Posts Tagged ‘end of year’

Yeah, it’s been a while.  And 2010, the end of a decade, has been quite a year for VOCO Creative.

Every year around this time, we take a moment to reflect on what the year has brought:

~ Great results for clients, from publicizing a legal victory to providing clarity to a national brand struggling for relevance to successfully launching three additional communities for a builder that’s beating the odds in Boulder County

~Increased revenues and a saving of almost 50% in overhead costs, reflecting our lean ‘n green business strategy

~Productive pro bono partnerships with the Epworth Foundation, There With Care, and ongoing consulting and training for the Boulder Small Business Development Center

~Speaking engagements, partnerships, collaborations, and schemes galore

~Surviving the launch process for Erin’s debut book, The Heroine’s Bookshelf, which was released by Harper in October and has since garnered press in The New York Times, Glamour, Ms. Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, and more (!)

~Continued growth as business partners and friends, in collaboration with the clients who constantly challenge, question, push, and prompt us to expand and explore.

To celebrate, we thought we’d pass on some of our good fortune and much of our goodwill.  This year we gave to The Girl Effect, an impressive charitable effort on behalf of girls supported by the Nike Foundation, the NoVo Foundation, the UN Foundation, the Coalition for Adolescent Girls, CARE, Plan, the Population Council, ICRW and the Center for Global Development, among others.

Our donations were earmarked to help girls in Tanzania and Bangladesh start businesses and gain access to safe spaces.  The Girl Effect isn’t just an incredible charity, it’s an impressive intersection of social media marketing and charitable giving…an apt choice given our personal and professional obsessions.

Many thanks to our clients, friends, followers, and faithful companions on VOCO’s path.  On to 2011, and a happy new year! — Erin and Juli

Now that you know where you are, it’s time to move forward and actually use that data to analyze your brand.

Problem is, you can’t know where you’re going until you know what you want.

What do I want? is a huge question, but it’s one you’re going to have to answer in specific terms if you want a good picture of your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. Yes, it is time for The Question Game.

In playing the question game, think of your average four-year-old.  Why is the sky blue?  Why do ants march?  Why did you just tell me I have to go to bed?  Why why why?  This might seem uber-simple, but it’s actually a pretty effective way of mining down through your meta-desires to specific action items.

Be relentless and aggressive.  Here’s a sample of the process in action:

VOCO Creative:  What do you want?

Client:  I want to make more money in 2009.

VOCO:  How much more money?

Client:  Well, $25,000 would do me.

VOCO:  What’s the best way to get an extra $25k?

Client:  Get some new clients?

VOCO:  How many new clients?  What kinds of clients?  Etc., ad infinitum.

Once you’ve mined down to specifics — I need 30 new paying clients for my Brand Miracle Service — get even more specific.  Where are these clients?  What strategies do you need to use to reach them?  What resources have you already got?

Here’s where the real fun starts.  Once you know what you want and whether you have it or not, you can assess your brand’s ability to meet those needs and get you where you want to go.  If you’ve decided you need clients who are female and who love the mall, you can then decide whether you have the collateral you need, the Web presence you need, the contacts at the mall you need, the reputation you need.

For each area, assign yourself a percentage.  Pretend you’re a high school teacher grading yourself on preparedness to go after your goals.  If you want to reach out to the Mall Ladies but have no contacts and a crappy reputation, you might be at about a 20% — a failing grade.  If you have all of the resources but one, you might be at 90%.

Do this for each of your goals and you suddenly get a much more realistic picture of your brand’s health.  Are you constantly missing your Web-based goals or failing to increase traffic?  Problem area.  Are you rocking the printed collateral and sticking to your marketing plan?  Great news.

It can seem intimidating to assign numerical values to different facets of your brand identity, but guess what?  You can’t progress until you decide where you are today and what kind of equipment you have going forward.  If you fail to plan, your next year might feel a lot like going for a camping trip with a can of Pringles and a pair of hiking boots.  Will you have fun?  Maybe.  Will you succeed?  Probably not.

In our next edition, we’ll make some real-world decisions based on our brand assessment.  See you then!

Image courtesy of woodleywonderworks

Mulled cider and Santa schemes aren’t the only thing brewing this time of year.  In fact, I find that my clients like to look back at year’s end to see how far they’ve come, where they’re going, and set some financial and business goals in order to head into the new year with confidence.

But how do you even wrap your head around your brand, anyway?  Brand assessment doesn’t have to be daunting…in fact, there are several quick strategies and assessment tools you can use yourself as you close the book on 2008.

Over the next week, VOCO Creative will be offering a fresh new blog series about brand assessment right here.  Check us out Monday, December 8 for the first installment!