One must contemplate the distinction between branding and rebranding. Rebranding is often miscast as an exercise in repairing one’s reputation. Some rebranding efforts focus on mitigating a negative image (such as Philip Morris’s name change to Altria or AIG’s move of their advisory business to Sagepoint). Yet rebranding may also represent subtle changes in positioning, or the recasting of visual identify, such as Starbucks recent move to a more contemporary look.

If you’re thinking about rebranding your company, bear in the mind the following considerations:

Seek out simplification-Today’s rebranding efforts are often a function of providing clarity to the marketplace and removing brand confusion. Citi’s recent rebranding removed a single word (if the word bank is in your name, it may not be a bad idea to remove it). Our cluttered market values simplicity.

Leverage Social Media from the ground up- Within our firm, we recently rebuilt our website, refreshed our brand, and printed new business cards (including a QR code). All of our marketing includes embedded social media components, with the intent of driving traffic to our website where prospects can experience various multimedia tools that are featured online.

Use emotional triggers-Google famous Parisian Love ad (when an American finds love in Paris) is a classic example of using emotional messaging to capture the imagination of your audience. All marketing should utilize emotional triggers.

Enter new markets- Pabst Blue Ribbon, perceived as an also-ran in the U.S. rebranded in China as an ultra-premium American lager (PBR) and is selling for upwards of $44 a bottle (the Chinese may not have everything figured out).

Reshape perceptions about quality-Rebranding should not appear cosmetic or contrived. Harley Davidson’s slide in perceived quality in the 80’s was magnified by stiff competition from Japanese competitors.  The company’s drastic repositioning included a return to its core products and the formation of the Harley Owners Group (HOG’s),  which reestablished Harley a bad boy brand.

Identify unmet needs- Your offer may need to change as the utility of your product or the benefits that differentiate it may shift over time.  Marketers will often use a tag line when they wish to preserve their brand equity, and point out new features or benefits.

Use professionals- Rebranding can back fire when companies draw attention to their marketing.  Many smaller companies try to utilize self service template web sites and similar home grown tools that come off as……home grown. Marketing requires constant investment. Hire people who can assist you with both messaging and technology.

Understand the hard and soft costs- Change can be expensive, given the need to reprint, re-sign, change email addresses, etc. Consider all your hard and soft costs (including management team band) with as you refresh your brand.

Organizations often under appreciate the importance of branding. In this world of hyper-competition, the way you communicate the nuances of your brand are more important than ever.

You would have to be living under a rock not to have heard about the grass roots effort to capture Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda.  A video posted on You Tube this week went viral, with over 56 Million hits (as of this writing.) In my case, my 15 year old daughter pleaded with me to turn off 60 Minutes to watch it; providing a stunning commentary on our movement to new forms of media.

The video, shot by a little known videographer is being promoted by the advocacy group “Invisible Children” and tells the story of a Ugandan child and others like him, who have been the victims of horrific crimes against humanity.

While the story and cause is compelling, it is the story telling that should capture our attention.  The 30-minute video is presented like a short, part documentary part sensationalism. The themes of children killing their own parents and mutilating others are shocking and captivating.

All marketers should become aware of this medium. The movie blurs the line between amateur videos on You Tube and professionally produced movies. Companies often attempt to tell their story through static documents that lack color and texture.  Those of us who are on the wrong side of aging must recognize that  those who we market to no longer process information in the form of static text. We have been conditioned to view our news, our sports and our marketing offers in multimedia form.  The marketing of the future will include many dimensions, including video, sound, and info-graphics launched online, rated by others and spread through sites that have not even been built yet.  Media will be in constant flux, with new views, tidbits and vignettes wetting our appetite for real time information.

The other thing unique about the video is its call to action; setting a very clear goal to capture Kony in 2012. If you think that this is just another cause being thumped by a set of leftist activists, think again. The U.S. military has dispatched 100 Special Forces “advisors” to Uganda in an attempt to find Kony, and senior U.S. officials are scrambling to harness the populism of the video.

As the video proclaims “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” View it here

Globalization has enabled unprecedented hyper-competition, and all types of dynamic comparative pricing models. Yet pricing within many segments of our economy appear like something from the The Stone Age.

If you go into a white tablecloth restaurant and order the sea bass on a Wednesday, you might pay $30.  If you return to the same restaurant on a Saturday the price would be the same, even though demand in the restaurant is likely to be very different.  Eateries price on the cost plus model built in the industrial age; the price is based on some multiple of raw materials (or labor).

