 – You can save money if you conduct the search yourselves.

Trademark Tip – Top 5 Reasons to Register Your Brand Name or Logo.

There a myriad reasons to protect your trademark, brand name, logo or slogan through federal trademark registration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Here are just a few of the top reasons why you should seek federal protection for your mark:

1. Trademarks are a part of your company’s intellectual property portfolio. It could very well be one of your most valuable business assets, albeit an intangible one. Trademarks can be accorded a value separate and distinct from other assets in your company. To illustrate, the Coca-Cola® trademark alone is purportedly valued at $70 billion. This doesn’t include other assets such as trucks, manufacturing and bottling facilities, etc., just the Coke® brand. The value of a registered trademark may be listed as a line item asset for companies seeking to attract potential investors or obtain financing.

2. A federally registered trademark grants you nationwide priority claim of ownership to the mark. A registered trademark provides constructive notice to prospective users and potential infringers of your claim of ownership to the mark. In the event of  a dispute concerning rights to use a particular mark, the registered trademark owner will have the benefit of the doubt vis-à-vis a non-registered user of the same mark for similar or related products.

3. In the event of any unauthorized use or potential infringement of a registered trademark, the trademark owner is entitled to seek redress in federal court. The registered trademark owner can bring suit in federal court for trademark infringement and prohibit the alleged infringing mark from being used in commerce in a manner that causes confusion with the registered trademark. Moreover, trademark owners may seek three times their actual damages suffered as a result of the infringement (triple damages).

4. If you are interested in obtaining international trademark protection for your brand, you will need to first have a registered or pending application filed with the USPTO. A federally registered trademark is the basis for U.S. trademark owners to seek international trademark registration. Upon filing your application, the USPTO assigns your mark a serial number (or a registration number, once registered). This number is used to submit an international trademark application under the Madrid Protocol System for International Trademark Registration.

5. Registered trademarks may be filed with the U.S. Customs Service to prohibit the importation of infringing foreign goods that may bear your mark or something similar (“knock-offs”). Many illegal imports attempt to trade off the established brand value of famous or well-known marks. Trademark registrations may be placed on record with the Customs Service so infringing products entering the country may be flagged, seized and possibly destroyed.

So there you have it, the Top Five reasons to protect your brand name or logo through federal trademark registration. There are other reasons, of course, including protecting your brand value and hard earned marketing dollars. For more information concerning trademark law, the trademark registration process, or for questions concerning your particular mark or brand, please contact one of our FlatFee Trademark attorneys at 1.800.769.7790 or info@flatfeetrademark.com .

Owner: Camacho Cigars, Authors: Dylan Austin, Gianni D’Alerta

Background/Introduction:

Before we started this project we planned and built the following two sites for Camacho cigars – www.camachocigars.com and www.socialcigar.com (at first we did not reveal that Camacho was behind this site). Through the two sites we built a subscriber list of 4,500 people in less than one year. Since then we have also built www.room101cigars.com, and we are currently working on a new revolutionary social networking platform and corporate site for Camacho Cigars/Davidorff.

Kickoff of the BlackBand project:

To start off, here is an excerpt from the press release, post project:

“The campaign objectives for Camacho included the creation of an engaging, opt-in viral marketing campaign, a successful permission-marketing opportunity as an outlet to sample yet to be released products. A four-part web-series was created without mention of Camacho until the final “reveal” episode. The viewers followed the satirical Independent Cigar Review Bureau, a fictional agency, whose sole purpose was to educate the world about cigar selection, as they used humorous, guerilla-style tactics to enlighten three characters that represented the most common cigar misconceptions”

Process:

