The Mind of Kenney Young

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Whether it is an international organization or a local business, every company has to get a smart logo designed which would reflect its ideology. The logo should have a strong visual attraction for the customer and must induce instant recall of the brand, and an expert logo designer can immensely help in this regard.

As the brand identity of a firm would depend upon logo design, the credentials and expertise of the logo designer ought to be examined comprehensively. He must have high levels of creativity and must have handled difficult projects in the past with success. He should also be able to blend your ideas into the logo and finish the task within fixed deadlines.

A good logo must have a few key features. There must be an ideal mix of images, colours and text so that it appears both appealing and soothing to the viewers. It should be unique so that it can set the firm apart from the bunch of other brands in same business.

The logo design should try to highlight the main business of the firm meaningfully and subtly, in order to give the customers knowledge of what your firm is dealing in. In addition, it should be apt enough to survive for many years and even decades so that you don’t have to to substitute it with a different one.

Forecasting the success of a logo is not generally that simple. Actually it can take months for a new logo to develop an impact and settle in the minds and hearts of consumers, and finally lead to more revenues or market share for the company.

However, this does not mean that it is impossible to tell whether the new logo will be successful. You can find out the consumers’ likely reaction to the new logo design by doing market research. A well known and very effective way of doing this is to use a test market.

A test market is a relatively small segment of the whole market, where you can launch the new logo design, and then do a study to comprehend how people are responding to it. An aggressive test market promotion of your new logo will help you in generating quick recall of your logo among different consumers and hence you would not have to wait long to find the outcome.

Thereafter you can study and examine what perceptible impact your experiment has had on the sales of your products in the test market and on the overall perception of your company in that specific area. If all the outcomes are favourable, you know that your logo design exercise has been successful.

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Good quality paper bags with the company’s name and logo printed on them can have a lasting influence on consumers. They can be very successful promotional tools and cost saving as well especially if you order in large volume, which reduces the cost of paper bag printing drastically.

Consumers have an inherent inclination towards noticing and grasping text and pictures on paper bags when they are out in the market. A company must take advantage of whatever it can in order to promote its products and these bags present a perfect chance of doing that.

Paper bag printing can reap rich dividends for the business for many other reasons besides these. Easy portability is one of the most important features of a paper bag. The portability of paper bags means a greater reach for your logo and brand as well, ensuring much more extensive visibility.

Being very useful and strong, these bags are kept by people at their homes for a long time, and as long as the bag is in use, your business keeps getting coverage. In addition, by getting these bags made from recycled paper, your organization can even adopt a ‘go-green’ approach, which can give it a good mileage in the market and help attract more customers.

Paper bags can be given away in seminars and conferences attended by your prospective clients or partners, to help carry any documents or brochures back home. The bags can generate frequent recalls about the business in the minds of their owners or anyone else who looks at them.

However, a organization should never invest in bags of inferior quality, as a poorly made bag would damage the business’ reputation, which is contrary to what the initiative is meant to achieve. The good news is that there are many paper bag printing businesses out there, which can assist you in this task and help in ensuring that the bags are of the correct colour, design, and material, and that they develop a good impression on the customers.

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Definitions of some English words can change quite rapidly these days. In the recent past the meaning of words was often very fixed. Today the meaning can change in the blink of an eye. With faster and newer ways to exchange ideas such as Twitter and with wider and more culturally, socially and educationally dissimilar groups connecting together – words are put back on the anvil of evolution and changed into something new and more reflective of current life.

There’s a significant global movement happening where consumers are asking business to take care of the things they care about such as the less fortunate in society and the environment. The request is mainly tacit and despite it being an ironic request it by far indicates still that we are in a time of vast change. Consumers these days want their cake and eat it. They not only want cheap products, they also want the environment to be preserved and they want workers to be well looked after.

There does not seem to be an answer to this conundrum and yet one does exist. It exists in the recoining or reforging of a single word. This word is a simple one – GET. Today, new movements of people who want to get but give at the same time are reforging it. It is being transformed into the word GIVE.

Every day automated email notices arrive in my inbox from Google Alerts for two keywords – BOGO and B1G1. I see all the new places these words are turning up on the Internet. Little by little these two words are gaining a their new meaning as more and more people take up the Buy One Give One cause.

