Chapter 3: Developing Your Corporate Identity
ShareThisThis chapter discusses coming up with your business name, logo, letterhead, URL, and e-mail accounts.
I mentioned early on that Maui CEO is your project plan; therefore, I want to stress that chapters 3, 4 and 5 need to be happening about the same time. For instance, you might realize that you want to schedule factory visits in China to coincide with a Global Sources trade show. This will all be explained in chapter 5; stay with me. If that trade show is one month from now, you need to get busy, fast. If, however, the next trade show is four months away, then you’re OK to do the activities in these three chapters sequentially.
Now that you know (or have a good idea about) which product you’re going to sell, you need a few additional things. First, you need a business name; second, a logo that you can use on your Web site and letterhead; and third, a Web address (URL) to register (and possibly trademark).
Naming a business is a time-consuming process. You may already have a name in mind, but for many reasons, that name may not make sense. For instance, one of my students had an online business named Cool Stuff For You. This name may be appropriate for a one-store off-line business in a small town, but is not right for our type of online business. The most obvious weakness is the URL (Uniform Resource Locator). To find this business, what does a customer type? The business name has more than one logical way to be spelled.
or
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Of course, the business owner can buy all of these Web addresses, assuming availability, and then use a feature called domain forwarding so that any and all variations a customer might type end up at the right Web home page. This scenario is really more trouble than it’s worth. The business name should not lend itself to multiple spellings. Also, try to keep in mind a global audience. While most customers will come to you through Google or MSN, business names that are shorter and easier are preferred.
Another key characteristic of good business names is having an appropriate word connotation, based on the root or roots of the word. For instance, the name Intel is derived from the words integrated electronics. When the name Intel is heard by a customer, the customer could subconsciously think of the following associations: “integrated electronics,” “intelligence” or “intelligent”—all thoughts with positive and appropriate connotations.
These positive connotations can successfully be tied to your brand identity and differentiation. For illustration, a piano-seller might want to target piano students. Students tend to have lots of sheet music spread out on the music rack—or maybe even a flat-panel screen if the music is digitized—so the piano-seller would have only large, sturdy music racks on all pianos instead of the flimsy racks of competitors. Further, students tend to have teachers sitting next to them during practice or rehearsal. So the piano-seller would only include piano benches large enough for two persons.
Make sense? This seller is differentiating their product with large music racks and two-person benches. When coming up with a business name for this student piano with large music racks and duet-sized piano benches, Sorbonne is a good choice. Sorbonne is the name of a famous university in Paris. The name of a well-known university has the student-teacher connotation consistent with this seller’s product differentiation. In fact, positioning the piano as French-made is not a bad idea, either.
Therefore, your name ideally would be consistent with either your product and/or your point of differentiation.[1] That point of differentiation could be a product feature or even the channel itself. Old Navy t-shirts, for instance, carry the name of the business instead of manufacturer.
With these tips in mind, you are now ready to contact a brand identity company to help you with the following:
- Come up with a business name consistent with the processes I’ve described
- Check your name choices for federal trademark availability[2]
- Design your logo for use on letterhead, envelopes, and your homepage
- Get your Web site navigation designed
Getting the federal trademark is fairly important to protect yourself in case someone else starts using your business name at the same time. “Trademark-factory” attorneys can be retained to process your federal trademark application for around $400.
Developing a corporate identity is a good place for you to spend a little money. I have a clear favorite recommendation here:[3] www.brandmother.com. These guys know what they’re doing, are based in California, and the company is designed from the ground up to work with clients remotely. Prices are extremely reasonable, and turn-around time expectations can be agreed upon easily. If you want to shop around for these services, try a Google search for business branding or logo design. Guru.com and Elance.com are also great places where you can find fixed-priced services or use this book to outline your requirements and get competing bids.
One note about your Web site: I prefer that you get a semi-custom Web site design instead of using design templates available from your hosting company. The design templates offer limited flexibility, particularly when integrating the database. eBay’s ProStores is another example; I am not sold on them either. In contrast, a semi-custom website uses a logical navigational template, but customization in other ways.
Database Design
Designing your database is probably the most difficult task you will face prior to launching your business. The best way to go about this is to have your brand identity company refer you to a database programmer. Another approach is to outsource your development to a bidder on www.rentacoder.com, www.guru.com, or www.elance.com.[4] Here you post a free description of what you want developed, programmers bid on the project, you select the best choice, and the code gets written. I outsourced www.mauiceo.com to a provider on Elance.com, and by way of reference, received an average bid of $1201. Escrow keeps a third party between you, the coder, and the money. See chapter 8 for specific recommendations on getting the right database functionality.
One thing to remember as a goal is to have the database structure done before the Web site is finalized. The Web site design, other than the home page and core navigation, must support how content (inventory, photos, blogs) is delivered to the customer. The Web site pages must also support the checkout process, as managed by the database design.
