The situation is as follows. Three gunmen stand in a wide, flat area. Their guns are (in the classic Mexican standoff, but, we shall explore, not in the film version) each filled with six bullets. One is the fastest draw, another is the slowest draw, and by common agreement, the third is somewhere in between. Assuming that if two shoot at each other, the fastest will kill the other before he gets a shot off, and, assuming that it takes more time for the fastest to fire a second shot than it did for the slowest to fire a single shot, what are the optimal strategies for each shooter, and is there a guaranteed winner if all play rationally? Further, are there other strategies — for example, playing irrationally — which will benefit a player whose chances are otherwise poor?

Working from the first shot, it is impossible to solve the paradox. If the fastest fires, whichever person he shoots will die, and the other, provided he shoots the fastest, will live. But this gives both other players merely a fifty-percent chance of survival, with no confidence as to which player the fastest will choose to kill.

The key to the puzzle is to look at the second round. The result of the first round could be that only one player is left alive — for example, if the fastest shoots the second fastest and the slowest shoots the fastest — or it could be that two players are left alive — for example, if both the fastest and the slowest both shoot the middle player.

Looked at from the perspective of the slowest player, the second round is always a loss, because whoever else is left alive, the slowest player then loses. Therefore, the slowest player, if acting rationally, must take whatever course of action is necessary to ensure that there is only one round. But there is only one possible choice for this to be the case, and in which the slowest survives. That combination is when the fastest shoots the second fastest, thereby killing him before he gets off a shot, and the slowest shoots the fastest. In this arrangement, the choice of the second fastest is irrelevant. If the fastest shoots the slowest, then the slowest is dead anyway, and if the fastest and the second fastest shoot each other, the result is that the fastest and slowest go through to the second round, resulting in a certain loss for the slowest.

Therefore, a slowest player acting rationally must shoot the fastest player in the first round. The fastest may choose to shoot him, or may choose to shoot the second fastest, but the slowest player cannot influence this decision, and therefore must accept the notional 50% chance of survival, as against 0% in any other combination.

However, if the fastest player is able to reason this, then he knows that the slowest player will shoot him. Therefore, acting rationally, he must shoot the slowest player.

The second player can make his own decision without having to follow this reasoning. Simply, if he shoots the fastest player, then he faces the slowest in the second round. If he shoots the slowest player, he faces the fastest in the second round, which he will certainly lose. Therefore, the second player must shoot the fastest player, hoping that the fastest will shoot the slowest. As it happens — whether the second player knows this or not — the fastest must do this if he is acting rationally.

The result of this is that the second player always wins if the players are acting rationally, and if there are no other factors. The fastest player cannot ‘trick’ this, by, for example, acting irrationally and shooting the second player, since he is still shot by the slowest player acting rationally, and the slowest player never gains anything by deliberately acting irrationally (that is to say, by varying his game), since all other combinations inevitably lead to his death. The middle player has nothing to gain by acting irrationally — he is the winner if all players act rationally, and loses in any combination if the fastest chooses, irrationally, to shoot him, or if the slowest chooses, irrationally, to shoot him, since that then leaves him facing the fastest player in the second round.

Clearly this is not a good game for the fastest player to be entering. He would be better to try to configure some kind of two stage one on one knockout contest, which he will be certain to win in both rounds.

In the film ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, the character Blondie (aka, the man with no name) is the fastest player, and is the one who proposes the game. In an extraordinarily tense five minutes on screen, the fighters eye each other up, until the second fastest, Angel Eyes (‘the bad’) draws and, rationally, shoots Blondie. However, instead of shooting Tuco (‘the ugly’ — the slowest player), Blondie shoots Angel Eyes. It’s not clear whether Tuco would have acted rationally by shooting Blondie at this point, or would have remembered that Angel Eyes (‘the bad’) is not to be trusted, shooting him, because, in the event, it turns out that Blondie removed Tuco’s bullets the night before, thereby reducing the game to a one-on-one, which Angel Eyes should (acting rationally) not have accepted if he knew the real state of affairs.

However, there are other possible actions which the fastest player can take. In the Weakest Link version of the standoff, all three players get to vote together, with full knowledge of their strengths up to that point (if they have been paying attention), but the strongest player gets to tie-break. In this version, players vote off the weakest link. Acting altruistically, both the strongest and middle players will vote off ‘the weakest link’, who is the third player. But, if the players play rationally, the middle player will vote off the strongest, in the hope that the weakest player will also vote that way, giving a clear 2:1 majority with no tie-break, and leaving him to face the weakest rather than the strongest in the final round. The weakest player must vote for either of the other two. If he can count on the middle player voting rationally rather than altruistically, he will vote against the strongest player, as this will put him into the final, whereas if everyone votes altruistically, then he has lost anyway. There is a slight combination here, in that if the weakest player votes altruistically, and the middle player votes rationally, then the result is a three way tie-break, and the strongest player may be sufficiently displeased that he votes off the middle player rather than the weakest player. But, if the strongest really is the strongest (which is not as clear in the game as in the gunfight), then facing the strongest in the final will result in a loss, and the famous ‘you leave with nothing’, for the middle player which ever way he votes.

