Mark Jarvis,Dell’s CMO, spoke to the group of Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 award attendees on day 1. He referenced a survey of Inc. 5000 companies that showed 73% of us felt word of mouth marketing was the most important marketing tactic. His presentation talked about how to turn ‘word of mouth’ marketing to ‘word of mouse’ marketing. To help build a case as to why this is necessary, he gave us these very interesting stats:

• Every second: 2 blogs are created, 7 PCs are purchased, 4 babies are born, 3 new DSL subscribers signup, 25 cellphones are sold, 2 million emails are sent, 1,157 videos are watched on YouTube, 23 domains are registered, 257 search queries are executed, 13,547 instant messages are sent, 7 people logon for the first time.
• There will be more devices connected to networks in the next 5 years than were connected in the previous 15
• By 2010, there will be 988 Exabytes of digital information. At then end of 2006, there was 161 Exabytes.
• If you took the digital data equivalent of every book ever written and multiplied that by 3 million, that’s the amount of new data that will be created in 2007.

Because of the network effect of the people and devices that are now interconnected via networks AND because of this massive creation of data, consumers today have an incredibly short attention spans, they’re feeling media overload, they take part in pro-active advertising avoidance, and they have an aversion to intrusion. They are also increasingly seeing themselves as unique and individual. They want things personalized, portable, interconnected, and collaborative. Mark talked about the marketing challenge that faces every company today is to become part of this new world of networking and data and to create a network of advocates for your business. He recommended to companies where to do 3 things: 1. Give people a way of talking about you; 2. Make it easier for conversations to take place; 3. Be part of the conversation too.

As I listened to Mark, I realized that outside of this blog, Doba doesn’t do much of these 3 things. Probably a good thing I took some good notes. I was very impressed by his marketing insights. After re-reading the notes I took, I’d actually combine #1 and #3 into the same point: Give people a way of talking WITH you. When he talked about how you can give people a way to talk ABOUT you, he went over forums, online community, chat, tagging, reviews and evaluations, user generated content, etc. Each and every one of these things could be extremely powerful if implemented in a way that the organization is talking WITH customers in all of these ways. Pretty easy to put up a forum (although Doba still hasn’t done it), but more difficult to put up that forum and make sure Doba employees are engaged with it from day 1 and our processes are aligned with that forum being robust. My $0.02 on what he talked about, and gain, I was impressed with his ideas. Hopefully we’ll get to some (and eventually all) of them with Doba soon.

More to come from the Inc. 500 conference…

I have a confession to make. I absolutely love Backpacker Magazine. It’s my outdoor adventure Bible. I read the magazine cover to cover each month when it arrives. For the past many years, Backpacker has sponsored an annual tour that they call Get Out More. From the Get Out More website:

BACKPACKER’s Get Out More tour provides the information and inspiration you need to get out and enjoy the outdoors. The team travels the United States for 6-months encouraging readers to pack their bags and get behind the wheel to find close-to-home outdoor adventures.

Each time they announce their tour schedule in the Spring, I look to see whether they are coming to Utah. This year, to my excitement, they had announced a stop on the tour not only in the town I live in, but also at the Cabelas mega-store. This store is literally 2 minutes from my home! So I put the event date on my calendar and anxiously waited for the day to arrive.

I have to admit that when I saw the date they set and the location they picked I was a bit confused and concerned. After attending the event about a week ago, my concerns played out just as I thought they would. The actual presentation was pretty good. The two individuals on the team did a great job covering the basics of the latest and greatest techniques and equipment that backpackers use. However, as I had suspected, the event was pretty much a bomb. There were a total of 8 people there.

I’m not sure who at Backpacker is putting these events together, but it’s obvious to me that they need to rethink their approach and be more aware of who their target audience is. First of all, in Utah, you don’t want to plan anything on a Sunday. The entire State almost shuts down. It’s obvious they don’t understand who their target audience is. In Utah most of that audience attends church and doesn’t do much else on Sundays. The other major issue, and this is one that will play out across the tour events around the rest of the country, is that they seem to have put together a deal with Cabelas to host the events wherever a local Cabelas store matches up with their plans. The shoppers who frequent Cabelas are not the Backpacker audience. I live 2 minutes from Cabelas, but I rarely shop there for my backpacking gear needs. Instead I drive 20 minutes to shop at REI. Cabelas is a store that caters to hunters, fisherman, car campers, RVers, and ATV riders. The readers of a magazine more like Field and Stream would be such a perfect fit to match up with an event at Cabelas.