B1G1 and BOGO, despite sounding like characters from a Marvel comic are acronyms for Buy One GET One free. You buy one and they give you an extra one for the same price.

Look up BOGO on Wikipedia.com (there isn’t a definition yet for B1G1) and you will discover these definitions for BOGO:

* An acronym in the retail industry that stands for Buy One Get One. For example, you could say “Buy 1 DVD, Get 1 FREE!

* An acronym in slang British that stands for Britons Of Greek Origin or Greek Britons.

* Bogo, Cebu, a city in central Philippines.

* An alternate name for the Bilen ethnic group of Ethiopia or their language, Blin.

* Norway, a village in Norway.

* The mascot of the ITESM CEM.

* BogoMips, an unscientific measurement of CPU speed

* Bogosort, an ineffective sorting algorithm

BOGO lights

There is an organisation in the USA called SunLight Solar founded by a gentleman called Mark Bent. He has created a special torch that not only is an amazing and robust solar-powered light; his company also gives a free torch to a family in need in developing nations for each one purchased. If you look on their website you will learn about their “BOGOlight”.

“The BoGo – our Buy one/Give one – program has successfully provided lights to many, many thousands of people in the developing world, changing lives because of your purchase and participation.” – BOGOlight.com

Mark Bent turned the acronym upside down when he started to use the word as part of his product name. For him now and the thousands who buy his lights, BOGO now means Buy One GIVE One. Each person gets to give a light every time they buy one for themselves. So now with each sale, people who do not have the luxury of electricity can harness the power of the sun to support their lives.

There are many other well known and many less well know businesses doing Buy One Give One giving, or transaction-based giving as its becoming known. Some of the famous companies are OLPC – One-Laptop-Per-Child and TOM’S Shoes. Some of the less well-known ones (in the US at least) are based in Oceania and the UK – Earthstar Publishing, Maple Muesli, Blinds Couture, Figure 8 Body Chains, Sunsplash Homes, Honestly Women magazine and Thavibu Gallery based in Thailand are just a small handful of these special businesses that are leading the Buy One Give One movement.

Many Buy One Give One businesses are coming together under the single brand banner of Buy1GIVE1; a Singaporean based social enterprise which is becoming the home of transaction based giving. Any business can now choose to be part of Buy One Give One giving with ease. It’s like a CSR ‘plug-in’ to allow a business to start giving from each and every sale today – starting from just one cent. It is now not even a matter of giving an equivalent product to someone else. Instead it is about giving to a charity project that is in resonance with a company’s business activity. For example a magazine publisher cannot support the planting of a tree every time they sell a subscription, a restaurant can feed a child for each meal sold, a TV store can gift a cataract blind person with the gift of sight (Get Vision-Give Vision), and a builder or property developer can build a budget home for those in need who have lost their homes in a disaster (Buy1BUILD1) – the list is only limited by imagination.

There is something very special happening these days as more and more people are switching to giving and what are known as ‘citizen brands’ as a part of their everyday experience. In the 2008 Goodpurpose study of global consumer attitudes it reveals that almost 68% of consumers would choose to remain loyal to a brand during an economic downturn if it supports a good cause. And 71% say that when they think about the economic downturn, they have either given the same or more time and money to good causes. This study also highlighted some other key points as well such as:

* Half (52%) of consumers globally are more likely to recommend a brand to others when it supports a good charity cause over one that does not.

* 54% would sing the praises of a brand to promote their products if there was a good cause behind it.

* And going even further globally, consumers are voicing a strong desire for marketers to connect their brands to social causes or action. Forty-two percent say that if two products or services are of the same quality and price, commitment to a social purpose trumps factors like design, innovation and brand loyalty when choosing one product brand over another.

Transforming Getting into Giving

In the minds of consumers, Buy One GIVE One is expected to replace Buy One GET One as the new global giving movement led by Buy1GIVE1 spreads. Certainly with the massive sales results and consumer demand shown for companies like BOGOlights, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and TOMS Shoes, this tide will continue to spread and grow.

