Here are a few things to consider:

Avoid acronyms

Unless you have a massive marketing budget to help give meaning to your “ABC Inc”,  avoid all acronyms – period. Even IBM started as International Business Machines.

Think beyond your local market

While you might operate in a local market in the beginning, having a geographic label in your name can cause issues when you want to expand.

Ensure web availability

It’s critical that you can secure the domain address of the name you choose. The web will very likely be the first touchpoint prospects will have with your brand so don’t drop the ball here. Your web address needs to the same as your business name so avoid hyphens and abbreviaions.

The infographic below from Webs.com explores common approaches that are used in naming a business while highlighting some of the benefits and pitfalls to avoid.

I recently saw a blog post that asked the question “what makes an ad great?”

Many of the post’s comments talked specifically about how the art direction and production value is what separates great ads from the rest of the pack. Stopping power and entertainment value were also mentioned several times.

I couldn’t disagree more.

The single attribute that makes an ad great – be it a multi-million dollar TV ad or a classified recruitment ad – is meeting or beating its stated objective.

For example, take an ad considered to be an all-time classic – Coca Cola’s “Mean Joe Green” ad from 1979. According to Sergio Zyman, former Coca Cola Chief Marketing Officer and author of “The End of Marketing As We Know It”, the ad was loved by everyone. Consumers loved it. Bottlers loved it. Critics loved it. It received many awards for its ad agency.

But Zyman didn’t care how much people loved the ad. He pulled it off the air because it wasn’t meeting its objective – it’s wasn’t selling Coca Cola.

If it wasn’t selling the product, it wasn’t a great ad.

Pretty pictures are nice and entertainment value is important, but if your ad doesn’t meet its objective – who cares?

Unfortunately, after taxes and tip came into the equation, they just had enough for the pizza and a single small drink to share – with 5 cents left over.

When delivering their order to the table, their server noticed the single drink. Now the server could have done the expected and offered them glasses of water but instead she did the unexpected. She gave each of them a soft drink free of charge.

The drinks cost the restaurant pennies but the impact was huge. By making this unexpected gesture they created brand advocates out of these girls who are now spreading the word about this great restaurant to all their friends.

Give your employees the power to do the unexpected for their customers. Yes, there is a cost associated in doing so but the results are priceless.

But how do prospects come up with their perception of your brand? And what can you do to help them form the perception you want?

Here are the steps you need to take to give your brand the best chance of developing the perception you want people to have of it.

Step 1: POSITIONING YOUR BRAND

Your brand needs to fill a unique, relevant and available space in the customer’s mind.

First you need to determine the current state of your brand and what you want it to be. Then research who’s buying and why they’re buying to discover what you do better than anyone else. This will become the foundation of your brand.

Step 2: DEFINING YOUR BRAND PROMISE

This is the backbone of your brand and the basis of your reputation.

Your brand promise is the essence of what you stand for and how you operate. Just like Volvo’s brand promise is safety, your brand needs to develop a simple, clear and easily understood promise.

Step 3: BRAND PRESENTATION

How you present your brand can make or break your ability to develop interest and credibility.

This is your name, logo and any visual representation of your brand – ads, website, business cards, sales presentations, trade show materials, etc. It must communicate your unique position and brand promise.

Step 4: PERSISTENCE

This is the point where many companies fail.

It’s human nature to change things. Unfortunately, in the world of branding change isn’t always good. Trust us earned so it’s critical that you consistently communicate your unique position and brand promise at every touchpoint.

Step 5: BRAND PERCEPTION

Your brand lives in the mind of the buyer.

If you’ve done everything right – have a product or service that people want, established a position that fills a relevant need, developed a believable promise of the brand experience, presented your brand is an engaging way and consistently communicated all this at every touchpoint – over time the perception you’re hoping for is formed.

A strong brand can:

• Ensure a lasting customer relationship based on trust
• Tell customers why you are different and why they should buy from you
• Improve recognition in a cluttered marketplace
• Increase the ability to command a premium
• Provide a point of difference between similar products
• Give the perception of quality and credibility
• Encourage consumers to use other products from the same brand
• Give employees a promise to adhere to and a common goal to achieve
• Attract and retain the best talent

While entrenched in a corporate marketing environment I have done my share of the above and confess to being guilty on all counts. But even then I knew that these two teams needed to work together to be effective.