Our economy doesn’t work this way anymore.  Consider the market for sports tickets. Sports franchises (the Lakers for example) set the initial price for a ticket. But the market resets the price in real time based on supply and demand. If it is a Tuesday night game against the Raptors, a seat may command a few dollars more than the face value.  A Sunday game against the Celtics could command double that within a market being energized by the likes of Stubhub and other online exchanges.

Variable pricing based on nuanced supply and demand is the future, and it is the present.  Marriott has historically been the most profitable hospitality company, as its revenue per available room (the industry benchmark) often exceeds that of rivals. In the case of hotel rooms (or airfares), business-to-consumer pricing models can shift daily based on numerous variables such as weather, events, or the calendar.  Like it or not, exchanges that provide comparative prices are proliferating, in both B2C and B2B.

I am not advocating the companies participate in such portals: they the fastest way to commoditize an industry. What I am saying is that the acceptance of such tools points out a broader problem (or opportunity), that markets re-price based on real demand, not arbitrary prices set by the seller.

Businesses, including those that market products and services business-to-business will need to be more analytical about which products and services could and should command higher prices and which will command less.  To set up a fixed pricing schedule seems overly convenient in a world where buyers have far more sensitivity over some purchases than others.  A software developer may need to sell a project at a low cost to win the business, but could charge far more (on an hourly basis) for change orders that are not foreseen by the client.

Most small and mid-market companies have not done enough research to understand the relationships between the products and services they sell.  If an accounting practice sells tax work and audit services, how should they price one against the other and what is the likelihood that clients will gravitate to them as a result of their pricing model or other variables? I think few really know.

Companies should test various pricing strategies to see what works best, and be more purposeful about tweaking pricing to reflect current demand.

There are many ingredients required to develop and execute a successful strategy; none more important than discipline. Disruptive innovations that reshape an industry are rare. Most innovation is incremental, and successful execution is a function of hard work, time and patience.

Jeff Bezos’s insight about selling books online (which resulted in the formation of Amazon) was conceived while he worked as an analyst at an investment bank. His conversion of strategy into tactics will go down in history, as Amazon took on all the best in retailing, seemingly overnight.

Bezos remains hungry and focused. Amazon’s top 5 managers meet every Tuesday for four hours to review and rebake strategy. Not once a year, not once a quarter – every Tuesday. Twice a year his team has a two day off-site to think about “big ideas” that may require 2-3 years to implement.

Alan Kay once said, “Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”  Where the rubber meets the road in strategy is maintaining the right perspective – the intersection of strategic thinking and tactical execution.  Business owners can easily lose perspective when they spend too much time muddled in solving day to day operational problems.

To maintain strategic discipline:

Create a strategy committee, task force or executive management team (EMT).

Each member should have a role in strategy formation and implementation and be accountable for key initiatives of the company. Meet with the EMT monthly to review progress versus goals.

Engage mid-management in strategy formation and execution

Mid-managers are often insightful in identifying latent needs as they are often closer to the customer than their senior counterparts.  Many entrepreneurial companies lack management depth. They are well served to include mid-managers in executing strategy.  Provide learning opportunities for junior managers by delegating tasks for them to complete.

Hold your teams accountable

Results oriented organizations are built from the ground up to support execution, rigorously using scorecards that drill down to individual performance. Best-in-class organizations orchestrate goal setting for individuals that align with the broader goals of the organizations.

Include outside variables in your dashboard

While most successful companies measure internal activities, few score external variables. Seek out external metrics that may be predictive of future demand. Leverage the data to plan capacity, labor, facility expansion, procurement of equipment, etc.

Bezos said, “We are willing to plant seeds and wait a long time for them to turn into trees. Every new business we’ve ever engaged in has initially been seen as a distraction by people externally and sometimes even internally.”

Great strategies convert into initiatives that become the unifying vision of the strategically successful organization. Ideas that lack resources, energy and concentration are just a distraction.

I believe this is a defining moment in our history. Our nation is in a fight for its soul. What kind of country do we want to be? I think we are the nation that takes care of its own.

Twelve percent of the 240,000 American veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are unemployed. Thirty percent of those under 24 are jobless, double the national average [i].  This is a national tragedy of epic proportions and those reading this post are the ones who can do something about it.

We can’t begin to repay veterans for the years they served for the country, the friends and family they have lost, or the sleep lost over the horrors of war.

But we can give them a chance to have a life when they come home.

Every company in America who is hiring should put veterans at the front of the line.

Hiring a veteran is a gift, not for them (they have earned the right to work) but for us. We should hire them because:

• Veterans make great employees: loyal, trustworthy, disciplined, hard working and tough.

