Tips from February 9, 2010 The Small Business tips today discuss legal issues when starting a small business. Keep legal! Know what the laws are specific to small businesses, but also learn what tax breaks there are! Find more here. Your business should be defined well. Sole proprietor? Partnership? Corporation? What's it matter? Find more here. Bad things happen to businesses too. How can you prepared for unforeseen problems? Business insurance! Find more information here. Your name is your brand, protection is important. Copyright, trademark? Which do you use and why? Find out more information [Read Full Article]

Tips from December 4, 2009 The Small Business tips today discuss women as a target audience. 85% of all brand purchases are made by women. Once they find a brand that the they like and at an affordable price that they TRUST, they will be loyal. Women are flooding social networks, especially women who have young children at home. Market to them by communicating on social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, women are compelled by advertisements they see in newspapers, magazines, or online. 91% of women feel that advertisers don't understand them. Pink, frilly, and foofy is no way to advertise to women. Understand that simply they are consumers who, like all consumers, are looking to get exactly what they want for the price they are willing to pay. Too girly of a strategy is not the way to gain women customers. On average, 25% of products in women's shopping carts are environmentally friendly.... [Read Full Article]

Take a look at this advertisement. What is the first thing that comes to mind?     Shock? Anger? Hatred? Fear? Would you think it was for Homeland Security? The 9/11 Memorial? In actuality, this advertisement was pitched for the World Wildlife Fund.   Just over a week before the eighth anniversary of September 11th, this controversial advertisement was pitched to the Brazilian branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The ad features dozens of airplanes in mid-air, flying directly into Lower Manhattan with an accompanying tag line reading "The Tsunami Killed 100 Times More People Than 9/11." Underneath the comparison of 9/11 to the Tsunami, the WWF's signature logo of the panda is displayed next to the copy of the ad: "The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it.”  The Brazilian design firm DDB Brasil designed the advertisement and, according to... [Read Full Article]

He’s the Incredible Hulk. He’s big, he’s green and he’s really, really angry. He is also the first of the remarkable remake/sequels that Marvel Studios is putting out to reclaim the integrity of their brand. We all remember the first film by director Ang Lee. It was sharp, it was cool, the CGI was good for its time, the “Hulk issue” was shown to be multigenerational and the movie had a mutated poodle…you see where I am going with this. Somehow, the first Hulk went off the rails. The new one, with Edward Norton as Bruce Banner, manages to pull the train back to where it belongs.   The Importance of Brand to the Modern Superhero You see the same things happening with other superhero blockbusters. Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Punisher, and The X-Men; and on the DC side of the comic universe, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. All of th... [Read Full Article]

Yesterday was April 23, a quiet day in the Spring of 2008, a nice day; but 23 years ago, April 23 became a day that will live, as FDR put it, in infamy—at least from a marketing and public relations point of view. It was the day Coca-Cola introduced New Coke. It is nothing new to say that you need to protect the image of your brand, but that lesson was driven home with uncommon power—and violence—by the debacle that was New Coke. Coca-Cola has been around since 1886, when Dr. John S. Pemberton, an Atlanta, Georgia, pharmacist, first produced the syrup for Coca-Cola. He took a jug of the syrup to the nearby Jacobs' Pharmacy, where, according to Coke lore, “it was sampled, pronounced "excellent" and placed on sale for five cents a glass as a soda fountain drink.” In the years since then, Coke went from a syrup mixed with soda water to a bottled beverage that could be easily distributed throughout the region, then the country and finally the world. Throughout this per... [Read Full Article]