Launching a Brand New Brand: 5 Steps That Will Make It Better

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

You are starting a new firm from scratch.  Or perhaps you are launching a new product or service with its own distinct identity.  What exactly does it take to get your brand new brand right?

It’s a good question and not a small challenge.  With so many options available, it’s sometimes hard to know where to begin. You face the tyranny of a blank sheet of paper.

The natural inclination is to start making decisions about the brand name, the logo or the look and feel of the website.  Stop.  Step back and focus on these five steps first.

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Why Simple Ideas Drive Marketing Success

By Aaron Taylor

Behind every business success is a simple idea. That’s because simple ideas are potent. They stick in the mind like darts. They are easy to grasp, jutting out from the clutter of our lives, compelling us to reach out and take hold.

As professional services marketers, it’s our job to find that simple and compelling idea that makes our firm different and dangle it like a piece of candy in front of our target audience. If this image sounds silly or superficial, think again. This is exactly how marketers have encouraged us to try new products for decades. It is why we pick up that unfamiliar new book at Barnes & Nobel (it was conspicuously positioned, front cover out, on the shelf). It is how we try new foods at the grocery store. Things that are simply presented, new and different are difficult to resist.

But does this analogy really apply to professional services firms? After all, there aren’t many impulse buys in the service industries — the buying cycle is far too long. Right?

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Mazuma: Turning a Commodity Service Into a Brand

By Lee W. Fredeiksen, Ph.D.

Mazuma is a UK firm that goes against a lot of conventional wisdom in the accounting world.  Rather than trying to avoid being a commodity, they have embraced it and taken a high volume, low margin approach aimed at capturing the individual and small business market.  I was initially taken by their model and wrote a blog post about their business strategy. I decided it was worth a closer look.  Co-founder, Lucy Cohen, handles most of the marketing and business side of the firm.  I recently caught up with her for a one on one interview.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Mazuma?
It all started with the tax panic we saw all of our friends and family go through.  My partner, Sophie Hughes, and I saw that everyone had great difficulty with tax time.  We looked around and asked ourselves, “what is the simplest way to do this from the customer’s perspective?” And it grew from there.

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How To Improve Your Firm’s Value Proposition

By Lee W. Frederiksen

Let’s face it, Most professional service firms’ value propositions really suck. There are two reasons for this sad state of affairs. The easiest to fix is when your firm has a good value proposition but you just haven’t figured out how to communicate it. The other more common reason is that you just don’t have a strong value proposition to offer. You do pretty much the same thing your competitors do for just about the same price. Hard to make that one very compelling. Hold the pig down and pass the lipstick.

Value Proposition Defined
Let’s start by nailing down what we mean by a value proposition. A value proposition is a marketing message that conveys the benefits a client receives for the costs they incur. “Our average client saves over $12,000 per year on their IT costs” for example. Pretty simple concept. Here’s another: “We offer superior customer service and world class technical competence at a competitive price”. A lot fuzzier and less compelling, but still a value proposition.

So how do you improve your value proposition?

There are four key questions for you to consider. We developed these as part of an overall firm self-assessment that accompanied our new book Spiraling Up:How To Create a High Growth, High Value Professional Services Firm. These questions focus on the key issues that trip up firms as they try to communicate why a customer should choose them over another competitor.

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Unconventional Apple: Customer Focused to the Core

By Aaron Taylor

On Monday, Lee Frederiksen wrote a post describing how high growth firms often employ counterintuitive strategies, allowing a company like WebMD to outperform a market phenom like Google. Today, I’d like to talk about a company that has performed far better even than WebMD — a company, by the way, that is known for charting its own course and defying conventional wisdom.

Two weeks ago Apple became the second-largest company in the world by market value (behind ExxonMobil). In the three and a half years since it first introduced the iPhone, the company’s stock price has tripled — an amazing achievement for a company its size.

In a recent post to the O’Reilly technology blog, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Mark Sigal discussed the way Apple approaches market segmentation from an entirely different angle than its competition:

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A New Way to Find and Sell Services: Crowdsourcing

By Sean McVey

The term crowdsourcing is defined as outsourcing a service to a crowd of providers.  For example, in the graphic design industry a new crop of web-based services allow small business owners to submit a project to a group of designers.  The idea is that a crowd of workers will produce to a wider range of options at a lower cost. (Of course, what you gain in short-term value you may very well lose in relevance and sophistication. How does a faceless crowd of designers understand the nuances of your business, for instance?)

Now the crowdsourcing concept is being applied to the consulting industry. Whinot.com offers up a gallery of consultants to collaborate with businesses.  Here’s how their process works:

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