In both these games, counter-intuitively, the strongest player inevitably loses if the players play rationally. In the Weakest Link version of the game, the strongest player does not have the opportunity to remove the weakest-player’s bullets. However, in both versions, the strongest player can attempt to disguise himself as a player of a different strength, as can the other two.

In the gunfighting version of the game, the result is then as follows. If all players play rationally, based on the information available to them, then if the strongest player is able to pretend he is the second strongest, he wins, because the weakest and second strongest shoot each other, and he shoots the second strongest. In fact, he can shoot either, because he will still win in the second round. If disguising himself as second strongest is too difficult, he can disguise himself as the weakest — for example, by turning up with his hand in a bandage. In this case, the apparently second strongest shoots the real second strongest, who is shooting the true strongest disguised as the weakest, who is shooting him back. The apparent second strongest’s bullets only strike the apparent strongest after the real strongest’s bullets have already killed him. The strongest player then faces the weakest player in the second round, and wins.

The second strongest player gains nothing by disguising himself, if the other two are undisguised, because he wins anyway.

If the weakest disguises himself as the strongest, he loses, because the real strongest and the second strongest both shoot him. However, if he is able to talk up his position a little, to the extent that he now appears to be the second strongest, then the strongest and real second strongest will shoot each other, and he will shoot the real strongest, thereby winning the game, as there will be no more rounds.

If the players behave entirely irrationally, that is to say, if they have no accurate picture of who is the strongest, then the result is statistical rather than logical. Using the letters S, M, W for Strong, Middle and Weak, and > for a shot from left to right, and < for a shot from right to left, the combinations are as follows:
1) S>M, M>W, W>S = W wins, as there is no second round, and the bullets of S have killed M before he gets a shot off
2) S>M, M>W, W>M= S wins, as M kills W, leaving him to face S in the second round
3) S>M, M>S, W>S = W wins, as this is the same result as case 1
4) S>M, M>S, W>M= S wins, this results is a second round where S will defeat W
5) S>W, M>W, W>S= S wins on the second round
6) S>W, M>W, W>M=S wins on the second round
7) S>W, M>S, W>S=M wins, as in the ideal case where all act rationally
S>W, M>S, W>M=M wins, since W is dead before he fires
In the non-rational case, therefore, S wins 50% of the time, M wins 25% of the time, and W wins, surprisingly, 25% of the time.

Although S is clearly the most likely to benefit from this arrangement, it is the least advantageous to him except for the fully rational version with no disguise, where he inevitably loses.

If he can organise the game differently, into a knockout-type competition, then he will win each round against either opponent.
If he is able to disguise himself, then he wins, provided that the others do not disguise themselves.
In a fully random version, he wins 50% of the time.
In the fully rational version, he always loses, as does the weakest player.

An alternative scenario — which is to some extent what appears to be happening at the end of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly — is collusion between the strongest and weakest, who are aware that, playing fully rationally, they will both lose. However, the price of this, for the weakest player, must be that there is to be no second round, as he will inevitably lose this.

The Mexican Standoff, in this version, differs from rock-paper-scissors because, although the players can vary their strategies, they cannot vary the order of precedence of their skills.

In a certain sense, branding is the very top of the marketing food chain. A corporate branding programme can cost anything from £50,000 for an NHS Foundation Trust, where there is almost no leeway for name or graphical treatment, to several £ million for a branding exercise for a major international product. I once met the guy who came up with the Orange brand name. I think the cost was £3 million, though I may have misremembered. That was more than a decade ago. His process was fascinating, and it wasn’t hard to see why it cost so much. He was obviously used to having to defend the figure, though: he pointed out that since Orange had come onto the market, BT had changed their mobile phone brand three times, and would probably change it another three times. And he was right. Interestingly, the meeting where I ran into him was about rebranding Coventry. I seem to remember that the tender eventually went against his company. Which may explain why, ten years later, Coventry is still not a brand to be conjured with.

There are tens of thousands of brands in the world around us. Most of us would be pushed to name twenty, though if we were given enough categories, most of could probably name several hundred. More to the point, though, in all but a very few categories, most of us would be pushed to name more than three. Name three brands of car? Easy. Jaguar, Rover, Ford, Kia, Opel, Audi. The list goes on. Name three brands of sugar? Erm… Tate and Lyle… any others? Three brands of motor oil? Duckhams, Castrol… any more? Three brands of vacuum cleaner? Hoover, Dyson… erm? Actually, if you drive up the M6 you will see hundreds of brands plastered on the sides of white vans, trucks and tankers. But most of them will be ones you don’t recognise, even if you are actually quite interested in those services. Some of them may be purely local brands. But a large proportion of them are simply brands that do not work very well.