Backpacker did try and promote the event. They ran ads in the magazine and they mailed me and probably every other Utah Backpacker subscriber a reminder card. But it was all for naught. Get Out More was a big disappointment for me. I had hoped to find hundreds of other Backpacker enthusiasts at the event. At least their magazine still rocks. Backpacker must have different people in charge of their events. Hopefully they don’t get their hands on any magazine content, or I’ll probably be looking for a new ‘Bible’.

A few weeks ago, in a post titled “Pick a Brand, Any Brand,�? I mentioned that Doba had just emerged from an exhaustive brand migration project. For the first three years in the life of the company, we called ourselves Wholesale Marketer. Then, last year, because we wanted to be able to define for ourselves what our company does and what we stand for, we decided to rebrand.

To most everyone on the planet, “Wholesale Marketer�? means something, and at the end of the day, we felt pigeonholed by the name. After a lot of thought, internal team discussions and more than a few disagreements, we chose “Doba�?, which aside from being a small town in the southern part of Chad and an obscure character in a Star Wars role-playing game, means absolutely nothing to 99.999 percent of the Homo sapiens roaming the planet today.

While picking a new name may seem like child’s play, I can tell you firsthand that a rebranding campaign is anything but a simple matter. From updating corporate papers and vendor agreements to educating your customers and employees about why rebranding is necessary, before it’s all said and done, you’ll literally find yourself tearing into every single facet of your business to complete the migration.

If your company is thinking about rebranding, keep these tips in mind:

• Rebranding means more than just creating new graphics. Rebranding usually involves significant changes to your company name, mission and vision statements, brand logo, image, marketing strategy, advertising themes, sales presentations, collateral materials, company documents, staff recruitment and retention strategies, and employee training programs, just to name a few. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that rebranding just means creating a new logo.
• If you’re going to rebrand, consider being original. Go the extra mile to see if there’s value in being unique. Sure, you could call your funkadelic lampshade company, “The Lampshade Company,�? but you could also call it “Funkadelic,�? which is scalable and may resonate better with both your target customer and staff.
• Identify a clear leader for managing the brand migration process. Once you have your new brand in hand, you’ll need to assign someone to coordinate the project and make appropriate “go�? & “no-go�? decisions. The key here… avoid groupthink. Be clear about what you intend to accomplish, and give the leader the authority to manage the task at hand.
• Form a task force. Rebranding affects all of your employees, every department at your company, 100 percent of the customers you’ve ever had, and all of your business partners and vendors. Right from the get-go, establish a task force whose membership is representative of each and every stakeholder you serve. Charge the task force with looking out for the unique needs of each demographic, and make it their job to drill down and narrowcast their efforts, leaving no stone unturned in the effort to migrate to the new brand and communicate the impending change.
• Charge the brand migration task force with generating and monitoring a giant list of all the small and large changes that will be required for full brand migration. Beware: This list will be big and feel totally overwhelming, but once you have it down in an Excel spreadsheet (or in another task tracking tool), it will be relatively easy to monitor the brand migration’s progress. Items to include on the list are: changes to merchant credit card processing accounts, logos, web site copy, job descriptions, press releases, better business bureau listings, telephone directory listings, outgoing telephone greetings, legal filings, employment contracts, business cards, brochures, etc. Remember, no item is too small for this list.
• Set a deadline for the migration and stick to it. No matter how big or small your company may be, rebranding is a big undertaking, and someone will always be able to generate valid reasons to shift the launch date. Trust me…you need to set a deadline and you need to stick to it. At Doba, even after we knew we were going to rebrand, we procrastinated for quite a while. Finally, we set a somewhat arbitrary deadline and just pushed to get it done. If it helps, think about the timing of your biggest trade show or sales presentation of the year. Prepare a soft launch three months in advance (that way you allow yourself enough time to work out the kinks before the big show or presentation).
• Communicate with key stakeholders before the launch. Internally, make sure every single employee—from members of the management team to the people you entrust to answer the phones—understands why rebranding was necessary and what it means to the company moving forward. Externally, inform your customers of the impending change, and seek your business partner’s and vendor’s cooperation early on in the process in adjusting external links back to your newly branded web site and name.