But when I say work together I’m not talking about creating one department or having common goals and objectives. These are two separate departments and each has its own purpose:

• Sales exists to make sales
• Marketing exists to make the sales process easier so the company makes more sales

The entire point of any business is to sell. There is no function more important than selling, because without sales there will be no business. But the sales process needs to be effective and the support it receives from marketing is essential to a company’s success.

So how do we get sales and marketing working together?

One of most effective methods is communicating. Sales can provide marketing with valuable information, including sales obstacles, prospect objections, customer feedback and competitive activity.

But even more important is respecting the company’s brand and consistently communicating the brand promise. This means no homemade marketing materials with off-message content, invented taglines and manipulated logos. They make you look amateurish and unprofessional and confuse your customers, diminishing their trust in you.

Sales should be making sales and marketing should be creating programs and materials to make the sales process easier. And both should correctly represent the company brand – continuously, consistently and correctly.

Brand trust is earned – it’s really that simple

Ask any sales person and they’ll tell you that trust is crucial in building a relationship with a customer. Ask any customer and they’ll tell you that they’re much more likely to do business with a company that they feel they can trust.

Branding helps you earn trust with your customers by consistently delivering a message that clearly defines what you are offering, and tells them why you’re different and why they should do business with you instead of your competition.

Each time a customer is exposed to your brand you have the opportunity (if done correctly) to strengthen their perception of your company. A consistent brand reinforces your position and gives your customers a compelling reason to do business with you. A consistent brand makes you more familiar and your customer is more likely to trust you if they’re already familiar with you.

Branding lays a foundation of credibility that your sales team can build on

This is how branding makes sales easier. Branding lays a foundation of credibility that your sales team can build on, working with a defined message that clearly states the promise your brand offers. Left to their own devices, your sales team will come up with their own message and you will find yourself with several conflicting messages that confuses your customers and gives them the impression that there is a perceived risk of doing business with you.

Your message needs to be consistent and stated clearly at every customer touchpoint – from your logo and tagline to your website and interaction with frontline employees.

Many companies aren’t doing this well or aren’t doing this at all

The result is more time, effort and money spent to get on a prospect’s consideration list and ultimately fewer new businesses wins.

Making the sales process easier should be job #1 for any company. Who doesn’t want more sales with less effort? Would you?

I wholeheartedly believe this is true but frequently see examples where companies fail. Often a company will focus primarily on their product or service thinking that it IS the brand. But in fact is it’s only one part.

Your brand is the sum of all the touchpoints a customer has with you – how your receptionist answers the phone, the look of your website, your sales team’s presentations, your trade show displays and (of course) how your product or service performs. It’s all the little things that add up to form a person’s perception of your brand. And your customer’s perception IS your brand!

A good (well, actually a very bad) example of this is a flyer I received from a company that sells and leases colour photocopying machines. The flyer was itself a colour photocopy, which isn’t a bad idea considering that is their business. Now, I’d never heard of this company before so this particular touchpoint is how I made my first impression of their brand. And it wasn’t good.

The quality of the photocopy wasn’t too bad but the combination of cheap paper stock, poor layout and a blurry company logo gave me the perception that this company is small, amateurish and lacks attention to detail. Hardly what you want a new customer to think!

Smaller companies may have limitations on how much they can budget for printing and design but that’s no excuse for shoddy marketing. You should always do the very best that you can afford and work within your budget to produce something that truly represents your brand and enhances your customer’s perception of your company.

And this type of thing isn’t limited to small companies – I’ve seen plenty of big ones with hefty marketing budgets miss the mark as well. I’ve received mailings from 5-star hotels looking for my event or meeting business that were obviously created in-house, probably in an effort to save money on design and printing. They were completely off-brand and certainly didn’t represent the high quality and prestige of their product. I’m not sure if “saving money” on such mailing pieces would ever make up for the revenue lost because customers perceived the hotel as being lower quality and unprofessional.

Lack of consistency and poor attention to detail – have you seen examples of this yourself?