I followed a van today which had the name “Vantage” emblazoned on the side, with a sort of double circle sign in the top right hand corner. Even after looking carefully at the unusual roof-rack on the top I was none the wiser about which product it was selling. Was this Vantage Highchairs, or Vantage Electronics, or Vantage Satellite Receivers, or Vantage Technologies of Sheffield, or Vantage Land, or Vantage Estate Agents, or even Vantage Spit Roasters? Who can say? The fact is, I might very well be in need right now of the product that that van was carrying, but as I have no idea what it was, and the logo was entirely anonymous, they gained no business from the £1,000 it probably cost to paint the van with those logos.

Most people, when they talk about branding, feel it has something to do with a new logo, or perhaps a new name. A true branding programme may very well result in the development of a new logo, or indeed a new name. But it does not necessarily result in the development of either.

The vast majority of brands most of us bump into are Small and Medium enterprises (SMEs), perhaps with names like PB Electricals, or Stechford Roofers, or Procter and Smith Removals, which, if unremarkable, have the advantage of telling you instantly what they do. More ambitious SMEs, however, quickly err into names like Vantage, Synergy, or Ideal, which say nothing about the product and nothing credible about the company. Furniture companies seem to prefer grandiose titles. Manufacturers of leather sofas are the worst culprits. We have seen many unconnected companies called things like Leather Village, Leatherland, World of Leather, or even, in Belgium, Univers de Cuir. The mind boggles slightly at an entire universe made out of leather.

Ultimately, a brand is a distillation of a distinctive promise to the end customer. All of the SME brands I have just listed fail in this regard. The first three, PB Electricals, Stechford Roofers and Procter and Smith Removals set out the general area of their activities, but they do not distil any particular promise. Vantage, Synergy and Ideal are neither distinctive, nor distillations, nor a promise of any kind. The various geographical entities of leather equally fail to make any particular promise.

Saint Paul famously wrote that “I become all things to all men…”. This is probably the right approach for a missionary (I speak from some experience), but it is exactly the wrong approach for a brand. And, in fact, the brand that Paul was selling, Christianity, was exactly non-negotiable, and Paul’s complete flexibility in his own behaviour was, at least in part, so as not to undermine the distinctiveness of that brand. SMEs which choose names like Vantage, Synergy or Ideal generally do so because they want to keep their options open, rather like Universal Import/Export, the cover name for MI6 in the James Bond novels. But keeping options open is exactly what a brand should not do.

Therefore, the first D of branding is Decision.

Decision

For a brand to be successful, there must first be decision about what it actually is, and who it is for. Wolff Olins suggests that a brand can be based around a product, or an environment, or a communication, or a set of behaviours, or, often, one of these supported by one or more of the others. Ultimately, the brand must reflect and portray the decisive features that make that product, or environment, or communication, or behaviours what they are. Any attempt to keep the options open, perhaps to sell into more than one market, or at more than one market position, or to try to brand two or more disparate things in the same way, is doomed to failure.

Distillation

Secondly, a brand is a distillation. Advertisers used to talk about Unique Selling Points (actually, they still do, although the more advanced ones are getting sniffier about this). The notion of a USP doesn’t necessarily work for all products, but the idea behind it, that you have to get to the nub of what you are really saying, is sound. Remember though, that a brand is a distillation of a promise, not a distillation of the product, environment, communication or behaviour itself. Many SMEs struggle with distilling the promise because they are so in love with the product they have created that they want to showcase all its benefits. I once spent a year trying to brand a new kind of friction material for car brakes. The German and Spanish engineers who had developed it kept on telling me more and more features (less polluting, lasted three times longer, very little fade as compared to other brakes, less dust, cleaner dust, etc). Whenever I tried to distil the promise, they explained to me first that this was only a small part of what this material did, and also that I was generalising too much. The lower fade was only on the vehicles they had tested… it would be entirely false to claim that it applied generally, until they had tested all the possible vehicles. After thirteen months I left the company, and I still haven’t heard whether they eventually came up with a name for it. Your product may indeed be all things to all people, but your brand promise can be exactly one thing, to exactly one market segment. If you want to market it to a different audience, introduce some variation and market it under a different brand!

