Greenfield/Belser has released its 2009 annual review, A New Brand World, which includes the stories of nine courageous firms who used 2009 to define and roll out brands for the times.

If you’re not on our mailing list, email our marketing team at gbmarketing@gbltd.com or call us at 202.775.0333 to get your copy.

If you’d like a digital copy, you can download it here.

Our latest webinar, “Finding and Choosing Professionals on the Web,” is now available in segments on YouTube.

Gather the facts behind executive-level usage of the Internet as a tool to find information and inform choices about professional services providers. This seminar presents Greenfield/Belser’s and The Brand Research Company’s recently completed findings drawn from an online survey of executive-level buyers of accounting, consulting and legal services across the U.S. It covers how, where and what they search for online as they consider firms like yours.

Burkey Belser and Sue Stock Allison shared these primary research results and insights about how to adapt your website and digital strategies to align with buyer habits.

Join us this Wednesday at 2 p.m. EST for the next webinar in our three part series, “Designing the Interactive Experience.” Reserve your webinar seat at: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/927177267

Join us for our next Webinar:

Designing the Interactive Experience

Wednesday, February 24; 2:00–3:00 PM EST

Join Burkey Belser and Gayatri Bhalla on February 24th at 2 PM for the next Webinar in our series. All delivered in 60-minutes on your own desktop.

You will learn:

• How to create an effective, SEO-friendly Web site.
• And more.

Register Now! Reserve your Webinar seat at: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/927177267

There are three legs to getting found in today’s market:

• A clear brand message
• A Web site that’s differentiated from your competitors, and
• An online Web strategy that promotes search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the first leg of an effective online Web strategy, but SEO is a black box to most Web site owners. And guess what? We’re going to teach you just enough to make you dangerous because, frankly, you don’t need to know all of the ins and outs of optimization. You don’t want to know how sausage is made either.

Black hats and white hats
The rise of search is wonderfully chronicled in the book by the same name, The Search, by John Battelle, one of the original founders of Wired magazine. No one, except Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, had any idea that getting found on the Internet would either be so important or so challenging to businesses. Yet search has become a multi-billion dollar business. And it is vitally important to your business.

But that’s enough on the history of search. Read the book. What we want you to know is how to get found. In the short history of search, individuals have tried to game the system in order to beat Google’s famous algorithm for delivering search results. One of the first tactics Google gamers used was hidden keywords embedded in the site (think “white on white”) to trick search engines into ranking the site higher. As these tactics proliferated, Google fought back by banning sites that employed these “black hat” techniques from search results altogether.

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Lately—well, in the last 20 years or so—we’ve noticed many of the brands we’ve created go astray. All the money, time and effort spent in creating the brand is forgotten, as the brand grows older. Recently—well, in the last year or so—we’ve determined to take a close look at this drift in order to help our clients sustain their brands.

Our entire creative team (strategy and design) sat down to review two or three brands we developed with clients recently. We spread out the creative work in front of us as well as on a nearby monitor. Then, in each case, we promptly disagreed on many details that constituted the “brand.” As the meeting wore on, some light bulbs went on, such as…

Insight #1. Newborn brands share a lot in common with babies.
As brand strategists and designers we believe we know what we have created but, if our brand review was helpful at all, we learned that the only thing we’d created was a baby. We had no fully-formed notion of what the brand would look like when it was six years old, much less a teenager.

Don’t get me wrong. A baby is a miracle but requires lots of care and feeding to help realize its potential. Sure, a brand has your firm’s eyes and complexion, but there’s more unknown than known. So we realized job one is to take lots of pictures. Literally, spread everything out and create a baby album. See what the brand looks like from every conceivable angle. Analyze the font usage, the relative white space, the type of imagery used. Tickle the color palette. Listen to the voice.

And finally, see if it has five toes on each foot. A newborn brand has everything implied in its early shape and form but not every detail has been worked out. For example, imagine the as-yet uncreated small-space charitable ad. How will that future creative application reflect the brand? Your PowerPoint might have the right logo in the corner but does the overall presentation reflect the brand?

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