I did a recent Google search to find the top 25 keywords associated with the keywords BOGO and B1G1. The results were interesting indeed seeing none of them contained the word Give. You can see the results below. It will be interested to repeat this experiment in 12 months time to see what changes. Consumers are now starting to drive significant change and despite them wanting to receive free gifts (as in traditional BOGO/B1G1), they equally want to help others and the environment. This feeling is validated by 2008′s Goodpurpose global study.

Keyword results:

Free, shopping, pics, join, prose, photography, blogging, discount, boots, groups, music, dallas, togo themes, wallpapers, buy, applications, skins, values, coupon, gift, sharing, networking, African.

Transaction-based or transactional giving

Unlike traditional charity giving, Buy One Give One giving is transactional in that every time you buy something, you give something. In the case of SunNight Solar they happen to give a physical light for every light sold. However, in most cases, Buy1GIVE1 associated businesses give in a different way. At Buy1GIVE1, giving can start from just USD 1c contribution per sale and go up to thousands of dollars in the case of Buy1BUILD1. At 1cent almost every business in the world can afford to give from each sale especially when they know 100% contributed goes to the cause.

The amount contributed from each sale is not the point of focus with Buy1GIVE1 transaction based giving. The focus is instead on the story and sharing the simple joy of giving. In the end, if you think that 1c is not a lot to contribute and is unlikely to make much of a difference think again and consider the following idea.

From its origins in Ethiopia, where the main coffee production is still from wild coffee tree forests, coffee consumption has spread globally. Brazil is still by far the largest coffee producer in the world producing on average 28% of the world’s total coffee. In 2006 Brazil produced enough coffee to make 216,400,000,000 (216 billion four hundred million) espresso coffees. If we were to calculate across global production then we get a daily global consumption of around 2,117,416,830 cups of coffee – wow. The figures are somewhat hard to track down but let’s guess that 40% of the world’s coffee is sold and consumed in coffee shops then we would get that 846,966,732 cups are sold commercially each day globally – nearly 900 million. This would equate to about’5,485,714 cups in the US on its own seeing they purchase around 21% of the world’s coffee.

Imagine now that for every cup of coffee sold a child in a developing region like Africa received drinking water from its own well and it costing only one US cent per person per day. Now any coffee shop could afford to contribute this amount from the sale of a single cup of coffee because it has a high profit margin sale. Imagine the different that this alone would make in the world.

Transaction based giving is the story of a thousand mile journey starting with the first step. To dig a well costs a few thousand dollars hence many communities in developing nations cannot afford to dig wells. But when you see that it only takes the sale of a single cup of coffee to give clean well water to a single person for a day1, then you can see the magic of transactional based giving. Buy1GIVE1 giving is like the compound interest of giving – a little turns into a lot very quickly.

So many companies are used to doing things on their own. Doing transactional giving is no different. A company can go out find a cause and start doing Buy One Give One giving. And yet they are missing the point when they do this. Buy1GIVE1 giving is about sharing the joy of giving and not trying to change the world. As soon as you step up and say you are going to change the world then the world will step up and challenge you. Within a heartbeat a company would experience the sharp scrutiny of the media inspecting their every move. And yet when a company steps up and says it is supporting what its customer want and joins with others in its industry to do that in a win-win way, the story is different. When companies choose to join together under a commonly recognised banner/brand they can have a powerful joint effect. The ripple that a single company creates is added to that of another and the ripple grows into a tidal wave that benefits so many. This is the power of giving and doing things together.

The final power of Buy One Give One transaction based giving is that everyone wins – the consumer wins – at no extra cost to themselves they have made a difference through their purchasing choices – the business wins in so many ways – and the worthy cause or charity wins because they can now receive small amounts from many sources all aggregated and paid as a lump sum from a single source if done through the Buy1GIVE1 service.

A new start – a new world – new thinking

If you go right now and check Wikipedia.com for the word BOGO you should find that a new definition has been added. And soon B1G1 will be added. It is time for a sea-change – a change from the focus on GETTING to focusing on GIVING. I personally added a small addition to Wikipedia’s BOGO definition that says this: “… an acronym in the marketing industry that stands for Buy One GIVE One.”

Simply imagine our world where every time you go and buy something you give something automatically and seamlessly – giving a gift forward to someone in greater need than you. This is the simple joyful magic of transactional giving.

This is the world I choose to be a part of.

And remember – you don’t ‘get’ giving till you get giving.