Differentiation

To compete in the market place, the brand promise must differentiate itself from competitors. In the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding (which is a darned good book, despite the rather over-selling title), Al Ries suggests that if you are the second to market, you should pick as your brand colour the opposite of the first to market’s. Differentiation is about differentiating yourself in the mind of your target buyer. If your target buyer is middle-class men over the age of fifty in Britain, and your product is exquisitely bound and superbly translated tales from Viking Iceland, the name Saga Books would not be a winner — not because it fails to distinguish you from other kinds of books, but because Saga Holidays (and previously Saga Radio, now Smooth FM) is one of the biggest brands in that market place. Note that this is exactly the opposite differentiation strategy from the one mandated on you by UK Intellectual Property’s register of trademarks, which stipulates that you cannot register a trade mark in a product sector where that trademark already exists. Clearly you would be foolish to choose a brand name which was similar to an existing brand for a similar product that sold outside your target market — aside from the trademark issues — because the brand value of that brand would be working against you, giving your customer the impression that you were really aiming at a different market. Remember that the brand is a distinctive promise. Your product may be identical to that of your main competitor. For example, if you are selling regular salt, you are unlikely to persuade customers on the basis of product quality, product features, or cost. But you can still make a brand promise — for example, “Salt of the Earth”, “Sustainable Sea Salt”, “Fairtrade Salt”, “Yorkshire Salt”, etc, which makes a promise about where the salt has come from, or how it has been obtained. You could even use pure showmanship (Olins’s ‘communication’ brand vector) and call it “Old Fashioned Salt”.

Discipline

The fourth D is Discipline. There is no effective branding without brand discipline. If you bring “Fairtrade Salt” to market, and the brand is successful, you have to exert great brand discipline to make sure that you continue to source your salt by fairtrade means. A whiff of exploitative practices, and your fairtrade credentials disappear. Equally, if you are marketing ‘Old Fashioned Salt’, then you need to conform all of your marketing to the old fashioned image. It goes without saying that logos must be used consistently, strictly adhered to and strictly defended (more often from well-meaning sales people who want to lengthen or compress the logo to fit on a PowerPoint slide than from competitors). However, if your biggest customer suddenly decides that they are modernising all their shops and no longer wish to stock products with old fashioned labels, then you have to strongly resist the urge to modernise the product to protect your short term sales. Rather, you should go back to the drawing board and perhaps offer to supply “Techno-Salt — scientifically balanced for osmotic benefit”. Just make sure you don’t deliver it in the Old Fashioned Salt van.

There are only a very limited number of branding strategies out there — Corporate brands, such as the NHS or IBM, allow no variation in graphical treatment or use of the name. Their sub-brands are subtitles to the overall brand, nothing more. Endorsed brands, such as Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum, Wrigley’s Juicy Fruits, etc, allow for a wider range of treatments. Separate brands, such as Techno-Salt and Old Fashioned Salt, depend on their separation to be successful. Once you have settled on a branding strategy, you have to stick to it with enormous discipline. An ill-disciplined brand is like an ill-rehearsed band: it falls to pieces in performance.

Delivery
Finally, your brand is exactly as strong as its delivery. Do you deliver what your brand promises? If not, your brand collapses. Contrariwise, every time you deliver on your promise, your brand equity increases. Consider the growth in brand equity of Microsoft. In the early 1980s, Microsoft was the very junior partner of IBM in the hardware driven world of the desktop Personal Computer. Initially all the brand equity belonged to IBM. It was only when Columbia Data Products cloned the IBM BIOS that the market was flooded with cheaper PCs. However, the testing stone of every PC clone was the question of whether it would run MS-DOS — Microsoft’s Disk Operating System. Every time a PC-clone started up, there was a whirring, and eventually a message telling you that MS-DOS was successfully running. That message was the mark of a working computer. When Microsoft took Windows from a rather flakey graphical task-switcher (Desqview was much better) to a proper environment, it made sure that the Microsoft logo was even more prominent than it had been on the MS-DOS start-up. Microsoft has attracted masses of criticism from all kinds of people, and is hated by many. But it has probably the highest brand-equity of any brand in the world. As much as people may curse their computers, and curse Windows, the appearance of the Microsoft logo is the sign that all is well: Microsoft delivers again.

Thus, we have the five Ds of Branding. Or BranDing, if you want a connection. Decision, Distillation, Distinctiveness, Discipline and Delivery. Provided that there really is a market for your product, a brand with these characteristics will exponentially strengthen your product offering. A brand which fails on one of these may succeed, providing the other brands in the market are weak, but it will greater investment for less impact.

One area in which neither the personal computer nor internet services has had much to offer, however, is that of the business logo. It’s true that anyone can buy Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw and have a go, or surf the net for budget alternatives, but a hard-headed business person is unlikely to want to spend so much on what is (for them) a one-trick pony, and probably shrewdly recognises that there is a lot more to logo design than simply owning the relevant software.

