Drew Schiller

Posts tagged as:

strategy

What You Don’t Know About Branding

May 18, 2009

“Honestly,” the college professor said to me about the branding course he was asked to teach, “I only have six seconds worth of material: follow through on your promises and provide great service. What else is there?”
The professor is basically correct: building a brand requires you to deliver on your promises with excellent service. It’s [...]

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Add Value To Your Bottom Line With Your Brand

May 11, 2009

Businesses, especially small ones, are traditionally valued by what can be tallied by accountants and auditors. Sales, inventory, payroll, accounts receivable, debts, etc. This is a fine way to value a business to settle on a purchase price, but this doesn’t account for what I see as the most important factor in valuing a small [...]

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Your World, Only Smaller

April 29, 2009

How big does your business need to be to be effective?
John’s Grocery, a tiny 61-year-old grocery store located in downtown Iowa City and near the University of Iowa campus, used to be a corner store that offered staples like dry goods, breads, etc. to feed families. Growing with their audience (while staying the same physical [...]

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It’s not about you

April 13, 2009

Do you remember Time Magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year? You should, it was you. To justify its choice, Time cited the boom of Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace and other community-driven, socially contributed websites (since that time we’ve also seen the meteoric rise of Facebook and Twitter).
Time got it wrong. Social sites aren’t about you; they [...]

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Google can’t build your brand

April 8, 2009

Because of my background designing websites, small business owners and marketers often ask me about search engine optimization (SEO). How can I get my website to show up higher in Google rankings? How much money should I expect to spend on SEO? Why isn’t my website showing up in search engines at all?
Disclaimer: I am [...]

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Just be-eeeeee yourself

March 16, 2009

Do you remember the sage advice Genie gave in Disney’s Aladdin? Aladdin wanted Jasmine to like him and Genie (transforming into a bumble bee) said to him, “Just be-eeeeee yourself.” Aladdin was trying to be someone he saw as grander than himself, but in pretending he was a rich prince, he only alienated those he [...]

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Do you want to be lovable or predictable?

January 19, 2009

A small company with passionate customers has different branding goals than a company trying to become a significant market competitor. Seth Godin writes that companies can either be loved by a small but vocal group of people, or they can be “less annoying” to reach a larger share of the market. This is an interesting [...]

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