Get out all of your company’s printed materials – your business cards, letterhead, brochures, fliers, ads, newsletters, etc., as well as a printout of your website’s home page – and spread them out on your desk. Take a good look at what you see and ask yourself: Is it visually obvious that all of these items are from the same company?

If not, why not?

A big part of branding is recognition. Having a “look” that you use across all of your marketing materials makes it easy for your customers and potential customers to recognize that a message is from your company. So what are the elements of this “look”?

The Four Important Elements of Your Brand’s Visual Image

1. Your logo symbolizes your company. Make sure it is easily recognizable and works well in a wide range of advertising media. Overly creative logos can sometimes harm you rather than help you — make sure you pick something that can be remembered for it’s elegance and simplicity, not forgotten because it’s too complex.
2. Your color scheme should be uniform throughout all of your materials, and appropriate for your goals. Some color combinations are relaxing and soothing, others suggest excitement and enthusiasm, while others project a very “corporate” image.
3. Your overall “look” (including colors, fonts, pictures, layout, etc.) needs to visually reinforce the feeling that you want your product or service to convey. For example, a company marketing “mom’s apple pie” to senior citizens will have a much different look than one selling the latest electronic gadgets to teenage boys.
4. Your printed materials need to reflect important elements of the “look and feel” of your website (or vice versa). There’s nothing worse than having printed materials that don’t look like the website — your prospective clients will usually refer to printed materials first on their desk.

Remember, it often takes multiple exposures to an advertising/marketing message before a consumer will decide to make a purchase or inquiry. If your materials are a mismatched hodge-podge of colors, designs and messages, it will be very difficult for you to build a recognizable presence in the market place.

How software is contributing to the current finacial crisis, and some pearls of wisdom from “Why Does Everything Suck.”

The truth is our economy has been in trouble for a long time. It is the “too smart for the room” guys that, at some point in, I would imagine the 90’s, figured out how to make money without actually creating any value.

Every idea isn’t a million dollar idea, and here’s what I mean:

I’ve worked for a number of companies that wanted to grow their concept so there was billions in revenue, thousands of employees. Growing an idea to that size is not only a once in a lifetime experience, the idea has to be so good that millions of people have to buy into it. Google, sure. Microsoft, they’re involved in 90 percent of a market or something like that. Apple, why not — they produce products that sell in the millions.

Companies like Stamps.com (where I worked)? No. When I worked there, we were aiming for the stars, but the actual (read: profitable) market for it was in the $20 to $30 million dollar range. They did layoffs, refocused their management, and swung for a double instead of a home run.

Guess what — they’ve been profitable enough over the past few quarters to net $2 to $5 million a quarter. Not huge, but considering the last quarter was a 33 percent more revenue then expenses, it’s working.

Sometimes we buy into that with the clients, and what we really should be telling them that doubles are okay, as long as they are focused with their ideas.

BaseCamp has a great article about how they are hittin’ for doubles by finding the natural size of their company around a solid product that is good, but not a home run idea and fills a very specific niche. That takes a lot of courage. Good luck to them.