References:

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee

http://www.dep.org.uk/globalexpress/13/page1.htm

http://www.scfnw.org.uk/site/article183.html

http://www.coffeepoet.com/2007/09/

http://www.scfnw.org.uk/site/article183.html

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee

http://www.tesco.com/greenerliving/what_we_are_doing/ethical_clothing.page

Footnotes: 1 The daily cost for clean well water per person is calculated by taking the average cost to dig a well then dividing that amount by its average expected life without major maintenance then divided it by the number of people in the community benefiting from the well on a daily basis.

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A home remodeling or renovation project is not as easy as it may sound. Renovating a building is not just all about how it will look or function, but most significantly you have to consider what kind of materials are utilized during the renovation, how are you going to work with your suppliers and contractors, etc. These of course will be covered by the person who will manage the project. Thus before a renovation project starts, one of the most critical decisions to be made is who will manage the project.

You can either hire a professional who will do the work or alternatively, you can manage the project yourself. If you opt to manage the work yourself, make sure that you have enough experience to deal with this. According to Gail La Grouw, the following are some common mistakes done by owners who have decided to take over the role of managing the renovation project themselves,

1. Poor Planning

Creating a good plan is a important part of your role as a project manager. The success of the project mostly depend on this. Your plan must include as much detail as possible. You have to regard planning for contingencies as well.

2. Poor Materials Management

Purchasing of the right materials at the right time is a large job during renovation. Think about this job properly, as it can be a cause of delay to your schedule. You can also incur additional cost if you do not have your materials at the right time.

3. Poor Record Keeping

Lodge everything particularly matters that have to do with finances. Record keeping must be done everyday. You certainly will miss something in your list if you do it in an inconsistent way. Record keeping will also let you know precisely where you are in terms of time and dollars against the plan specification.

4. Not Managing The Work Site

Most subcontractors are attempting to cut cost by ignoring a number of regulations and workplace safety items. This is a bad thing of course. Make sure that there is a proper insurance for their area of work.

5. Poor Communication

As home owners are not that knowledgeable with terms being used for renovation, miscommunication can occur along the way. Make sure that when you do not understand things, clarify it, but never loose your authority in front of your contractors of course.

6. Poor Change Management Control

All changes made during the renovation process must be documented and sign off.

7. Not Keeping Check of the Budget

Keep an eye with your budget, as most projects will overrun the initial estimate, make sure to add some percentage of your budget for your contingency plans.

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Technology has allowed for us to begin utilizing our computers and televisions in completely various methods than we used them ten years ago, and in numerous instances, even five years ago. Today numerous individuals are utilizing their television screen for their pc screen, so the two truly are interchangeable. This would be an excellent choice for most but numerous wonder how they are going to use their keyboard from throughout the room to do what they require to accomplish.

The great news is that there is a way for you to sit easily across the room from your television or computer monitor and still be able to accomplish every thing you need to do. You can do this with a wireless keyboard lengthy range varieties work best. The long range varieties often come with a lengthy variety wireless mouse, as nicely. That is an excellent choice simply because it will let you do everything that you may need to do throughout the room.

If you are in search of a wireless keyboard lengthy variety, you might wish to consider the IOGear Long Variety Media Center Desktop Keyboard. It is a great option because it’s a secure 2.4GHz wireless keyboard long variety and it furthermore has an operating variety of 33 feet. You are able to take benefit of all of the abilities from the keyboard if you control your multimedia functions using the media center hot keys.

This wireless keyboard long variety is generally sold as a package having a wireless mouse so you get every thing you may need in one purchase. This is the most economical way to go as well as a set that may let you work 33 feet away, which is usually more distance than you could possibly need. If you have been looking for a wireless keyboard that may supply you with all of the functionality of any other keyboard with the benefit of being throughout the room, this is a great keyboard to think about.

The wireless keyboard lengthy range comes in many various formats, but usually they work off of a USB signal. A controller plugs into the USB port and as lengthy as the keyboard can still communicate with the USB port the keyboard will continue to function. If you need to work a distance away from your monitor or television screen, that is a great method to

Want to find out more about wireless keyboard long range, then visit Ray Jenkins’s site on how to choose the best rechargeable wireless keyboard and mouse for your needs.