Start Up Blog

Ok, so this isn’t about to win any awards or be sent off to Cannes. But it might be funny / relevant enough for a few people to send to a few friends…. we’ll see.

• It took 20 mins to film
• Zero cost for media (thanks to Youtube)
• I earned $63 in tips for my troubles
• It was a lot of fun

How many CEO’s do you know who’d risk such humiliation & a bung knee for their business?

Here’s a tale of two cafés. Both are within walking distance of the startup blog office. After a while I noticed a few things changing in my favourite of the two. The decore, the Barista and eventually the clientele all changed.

Coffee is personal. The caffeine, hot steamed milk and the chocolate sprinkles are only part of the experience.

So I moved to the café up the road. I’d even walk past the other café to get my ‘new’ caffeine haunt. It was pretty obvious that the first café had lost its cache and customers along the way. I still trades, but not nearly as well.

Then I discovered the owner actually sold about the time everything started to change. The new owners put their spin on things, tried to improve it…. fully leverage the ‘goodwill’ they purchased. Seems the opposite has occurred.

And so it is with restaurants and cafés alike.

The owner is the goodwill.

People buy coffee from her. Her greeting, her skill, the ambiance she created. It can’t be passed on. It can’t be bought from a sole trader.Exceptions such as coca cola, big macs and starbucks grande lattes are already replicated thousands of times…

When buying a business from a sole trader – Goodwill? – No such thing.

Quite often we must make decisions by looking at the balance sheet. It’s a fact of business life. But when it comes to marketing such decisions can be the death of a brand. The fact is, most marketing efforts are immeasurable before the decision.

Irish brand Waterford Crystal has just done some Balance Sheet Marketing.

A quick summary for the uninitiated:

Waterford city is the Crystal County of Ireland

Waterford has been making crystal here since 1783

Currently one fifth of their products are made in other parts of Europe

They haven’t made a profit in 5 years

They’ve just cut 500 jobs in Waterford Ireland to move all production

Their Chief executive Peter Cameron was quoted as saying, “We can source things from Eastern Europe under the Waterford fanchise. That’s not going to be an event that will change the perception of the brand”

Maybe Waterford Crystal have underestimated the emotional links passionate users have with brands.

Start up blog view:

Maybe they should charge what it costs

Maybe consumers would pay what it’s worth

Maybe they should tell consumers they must increase price or leave Waterford

Maybe ‘all’ production should be in Waterford Ireland

Maybe they should sing this fact as loud as possible

Maybe they should leverage their history a bit more

Maybe that would turn a profit

The best financial decisions protect innate brand equity, not destroy it.

Last night at Stadium Australia two lower tier football teams (Sydney FC and LA Galaxy) played in front of a crowd on 80,000 fans.

The reason the crowd was so large was because of the person in the picture below. That’s it. 

Start up blog isn’t big on celebrity endorsement, but when someone has that kind of pulling power the possibilities are endless. Especially when the person in question is inextricably linked to the event – the football game - ie David Beckham is a football player. It’s not quite the same as getting an Olympian to sell a car.

The Beckham brand is one of the few sponsorship properties that may just be worth the money. Especially, when it involves the biggest sport in the world, which happens to be a minnow in the worlds largest economy.

Start up lesson:

Don’t get someone to endorse. Get someone who is embedded.

Here’s the top 15 logos of all time – according to startup blog. We’ve considered the logo rules and added these two additional considerations:

- Big enough business so that it has general global awareness

- More than 10 years old

* In no particular order:

1. The Cross       
2. Olympics         
3. Nike                         
4. Ford               
5. Quiksilver     
6. Starbucks     
7. McDonalds  
8. Shell             
9. Apple             
10. MTV                 
11. Michelin        
12. Swatch         
13. Yellow pages  
14. Woolmark  
15. Coca cola 

Feel free to tell us which great logos we’ve left out.

If we want to develop an eternal logo, here are some rules that are worth considering:

Startup blog logo rules:

- Clean design 

- Works in black & white

- Works in print & electronically

- Could be closely reproduced by a teenager with a pencil

- Has some kind of icon, widget or font variation which makes it unique

That is all.

web 2.0

permission marketing - Seth

interruption marketing - Seth

bootstrapping

startup

SPAM

BACN

badvertising (startupblog)

radvertising (startupblog)

goodvertising (startupblog)

longtail

Blog

ideavirus - Seth

Purple cow - Seth

Cutting edge

TV industrial complex - Seth

……

People like jargon for a few reasons. It puts them in the inner circle, it makes them feel smart & exclusive. When it’s great jargon, it simplifies an important explanation.

But jargon’s a bit like fashion. Things come and go and it’s important you’re using ‘fashionable’ jargon and avoiding the old embarrassing terms like ‘thinking outside the box’.

Seth Godin is a master at ‘inventing jargon’. There’s a little “Seth” next to his ones.

Taking the lead from Seth we’ve invented some jargon to explain important concepts for rentoid.com the place to rent anything including:

Unlocking idle assets

Conuserism

Digital networking of temporary needs

Go on and invent some jargon to sell your story.

Once said “We do things because they are hard…”

Start up blog once said we do things  “…because they are worth doing”

They combine to become a nice reminder and motivator.

I’ve never clicked on a web advertisement in a sidebar ever. Until today. In case your curious;

• It was while on Facebook
• It leads to this page

Did you build the website? Yes

Did you build your blog? Yes

Did you design the property development? Yes

Did you renovate your house? Yes

Did you launch the product? Yes

Did you manufacture the product yourself? Yes.

Did you landscape your own garden? Yes.

Did you make that advertisement? Yes

Did you self finance the business? Yes

Yes you did all these things, and more, every bit of them. You orgnaised the project, you had the idea, you got the finance from the bank, you conceived it and you made it happen. Never mind if the advertising agency made the creative, the PHP programmer coded your website or the bricklayer built the house.

You did it with your mind, your management skills and your ability to execute the project. None of it would have even started without you.

So whenever anyone asks if you did it? You say “Yes”.