To the rescue — perhaps — then, comes an application priced to sell which makes just one claim: the creation of that elusive logo. The Logo Creator, now in version 5 for both Mac and Windows, claims: “Create incredible logo designs that look like a Photoshop guru spent hours laboring over! It’s like having your own logo design studio… without the studio! With The Logo Maker – you’ll get a portfolio full of logos that you can modify and customize yourself… for far less than what a designer will charge.”

So is this the answer to this perplexing pre-business problem, or does it follow the pattern of many things which seem too good to be true?

Actually, this article is not really about “The Logo Creator”. At $39.95 it seems a bargain, but once you factor in another $39.95 for “The Corporate Identity Creator” to get your artwork onto templates for business cards, letterhead, etc, and another $59 to get it converted to vector format so that a real designer could use it, you’ve probably realised that you could have paid a design-school student or the bloke at the printers down the road rather less for a rather more informed job. The samples on The Logo Creator’s home page are also rather less than inspiring, unless your business idea is another cable channel for pre-teens.

But it does raise the question, what’s in a logo? What are the criteria, and how do you go about commissioning one?

The fundamental criteria for good logo design are:
i) Identifiability (you see it again, you recognise it)
ii) Uniqueness (sets you apart within your target market)
iii) Reproduceability (in CMYK ‘full colour’, spot Pantone colour, black and white,)
iv) Representation (of your corporate style — not a picture of what you do)
v) Simplicity (it’s a brand, not an illustration)

These are the things which a competent designer will have in their mind when they start on your artwork, and they should be in your mind when you select between different options.

However, in themselves these criteria will not help you very far with the task of briefing a designer. If you were a major corporation looking to develop a brand for a new venture, you would probably commission a branding agency, which would conduct the entire process from understanding your aims, through establishing your name, and on to the final creative package. Naturally, though, a corporate service of this nature would command a corporate price — from £thousands to £millions, in certain cases. A regional design or PR agency might well offer to the same kind of work, albeit on a smaller scale, for a more pocket money sized price, typically £3,000 to £10,000 in the UK. But this is still out of kilter with the efficient, low start-up costs that are tempting experienced business people into micro-enterprises. It might leave you looking at “The Logo Creator” again, or simply telling a designer “Just come up with some things, and I’ll pick the best.”

There is, however, a simple process which you can follow yourself to get to the point where you can give a designer an intellligent brief, and expect a useable result.

The name
The first thing you need to do is adequately define the name of your business. It’s surprising how fluid names can remain until a logo pins it down. Your name should be short, memorable, and say something credible. So “John Smith consumeables import and export” is unlikely to be a winner, but neither is “Trust Me — used car sales”. It’s not necessary to encapsulate everything — or indeed, anything — you do in the name, since you can do this in a strap line. Your own name may be your strongest brand choice if you are essentially selling knowledge or expertise, perhaps linked with the word for what you do. A locality name can also be highly credible. “Ledbury organic vegetables” or “Aldershot Telecommunications”. People looking to market a product worldwide — for example, something which can be sold via download — often look for a more ‘global’ name, but this is generally a mistake.
As you look for a name, prioritise what you are looking at in this order:

Short. Typically, the eye takes in 18 letters in one go. If your name is ten letters long, for example “Slumbertec”, a headline or marketing slogan has only got eight letters left to make its point. “Slumbertec delivers!” might work, but “Sleeptec” gives you more space, which may explain why “Sleeptec” is the name of a real business, and “Slumbertec” isn’t.
Credible. Exaggerated claims are unlikely to give you an edge over your competitors, and are most likely to put off potential customers. “Ultimate solutions”, “Design Universe”, “Maximum Investments”. They also have a potential for unintended humour. “Chocolate Universe” does not bear thinking about.
Functional. A name that gives the customer a good picture of what you do is generally helpful, unless what you do takes too long to explain, in which case, stick with short. “Jennifer S Smith Craftswoman made Mint Chocolates” might be a good tag line, but “Craftsmints” would be far better as a name.
Attractive. All other things being equal, attractive names give you an edge. Of course, what is attractive depends on who you are trying to attract.
To get to the point of selecting, try randomly brainstorming fifty (yes, fifty) names. Imagine that you have done this, and now have on the table:
Jennifer S Smith Craftswoman made Mint Chocolates
Craftsmints • Jenny Smith Chocolate • Jenny’s Mints • Handmints • Minted!
Smiths Mints • Smints • Chicolate • Chickolates • Mintolated!