These days, companies like mine have to realize that for our brand and business strategies to be aligned, our brand cannot be driven solely by the activities of one department within the company verses another. Delivering bottom line results against the promises of our brand strategy requires that every level of our organization lives, breaths, and owns the Doba brand. Hopefully, the tips I’ve provided here can help you achieve similar results.

This is my business card, and I love it!

The reason I’m telling you this is because Bob Bly, the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Direct Marketing and The Copywriter’s Handbook. recently had this to say about business cards:

“…the truth is, spending any significant effort worrying or thinking about business cards … or strategizing their use … is an absolute waste of time. That’s because most people who receive your business card throw it away without a second glance.�?

AND

So … what should you put on your business card? And how do you get it into people’s hands so they pay attention and file it for future reference? My answer may surprise you:

1. Don’t worry about what you put on your business card. It doesn’t matter.
2. Don’t carry business cards or hand them out to people.

For full accounting of Bly’s thoughts, click here and scroll down the page a ways till you see My Anti-Business-Card Approach to Self-Promotion.

Looking at my company’s business cards, it should be plainly obvious—even to a cave man—that I completely disagree with Mr. Bly. Doba takes great pride in its business cards, and for good reason. Each one is customized with our employees’ own handwriting, and is emblazoned in our branded color scheme. Here’s another example:

In my experience, business cards are a formidable extensions of your corporate identity. When done well, like ours, they support your brand and contribute to in the effort to make your employees proud to work for you. At my company, every single employee receives a business card. It doesn’t matter where you are in the organization… if you can write your own name, you’re getting a business card. I can’t begin to tell you how many people make positive comments about our cards. Chances are, if you receive one, you’re going to keep it, remember it, and comment to yourself, Now why didn’t think of that?

In my humble opinion, the most powerful brands always mean nothing—and I mean absolutely nothing—until they do mean something. Take Nike for example. If you didn’t already know it, would you ever in your wildest imagination think that a company named “Nike�? manufactured running shoes and athletic gear? Would you know that Apple ignited the personal computer revolution / reinvented the personal computer with the Macintosh? What about Google, Yahoo, or eBay. How about Citigroup, Fidelity, Wells Fargo?

Nike could have just as easily called itself Sneakers, Inc., while Apple could have been named Great Computers, LLC, and Google could have been Search.com (and I‘d bet you dollars to donuts that you’ve never even been to that site). eBay could have been Auction.com, and so forth and so on (heck, Exxon could have been called Diversified Multi-national Profiteering Corporation, but we won’t go there in today’s post ).

As I mentioned in a recent post, my own company, Doba, just wrapped up a major brand migration of its own. For the first three years in the life of the company, we called ourselves Wholesale Marketer. Then, late last year, because we wanted to be able to define for ourselves and on our own terms what our company did and what we stood for, we decided to create a unique brand. To us and almost everyone else, “Wholesale Marketer�? meant something. The word “wholesale�? means “the sale of goods in large quantities, as for resale by a retailer.�? The word “marketer�? means something too: “someone who promotes or exchanges goods or services for money.�? Together, they mean the sale of goods in large quantities by someone who exchanges goods for money! Or, do they mean something else entirely? Costco uses the word ‘wholesale’ pretty loosely, and “marketer�? is used in the term “telemarketer,�? so is that a negative thing?

After a lot of thought, internal team discussions and more than a few disagreements, I pushed for a brand that could be defined on our own terms, without any preconceived notions or ideas as to what it meant or stood for.

So what does Doba mean? It’s not an acronym, so it doesn’t stand for a group of other words, and it’s not some secret code used by childhood friends either. To us, the owners of the word, it means Product Sourcing. Simplified.. As owners of the brand, it’s now incumbent upon our senior management to plant that meaning into the hearts and minds of our employees, customers, partners, and to the whole wide world.

The bottom line is this… the most powerful brands and companies set out to do their own thing. That’s the core of what was behind the brand migration to “Doba.�? If you’re just starting out in business yourself, don’t do what we did… don’t call yourself “Wholesale Marketer,�? “Shirt Maker,�? or “Sticker Manufacturer.�? Don’t allow others to define or pigeon hole you. If you do, you’ll likely end up going through a costly brand migration project like the one we just completed (more on that bundle of joy in the next couple of weeks when I outline my recommendations for tackling such a large undertaking).