1. We launched the site with this page: http://www.blackbandproject.com/home-temp/
2. We blasted Camacho’s mailing list of 1000 and the social network we created while I was at Propeller of 3500 people, not as Camacho but as the fictional company. The amazing thing was that the idea was so interesting that we had a very low spam report.  We also ran rich media banner ads that actually played a trailer of the project on the websites the banners resided.
3. Once the person signed up they would get one episode a week that would build upon the myths and misconceptions of cigar smoking. The Buzz just keep mounting… people passing the links to their friends… it was huge… in the online cigar world.
4. After they registered they immediately received their first “mission” http://www.blackbandproject.com/d57s-1/
5. A week after that http://www.blackbandproject.com/6ku6-2/
6. A week later http://www.blackbandproject.com/hr4s-3/
7. And then the conclusion http://www.blackbandproject.com/b7x3-conclusion/

Results:

1. We gained 15,500 new subscribers! With that permission to market to them anything in the future. They are already expecting more from Camacho, and we won’t disappoint them.
2. Every cigar website was buzzing about the project, we even got more hits on our Black Band Project site in one month that Cigar Aficionado.
3. After the last video was sent… a month later people got 3 cigars in the mail. So for a whole month, every week… the conversations where about the black band project. Then when the cigars shipped, another huge buzz.

Another Excerpt:

“From day one, the campaign captivated the cigar industry and generated sweeping buzz across the country, with thousands of cigar enthusiasts discussing who was behind “The Black Band Project” on social media outlets, including Twitter, Facebook, and cigar-industry message boards and blogs.

End results:

1. 15,000 leads
2. 4,000 people got the cigars (people who watched all the videos)
3. 15% overall sales increase after the launch of the new product.

Road America is uniquely qualified to provide outstanding service to our clients and their valued customers.  This confidence is based upon the tremendous value we place on our relationship with clients, our comprehensive, specialized and rated service provider network, our long-standing and unparalleled experience providing 24-hour roadside assistance services, and our quality approach to servicing our clients and exceeding their business needs.

Corporate Strength

Road America is a wholly owned United States subsidiary of the MAPFRE Group (MAPFRE) the largest insurance group in Spain.   MAPFRE had revenues of over US $17.4 Billion in worldwide operations in 2006.  MAPFRE operates an extensive international assistance network through a specialized subsidiary, MAPFRE Asistencia, which is the direct parent company of Road America.

MAPFRE Asistencia is a leading international insurance conglomerate providing emergency roadside assistance, insurance, reinsurance and general assistance services worldwide throughout 52 countries and over 1000 corporate clients, including Renault, Infinity, Ford, General Motors, Harley-Davidson, Toyota, Peugeot, and Volvo.  MAPFRE services 120 million beneficiaries worldwide, providing assistance on more than 2.5 million occasions and is rated A+ (superior) by the North American rating agency AM Best.

International Expertise and Experience

Our confidence is also based upon the significant experience and strength of our parent company, MAPFRE, within the assistance services industry.  In the field of emergency roadside assistance, MAPFRE has developed and operates an extensive direct provider network in 39 countries.

MAPFRE has developed proprietary software, procedures and know-how in the field of roadside assistance, and it has comprehensive experience in developing worldwide provider networks and call centers to service international roadside assistance programs for insurance companies, automobile manufacturers, financial service companies and other international corporations.

Flexibility and Responsiveness

Road America’s programs have been and are marketed successfully through a variety of marketing channels in the following industries: motorcycle OEM, automotive, associations, telecommunications (wireless and wireline), financial services, insurance, original manufacturers, motor club and utilities.  This diversity in experience has allowed Road America to perfect and enhance our service offerings and capabilities.

Road America’s strengths include the size and flexibility to customize our service offerings and the responsiveness to meet or surpass each client’s exact or unique marketing, service needs and culture.

Comprehensive Service Offerings & Capabilities

In addition to a complete array of benefits, including automotive, travel, security, and medical related services, Road America can provide a full range of support services including marketing and promotional support, fulfillment services, inbound sales and enrollment, membership tracking and renewals, and program administration.  Road America’s extensive list of services, innovative approach, and commitment to complete client satisfaction makes our service offering the most meaningful and comprehensive in the industry.