Of these, “Craftsmints”, “Smints” and “Chicolates” are probably the best choices.
However, there is one more essential stage in choosing a name: you have to check whether it is available or not.
A quick Google search will tell you that “Smints” is a substantial brand name, while Chicolate is the name of a restaurant in South Africa. Craftsmints returns no hits. Google is, perhaps, not the right place to look, though. If you intend to trade from the UK, you can access for free the UK Trademarks Database. This will confirm that Smint has been registered for classes 05, 30 and 42, and by another company for class 09. The classes refer to which product areas the name is registered for — you can reuse someone else’s name provided that it is not in a product area they have regiestered. In our case, Smint’s class 30 precludes use for cacao (ie, chocolate). Chicolate, on the other hand, is not registered in the UK, notwithstanding the South African restaurant.

If you were a major company, you would want to conduct substantial further research in our potential customers respond to your name. As things stand, having ruled out all the names which are either too long, not credible, or not functional, you can still benefit by asking a few friends which name they prefer. Don’t let them analyse it too deeply — an off the cuff response is what you are after.

Style
Once you have your name — let’s assume we are sticking with ‘Chicolate’, you need to determine how you want to be perceived in the market place. Begin with your constraints. If you are selling hand-made chocolates, then volume of production and means of shipping will be key constraints. If you are selling downloadable software, then after-sales support, alongside protecting yourself from piracy, are likely to be far more important. With the constraints in mind, your style needs to resonate with what kind of business you want to be, and what kind of business your target customers are likely to want to deal with. If you were a new venture by a large corporation, you would want to set your style to exactly mirror that of your principle audience. However, one of the attractions of going into business for yourself is the ability to do something that you are personally proud of. ‘Chicolate’ could take you in one of two directions. It could refer you to ‘Chic’, as in French, stylish and in fashion, or it could refer you to ‘Chick’, ironically referencing the gender of Jennifer S Smith, or you could opt to try both.
As an exercise to help clarify your thinking, and to help you explain what you want to a designer, try describing to yourself a 30 second TV advertisement for your main product. It could go something like this: “Young, good looking man sits in expensive sports car. It is dark and it is raining, he looks at his watch impatiently and hoots the horn. Cut to elegantly (but fashionably) dressed young woman at door of her apartment. She is ready go out. She looks at her watch and sees it is two minutes past the hour. Then her eye goes to a bar of Chicolate chocolate on the dressing table. She takes a bite, and then savours it, while her eyes drift to the clock on the wall. When it is five minutes past, she carefully rewraps the chocolate bar, touches her lips with her tongue to make sure she has the last of the taste, and then makes her way out of the apartment. Cut to the road outside. As she opens the car door, the young man says ‘you’re late’. She looks wistfully/mischieviously back up to apartment. ‘Not late.’ She says (soft French accent). ‘Chicolate’.”

What about my unique selling proposition?
Any discussion of marketing and branding is likely to throw up the ubiquitous USP. Strictly speaking, a USP is characteristic of a product, not of an enterprise. A micro-business, of course, may be a single product enterprise, at least initially. But it may not stay that way. Clearly your style and logo should chime with the USP of your product, but an attempt to tie them more closely than that might prove shortsighted.

Finding a designer
Ideally you want to talk to a designer at this point, not to a design agency. All the usual means apply — Google, Yellow Pages, asking around. Ask to see some examples of previous logos which the designer has come up with personally. Make a point of asking for work they have originated — it is not uncommon for someone who has ‘worked on the logo’, that is, changed the colour, or scanned it in and vectorised it, to include a design in their portfolio. Use the earlier list to check out their work, and be especially careful of anyone who produces complex ‘illustration’ style logos, and anything which uses more than two colours, unless a two colour version is also supplied. Ask them about the sort of timescales to come up with three rough drafts, and the associated costs. Typically, a designer will look for something in the region of £40 per hour in the UK.

Briefing the designer
Once you have selected a suitable candidate, make an appointment to see them at their studio. For many independent designers, this will be their house, but that should not be a problem. Explain your business name, what it is you will do, how you intend to market your products, and sketch out your imaginary TV ad (make sure they understand it’s imaginary, or they will smell big money), and give them other comments about your style. Then ask them how long they think it would take to come up with three rough designs, and how long to work one of them up into a final. Explain your criteria for selection (Identifiability, Uniqueness, Reproduceability, Representation, Simplicity), and make it clear that you will want an EPS file, a TIFF file and a GIF file, and that you will be the owner of the copyright of the finished work, once you’ve paid for it.

Once they’ve agreed to all that, give them the job. They should not need more than a week to get the drafts ready. Meet them again, and pick the one which best matches your style and is simplest. Ask for any refinements, and then agree when they will deliver the finished version. If one or more of the drafts don’t match your brief, be ruthless and say this — it’s not uncommon for designers to recycle old, rejected logos from other clients, and then bill you for the time it took to create them.

And finally
Once you are satisfied with the final logo, ask them for their invoice, and ask them to quote for designing you a business card, letterhead, anything else you need. This will tend to ‘help’ them, if they are wondering about charging you a little bit extra for the work already done. However, don’t just take their quote — go round to your local printer and ask them how much it would cost to have them lay out these things for you, based on your logo artwork. Often they won’t charge you any more than the cost of the print itself.