• The Hire Heroes Act of 2011, passed last month (517-0 in Congress) provides up to $5,600 in tax credits to employers who hire a veteran

• Veterans provide inspiration to other employees, and send a message about what kind of employer you want to be

• Hiring war heroes helps drive home corporate values and messaging that resonates with customers, investors , vendors and the communities we serve

• Veterans are capable, many having mastered transferable technical skills

As the last American soldiers return from Iraq this week, we should take pause. As we celebrate our family, friends and faith, we should be thinking about those who have sacrificed so much, and have been received so little.

Most of us entrepreneurs have been the benefactors of American freedom, and it is time for us to show our appreciation.

Below are a set of resources for searching for qualified veterans:

http://www.vetjobs.com/

http://www.militaryhire.com/?gclid=CMT4ksjyia0CFQg1hwodswjGmg

http://www.hireveterans.com/

http://blogs.payscale.com/compensation/2010/01/tips-for-employers-hiring-veterans.html

Whenever they call a day “black”, you know something bad is going to happen. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, I wanted to vomit. Not because I ate too much, but because of the destruction done to the U.S. economy. As a purveyor of value creation, I find Black Friday repugnant. Even if you are not a retailer, there are lessons here for all of those fighting off commoditization.

U.S. retailing used to be the Pareto Principle in action, with as much as 75%-80% of profits being realized in the 4^th quarter. The holiday season has turned into a race of who can open the earliest, and sell the cheapest flat screen TV (you could have bought a 42 inch flat screen at Best Buy for $199).

Last year I was talking to a corporate Vice President who was quite happy with herself after doing all of her Christmas shopping on a single day (I believe 4 AM is still the middle of the night if you want to get technical). I asked her, “how many items did you buy”, “17” she said. “How many were on sale” I asked- “17” she replied.  The defense rests.

Retailers work on “blended margin”, the ability to attract customers with lower priced goods, only to flip them to higher margin products.  In grocery stores, staples such as milk which are very low margin are at the back of the store, and higher margin produce and deli at the front in the “traffic pattern”.  Black Friday represents the destruction of 100 years of merchandising evolution, and creates a frenzy of deep discounts (one shopper in Porter Ranch, CA used pepper spray on another over an Xbox).

Some may argue that the “strategy” is to win shoppers for future trips and control market share. That may work for the low price leader (WalMart), but it doesn’t work for other retailers and boutiques. Those are the retailers trying to train their customers to realize the value of their service, knowledge, and unique offerings, and may only have one or two shots at the buying crazed mother with three kids.

Here is the single most important and basic business principle one could ever communicate in a business blog: prices should be high when demand is high, and prices low when demand is low. The destruction of the industry is inevitable if retailers continue to discount the deepest when demand is high. The shame, the shame!

Here is a prime illustration of how deeply this perverse thinking has infiltrated the industry. Recently I was shopping at Macy’s, selected a garment and brought it to the register, clearly marked with the price I was willing to pay. The cashier pulls out a coupon and says, I can give you another 25% off.  The defense moves for an immediate verdict your honor.

Defenders will say that the competition made me do it. What competition? China, WalMart, Best Buy? The true answer is Amazon and other online retailers who have changed the game forever, and this year kicked in free shipping to make their offer more compelling (online purchases are predicted to rise another 17% this year). So the real problem is not some evil empire. We have seen the enemy and it is us.

In order to fend off deep discounting:

1. Find products that can co-exist with online purchases. How can your products compliment the deeply discounted products? An iPad offers very little margin to the retailer, but accessories such as head phones and adapters are very high margin and offer the opportunity for repeat business.
2. Reinvent your model so that you are purposeful in selling complimentary goods. If you are going to sell them a gun at cost, you had better have the staff, expertise, merchandising and inventory to sell them some bullets as well.
3. Teach your employees the profit formula. Most of your employees think you are making a ton of margin on those handguns, so you need to teach and incent based on your objective of selling more ammo (I would have picked a more pleasant example but I am feeling like a curmudgeon after all of this discounting).
4. Provide the ultimate in-store experience that rivals or beats the online experience. Perhaps customers can see, touch and feel products that are shipped to them later, or to their loved ones.
5. Select targets (product, location, etc.) that are less vulnerable to price attacks from discounters and online retailers.

Let the treasure hunters go to the competition; they are the least loyal of shoppers and you can’t make any money selling to them anyway.

With the sluggish selling season will be plenty of opportunities for deep discounts. Deep discounting marginalizes a business (unless you are the low cost leader). Retailers may need to offer products at cost, but should do so with a clear pricing strategy built on balancing market share and profit.