To collect payment, you have three options: get a merchant account and process credit cards through Verisign; integrate with PayPal; or integrate with Escrow.com[5]. Getting a merchant account is best done through an organization. For instance, if you belong to the National Association of Music Merchants,[6] they have prenegotiated Visa and Mastercard rates with a bank (in this case, First National Bank of Omaha). Rates charged to you are typically 2.3% of the purchase price, with American Express and Discover being closer to 3.1%. Then you have your database designer set up a “CGI Script” or gateway between your Web site and Verisign. This allows your customer information to be automatically transferred from you to Verisign, so that the customer does not have to retype their information. The credit card charge is run, approved, and then your Web site generates a receipt.
An easier approach is to use PayPal merchant services,[7] which basically accomplishes the same thing. Charges might be a bit higher than the 2.3% friends and family rate described above, but you can certainly get going faster through PayPal. After a year or two, you can use your sales records to go to your local bank and see if you can get a better rate. Remember, your average transaction size is going to be much larger than everyone else’s size, which is incentive for the bank to give you a lower merchant rate.
The third approach I mentioned is to integrate with Escrow.com. The pay process is very similar to the one described with PayPal above, except that the escrow company holds payment until the merchandise is received by the buyer. The process is similar technically to PayPal—the business sets up a gateway between their site and escrow to manage the flow of information and transaction completion.
Both PayPal and Escrow are described in detail in later chapters, primarily Chapter 10.
Everything must come in its true order, grasshopper.
URL Acquisition
Your brand identity company will obviously check for the availability of the URL. For instance, if you come up with Veritas as one of your company name possibilities, that name cannot be chosen as a finalist until you know that the URL can be registered by you.
Although there is good competition, I believe the best place to do this registration is www.domainsinseconds.com. They will show you the contact information for every domain that is already registered. Just click on their click here for info link and see if the owner is interested in letting the domain name go for cheap.
Of course your brand identity company will check on the names you’re considering. Once you decide upon a name,
- consider all spelling possibilities,
- register those alternative spellings, and
- use domain forwarding and URL keeper features to transfer those alternative spellings to the right homepage.
For instance, Barnes & Noble’s actual homepage is www.barnesandnoble.com. However, an alternative spelling (and one they use on collateral) is www.bn.com. Type www.bn.com and you are automatically transferred to www.barnesandnoble.com.[8]
As a side note, I don’t really believe that you should try to buy all possible extensions, namely .com, .net, and .biz. The reason is because most people in the future will find you through a search engine and save you as a bookmark anyway.[9] One argument in favor of buying all possible extensions is the proliferation of spoofing, which means Web users will eventually grow overly leery of following embedded links in e-mail. For example, instead of following a link in an eBay e-mail, to open up your PayPal account, you should open a new window altogether and type www.paypal.com. If PayPal were legitimately a .net extension, such as www.concast.net, then some customers will naturally confuse .net with .com. I discuss spoofing in chapter 10.
E-Mail Accounts
Once you have finalized a business name, it is time to open up your e-mail accounts. I recommend the following structure: these are in the format [info@bizname.com, status@bizname.com] and so on.
- Info: the general account to which 90% of company e-mail comes
- Status: where customers send requests for fulfillment and delivery status
- Spoof: this is a new trend where customers can forward e-mails to confirm the e-mail’s authenticity[10]
Then, you setup an e-mail account for each employee using their first name: terri@company.com, jake@company.com, and so on. All of these e-mail accounts are easily setup in your Domain Direct account. Domain Direct also has new antispam software—all included in their hosting price.
Skype Accounts
While you are at it, you might as well set up your Skype telephone service now. Skype is a small piece of software that lets you use your computer (and specially-designed phones) to make phone calls over the internet. You can call to China or India for 2-3 cents per minute…incredible value and incredibly valuable. Download the small business version here: http://www.skype.com/business/ for free. The small business version lets you get a master account and pay for credit there, and each employee gets an account that points to the master but has separate tracking, etc. That way, if an employee leaves your employ, you still maintain control of the account.
[1] For a great treatment on business naming, see The 22 Laws of Branding, by Al Ries and Laura Ries (HarperBusiness 2002).
[2] Getting the federal trademark is fairly important to protect yourself in case someone else starts using your business name at the same time. “Trademark-factory” attorneys can be retained to process your federal trademark application for around $400.
[3] I am a member of the Board of Advisors of LogoLab, a subsidiary of BrandMother.
[4] If you want a personal recommendation, and can afford $150 per hour, contact Douglas Technology Consulting at 916.752.6849. Their expertise is in .net and c-sharp, but they can also program in Microsoft Access and Macromedia ColdFusion. Otherwise, I like Indian firm ebizzsol on Elance.com, whose fees run closer to $15 per hour.
[5] See www.escrow.com
[7] See http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_merchant-outside
[8] As an example of bad naming, the & is not a valid domain name server (DNS) character. Therefore, if someone types www.barnes&noble.com in the address line, an error is returned.
[9] One argument FOR buying all possible extensions is the proliferation of spoofing, which means Web users will eventually grow overly leery of following embedded links in e-mail. For example, instead of following a link in an eBay e-mail, to open up your PayPal account, you should open a new window altogether and type www.paypal.com. If PayPal were legitimately a .net extension, such as www.comcast.net, then some customers will naturally confuse .net with. com.
[10] For a tutorial on spoofing, see http://pages.ebay.com/education/spooftutorial/.