Background
For those not in the know, Nikon is one of two leading manufacturers of Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras, a market which it, alongside arch-rival Canon, created at the end of the 1990s, initially to replace film for professional photographers. Neither Canon nor Nikon were first to market with a digital single lens reflex camera. From 1993 Kodak manufactured a series of DCS cameras, which were hybrid Nikon or Canon film cameras with Kodak sensors and electronics, but reliability issues, and the existing market presence of both main manufacturers, meant that the Kodaks were progressively squeezed out.

Pricing was initially high, but by 2002 Nikon had introduced the ‘prosumer’ D100, at less than £2,000 UK price. Canon, in the meantime, had also been active, and both manufacturers have continued to trade model releases, each with higher specifications or markedly lower prices.

The principal advantage of the Digital SLR over the then market leaders, digital compact cameras, is that they behave very similarly to film-based cameras, and allow photographers to leverage their investment of auto-focus (and, in Nikon’s case, manual) lenses. Since for many professionals the investment in lenses dwarfs the cost of the camera body, and since the attraction and flexibility of 35mm SLRs was largely in the vast variety of interchangeable lenses, the advent of the DSLR was hotly anticipated. DSLRs gained rapid acceptance among photojournalists, and by 2005 film based SLR cameras were becoming a rarity in professional settings.

In the mean-time, other players were entering the arena, including long-term rivals Olympus and Canon, as the market broadened. From 2006, sales of Digital SLRs were predicted to exceed those of digital compact cameras in the consumer market, and new-boys Sony entered with an ostensibly entirely new line, though it was largely a rebadging of the Konica Minolta system. At the time, Sony insisted that they would become the number one player in the DSLR market. Nikon responded bullishly, stating that it would see off Sony, and eventually supplant Canon as number one in the DSLR market.

Clearly, both Nikon and Canon need to obtain the largest possible share in the burgeoning consumer Digital SLR market, since this dwarfs professional equipment sales. However, both manufacturers are aware of the sensitivity in the market place to the perception of premium status, as demonstrated by the numbers of professional photographers at news, sports and commercial events using their branded equipment. Nikon was able to maintain dominance in this regard from the 1960s to the 1980s, but Canon created a better professional equipment offering in the 1990s, with Nikon late to market in the area of autofocus lenses. In the meantime, other manufacturers failed in their autofocus offerings, so that the position by the start of the 2000s was that most SLR professionals used Canon, with a smaller, but still significant proportion of Nikon users. The launch of the D1 to some extent redressed the balance, and Nikon has made modest year-by-year gains in professional market share since.

Further, the consumer sales of photographic equipment are unusually sensitive to media comment and community perception. Photography has a long tradition of clubs and magazines, and this has burgeoned with the advent of internet discussion and pundit sites, and the confluence of cameras and computers, leading to a raft of new magazines. This is also true of a number of other sectors, notably home computing, home video and digital music. However, no comparable sector is so dominated by just two players, which together hold about 80% of the market.

The Dilemma
Because of technical differences between digital and film, both Nikon and Canon originally came to market with a smaller sensor than traditional 36x24mm film. The smaller, APS-C, sensor offered its own characteristics, including greater depth of focus and a 1.5x multiplication factor (in fact, a 1.5x crop factor) which gave more magnification to telephoto lenses, but rendered wide-angle lenses unuseful. The smaller sensor only used the central ‘best’ 2/3 of the lens, enabling sharper pictures across the field, which was an important advantage since digital photographers tend to examine their pictures at the pixel level, the equivalent of blowing a traditional photo up to 10x or 100x. Nikon and Canon both responded to the issue of wide lenses by bringing specialist lenses designed for the APS-C size, which not only restored large angle of view, but which were also lighter and faster than their predecessors.

However, sensing an unmet need in the market, Canon continued to develop a ‘full-frame’ (or original 36x24mm) sensor, and in 2002 launched the EOS-1Ds. Although expensive, the new camera met with acclaim across user communities and in magazines, as setting the benchmark for the flagship Digital SLR.

As of the time of writing, Canon remain the only manufacturer to have brought such a product to market (although the now discontinued Kodak DCS cameras were full-frame). Sales of the camera’s successors are slight — the EOS-1DsMarkII and the EOS5D account for less than 1% of the Japanese market — but Canon advocates are quick to stake the claim, as in Canon’s white paper on the subject, that the company is the sole occupant of the true premium sector of the market.