Ethical Business Practices

The nature of the MAPFRE Group demands enforcing a policy of ethical treatment of employees, clients, business partners and customers; social responsibility; respect of the legal framework; and a culture of sound business and accounting practices.  The MAPFRE Group requires the same strong ethical business practices from all of its subsidiaries within the MAPFRE Group.

Tested. Proven. Trusted®:

With more than 120 North American corporate clients and more than seven motorcycle OEM clients, Road America has proven sales and service results.

Road America’s 24-hour roadside and membership programs have been proven to:

• Increase Brand Loyalty
• Increase Customer Service Ratings
• Increase Customer Referrals
• Increase Customer Retention
• Increase Customer Awareness
• Increase Overall Client Profitability

There are four ways to battle your competition. 1) Launching a true fighter brand, 2) Launching an endorsed sub-brand, 3) Launching a co-driver sub-brand or, 4) Launching a driver sub-brand

Driver sub-brand

Definition:

• The parent brand retains its primary influence as a driver, and the sub-brand can act as a descriptor-a word or phrase that tells end-users that the company is offering a slight variation on the same product or service they have come to know.

Note: Of the three types of relationships, a driver brand with a descriptor sub-brand is the most risky. The parent brand is vulnerable to cannibalization because very little distinguishes one brand from the other. The risk of cannibalization is greatest when a descriptor signifies merely a lower-quality offering. The risk is minimized when the descriptor signals a different application.

Examples:

• Mercedes provides a good illustration of a driver brand that has successfully accessed a downscale market with a descriptor sub-brand. In the early 1980s, Mercedes introduced that is now it’s C Class, a small car to compete with the BMW 3 series, as well as with Acura and Lexus.
• Now priced around $30,000, the line sells nearly 30,000 cars annually in the United States (around one-third of all Mercedes sales in the United States).
• How could a brand that has historically been identified with prestige and that offers a car selling for more than $100,000 pull off this kind of downscale move?
• First, Mercedes delivered a quality product.
• Second, the C Class introduction was accompanied by an intensive effort to reposition the core brand’s message from prestige to performance.
• Third, marketing for the C class aggressively targeted young buyers. The C Class name creates a distinction that allows the sub-brand to attract a slightly different consumer, but it does not drive that consumer’s decision to buy the car. The Mercedes brand retains that power.

Celeron – B to B (Intel) 1997

• To combat AMD’s $260.00 K6 processor chip, and to avoid having to lower prices on its Pentium processor, Intel launched a sub-brand dubbed Celeron.
• Despite a couple of early pricing mistakes and mishaps in expectations management, Intel succeed in combating and keeping AMD from creating a strong foothold in the low-end market. With a share of 80% of the overall processor market and their ability to roll out new processors frequently, Intel proved to be a testament to both the power of fighter brands to open up lower-tier market opportunities and their unequaled ability to keep competitors at bay.
• Note: The EU have recently been successful in winning a ruling against Intel regarding antitrust issues and pricing manipulation resulting in a fine of $1.5 billion dollars. We wonder whether the costs of the now 5 year old lawsuit brought by AMD, the fine and the distractions for Intel’s senior management team, would justify the launch of another Celeron value sub-brand when you already have more than 80 percent of the total market share.

There are four ways to battle your competition. 1) Launching a true fighter brand, 2) Launching an endorsed sub-brand, 3) Launching a co-driver sub-brand or, 4) Launching a driver sub-brand

Co-driver

Definition:

• The parent brand and the sub-brand act as co-drivers with roughly equal influence on consumers.

Examples:

United Express (United Airlines)

The United Airlines brand provides United Express, a commuter line, with the convenience of connections to United flights and a reputation for safety. There is no cannibalization because the flights do not compete. United Express is differentiated from its parent brand by its lower level of on-board service, its use of smaller planes, and its less formal personality.

Good News (Gillette)

Gillette Good News also illustrates a successful co-driver relationship. Gillette Good News disposable razors are a definite cut below ‘the best a man can get” that is the Gillette legacy in shaving. But disposable razors are qualitatively different from the upscale razors such as Sensor and Atra with which Gillette has long held a technological edge. Gillette could provide a rationale for a disposable brand by being the best in the disposable category. But the Good News user’s personality – younger and more carefree than the traditionally masculine and sophisticated Gillette persona – plays a key role in distinguishing the disposable brand from the rest of the line. Both brand names – Gillette and Good News – influence the customer’s decision to buy the product.

This is a great article from Roger Martin from the Harvard Business Review. We think this explains why most corporations don’t have a “big idea” for how to communicate their brand and essence to their stakeholders. Enjoy. Well done Roger!

A good strategy is the product of the creative combination of two disparate logics — rather than a single linear analytical logic flow — but CEOs and “strategists” are seldom conditioned to become skilled at the requisite creative combination.

There is a lot of strategy in the world, produced by all types of CEOs, corporate heads of strategy, and strategy consultants. Yet very little of this strategy is any good. There are undoubtedly many possible explanations for why this is the case, but here is my own pet theory, which I offer up to elicit your reactions and surface alternatives:

A good strategy is the product of the creative combination of two disparate logics — rather than a single linear analytical logic flow — but CEOs and “strategists” are seldom conditioned to become skilled at the requisite creative combination.

The two most fundamental strategic choices are deciding where to play and how to win. These two decisions — in what areas will the company compete, and on what basis will it do so — are the critical one-two punch to generate strategic advantage. However, they can’t be considered independently or sequentially. In a great strategy, your where-to-play and how-to-win choices fit together and reinforce one another.

For example, operating only in your home country market may seem to be a perfectly fine where-to-play choice and winning on the basis of technological superiority a perfectly fine how-to-win choice, but their combination almost always produces a bad strategy — because of global economies of scale in R&D, some competitor will globalize and blow out the geographically narrow national player. These choices don’t fit or reinforce.

In contrast, Apple wins because its where-to-play choice — broad participation across a number of high-involvement consumer electronics categories (computers, music, phones) — is matched wonderfully with its how-to-win choice — competing on user experience design and eco-system orchestration. It leverages the winning capabilities it has built in these two areas across the domains in which it has chosen to play to produce its winning Macs, iPods, and iPhones.

The trouble is, CEOs don’t usually get to the top by integrating different logics in that way. More often they rise by pushing a single logic. They like to analyze a problem and come up with a single, sufficient answer, like how to globalize or get costs under control or introduce a new product, rather than trying to look for answers to two questions that fit together elegantly.

As a consequence, many of them come to think of strategy as either where-to-play or how-to-win. For example, in the global pharma industry today, it appears that most CEOs define their strategies as simply playing in the historically lucrative pharma industry and doing whatever the rest of their competitors do. This is silent on how-to-win and the resultant set of me-too strategies is one reason why performance in the industry is going downhill fast.

Or alternatively, for many high-tech CEOs, the dominant choice is to win with a proprietary technology. This is silent on where-to-play and that has led many technology companies astray because it really matters where exactly that technology is used — as we see with Nortel Networks, which is now in the bankruptcy court despite its treasure trove of technology patents.

Meanwhile, corporate strategists and strategy consultants get ahead by demonstrating mastery of all sorts of conceptual tools for analyzing where-to-play (five forces, profit maps, etc.) or how-to-win (experience curve, value chain, VIRO, etc.). However, there as yet is no analytical tool for combining a given where-to-play choice with a congenial how-to-win choice or vice versa. That takes creative insight. But the majority of people who seek to become corporate strategists or strategy consultants do so because they are much more comfortable with analysis than what they perceive as guesswork. So they tend to become expert at strategic analyses, not strategy.

That, I submit, is why CEOs and “strategists” so seldom produce good strategies. Strategy is a creative act and the way to produce good strategy is go beyond basic analysis to creatively integrate your choices concerning where you play and how you propose to win.

Roger Martin is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada and the author of The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Press, 2009).