Nikon’s failure to announce a competitor product has caused some consternation in its community. However, there are unsolved technical problems in Canon’s offering, including poor performance at wide-angle, which was supposed to be the format’s strength, as well as a very substantial price differential. Furthermore, with effectively three formats in its offering (Full-Frame, APS-H and APS-C), Canon has created a degree of confusion in its own marketplace, especially since the new range of lenses designed for the APS-C sensor will not function effectively on Full Frame or APS-H.

The question, then, is: should Nikon underpin its recent gains in the consumer market by introducing a Full Frame camera, or should it stick with its single format strategy?

A BCG approach
This scenario would seem an ideal candidate for a BCG matrix, since both market share and market growth are already known. Nikon’s existing portfolio is Digital SLR cameras, Digital Compact cameras (the Coolpix range), Film Cameras, and specialist optical equipment. The actual market sizes for these products vary, but, taking high and low market share as the key factor, the table will look something like this

Currently, Nikon has a significant market share in three small, mature markets — it dominates the 35mm film SLR cameras, occupies a niche for particular kinds of specialist optical equipment, and has a measurable share of digital compact cameras. However, the first and third of these markets are showing marked contraction, while the second is a small market. Nikon has already closed its Medium Format optics programme, where it was a small player in a mature market. The Compact Camera may, in fact, be in the wrong place. Nikon’s share is around 9%, but it has predicted very substantial sales growth in 2007, releasing a range of new models, in the face of an overall market contraction.

On the other hand, Nikon has a 35% share of a rapidly growing market — consumer and prosumer Digital SLR in the APS-C format. This leaves entrance into the Digital SLR Full Frame market as a question mark — possibly — provided that the assumption that ‘Full-frame is the future’ turns out to be correct. Otherwise, as things currently stand, Full-frame would be a dog — low growth, low share.

In classic BCG thinking, the positions to take are as follows:
Milk the cash cows, but don’t invest in them. Investment costs money.
Abandon the dogs.
Invest in the rising Stars, but watch them carefully: the investment you need in a high growth, high share market segment may mean that you do not, in fact, return any profit.
Watch the question marks: don’t kill them off, but don’t invest in them either.

On this analysis, Nikon should not at this point enter the FF market, since there is no evidence at the present time that the FF market is actually growing, and, even if there were, this would only make it a question mark — one to watch, but not to invest in.

Does this answer the question?
Perhaps. On the same reasoning Honda would never have entered the automobile market. The BCG matrix fails to take account of the value of premium products in pegging a range. On the other hand, Nikon has made substantial inroads into Canon’s market share despite the absence of the allegedly premium sensor size. Further, the received wisdom that consumers buy what they believe to be professional brands underwent a huge challenge last year with the entry of Sony into the market. Sony had no heritage in digital SLRs, but captured 21% of the Japanese market in its debut month, with a predicted 10% full-year market share. In the event its actual market share for the first nine months was close to that, justifying Sony’s belief that a consumer brand without a professional user-base could take the number 3 spot, leaving long-term players Pentax and Olympus to scrap for the crumbs.

What actually happened?
In the event, the speculation proved false: Nikon did not release a D3 in March, and instead reaffirmed its position that Full Frame was ‘not on the road-map’, although spokesmen made a point of not ruling it out. However, it did release a new consumer based DSLR, the D40X, and new Coolpix cameras, indicating that, in this cycle at least, it believes that these are the markets to be seen to be investing in.

There are a number of reasons why you, (or your CEO, if that isn’t you), might want to turn your hand to corporate blogging. First, it gives you a new avenue for free publicity on the web. Blogs are mined for information more rigorously than almost any other form of web-expression. Second, it lets you speak ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’, whenever you feel like it, without the constraints of corporate newsletter schedules or the risk of journalists misusing your press release for other purposes. Perhaps most importantly, it gives you the chance to build an almost intimate relationship with a large, interested audience, who cannot but thank you if you give them insights into an otherwise closed world.

There is, of course, a risk: you may express yourself poorly, or, worse, let something slip that you would have preferred to keep quiet. On the other hand, if you have survived in business all these years, you have probably reached the point of knowing what is and is not safe to say in public. The real risk, of course, is that your blog will be lost among all the other voices on the internet, and you will effectively be wasting your time on a task which will never produce a benefit to your bottom line.

But all this is first-impression analysis. What are the real benefits of blogging, and how can you overcome the downside?

Benefits
There are three key benefits to corporate blogging, and it’s really up to you to decide if they are worth the investment.

How do you differentiate?
Chances are that, unless you have a very proactive IT department, you won’t be running your blog from your corporate website, although you should certainly link to it. In fact, running it exclusively on your website may damage its credibility. But in that case, how do you differentiate your blog from all the ‘others’ out there?

Blogging should not be seen as an alternative to tried and tested means such as press releases, customer information and a well-designed website. But it can reach the parts that others do not reach. And for that, it is worth exploring.