Brand Development is about more than the brand name. Otherwise, you’d be able to buy your way to the top by gluing yourself to an extant famous name. Tell that to the guys trying to sell Polaroid televisions. You’ll find them underneath the smouldering pile of defective sets.

Instead, brand development has to be a holistic process– you can bring in some purchased or inherited imagery or naming, but you’re probably going to have to put the effort into it to make sure it all speaks the same language. Are you trying to position yourself as a premium product, but your box design still resembles unbranded merchandise grabbed off Alibaba with your logo pasted in the corner? Fail. Built a gorgeous product, but your website looks like an unstyled 2006 X-Cart install? Fail. Search for your brand clogged with eBay sellers dumping its prior incarnation at 6 cents on the dollar? Fail. It’s worth the cost and effort to roll out all the branding components at once, ensuring you aren’t fighting against the work you did before.

Even once you’ve built a solid brand, it’s a constant battle to retain your territory. The accessibility of the web and the reach of social media have made any angry customer incredibly dangerous. Remember “United Breaks Guitars?” While the best strategy is, of course, to satisfy your customers reliably, you also need a bulletproof search profile– making sure that negative reviews are hidden well below the patience of a typical searching customer.

The good news is that there’s frequently plenty of room for entry. Customers frequently shop on the “negative”– “I don’t want another Brand A, it failed on me”– so a whole-new brand can enter the market without a lot of inherited baggage. The trick is to make sure you don’t show up with fresh baggage, and a solid brand-development plan is the key to that.

Whenever you do a specific search for a product or service in a location on Google, you will notice a list of local businesses in that area next to a map. Ever wonder that is, and how to get your business on that list? That is Google Places, the next best thing to help your business succeed.

Google Places pretty much acts as an online yellow pages account for your business, combined with a personalized web page. Customers can visit this page to find out all kinds of information about your business, from basic contact information, to YouTube videos, reviews, photos, and more. This little known area of Google is essential for local businesses looking to create that extra edge.

Let’s say you are looking for something specific, say “pizza in Chicago”, or “Chicago pizza”. The first page you see an alphabetized list of local restaurants in Chicago offering pizza on their menus. These businesses have Google Places accounts, allowing them to easily make first page search engine results on Google. See the potential in this? Web-Op specializes in managing your Google Places account for your business, allowing your customers to keep up to date on your information and allowing for no missed opportunities in rankings to go unnoticed.

To learn more about Google Places and Web-Op services in this area, please refer to http://web-op.com/google-places.php.

Tom Brady and a host of NFL players team up to build an amazing line of athletic performance nutritional products. The online store is www.6degreenutrition.com. Visit the site and try the two newly introduced products.

Working with Tom Brady opened a door for Web-Op that allowed us to grow our partnership, adding another tremendous product in Sejaa Pure Skincare. Sejaa is owned by Tom’s wife Gisele Bundchen. You couldn’t ask for a better partner in Gisele Bundchen, her stunning visual presence on the site coupled with tremendous design from our team, produced an immaculate site. And what a great product in Sejaa, all the women in my life absolutely love it and it has been incorporated into their daily skincare routines. It’s also an environmentally friendly product as well, a win/win. Absolutely thrilled to be working with Gisele Bundchen and everyone at Sejaa Pure Skin Care. We couldn’t be more excited for our official launch coming September 1st. www.shopsejaa.com

We are extremely excited about about Web-Op’s new relationship developed with Tom Brady and all those involved with his company, MyoNatural Pain Cream. It is truly an unbelievable product and equally unbelievable partner we have in Tom Brady, owner of MyoNatural. Tom recently did a photoshoot for our site and we were fortunate to capture some great live action shots, and really had a great impact on the look of the site. Our design team did an unbelievable job and those live action shots Tom supplied us with put it over the top. One of the first things I wanted to know when this opportunity was presented to Web-Op was does it work? Let me tell you I cycle every day and have done so for years, this stuff works!

The first thing I thought was that this product was a souped up version of icy hot, I couldn’t have been more wrong. It uses a unique blend of homeopathic ingredients that don’t cover up pain, but treats it and relieves it for hours and hours. Again I just want to reiterate how great it is to be working with Tom Brady and all those involved with MyoNatural Pain Cream, we are all thrilled at the official site launch on September 1st.

www.naturalpaincream.com

We can’t wait for this one to kick off. Web-Op is getting into the escrow services business. We purchased the domain www.escrowit.com. It’s not live yet but we’ve started the design process and have hired some great writers to help get some content started for the site. Keep an eye this one.

www.businesslians123.com is a site we have started that we offer loans to small businesses. We will be giving loans between the amounts of $1,500.00 and $150,000.00 to qualified businesses. Most of these loans are offered to companies w existing merchant accounts that we we can lean. During this rough economy we are expecting to loan small businesses millions of needed dollars to update and expand their companies. Go to the site and check it out.

It was great visiting with Dave today in Salt Lake. We are close to celebrating our second year of www.l-arginine.com. We have reached millions of dollars in annual sales and an amazing partnership.

Went to Snowflake this morning to deliver a truckload of new office furniture and computers. We have been expanding about a truckload of office furniture and equipment a year. I guess it’s not a startup anymore.

We hit a snowstorm during the trip. Glad to be back in the sunshine.

“Skate where the puck is going”

In the obnoxious sports cliche industry, everyone knows to try to target your business based on future trends, instead of past results.

Strangely, this seems to be a very rare occurence in business, especially the web business sector. Instead, there seems to be a lot of thinking along the lines of “skate to where someone else has already captured the puck and hope you can flail at him enough to release it and claim it”. The hundred Instagram clones, the fifteen million local sites which do exactly what Yelp does except without the user base, the penny auction sites which figured “well, Swoopo did well” (until they went broke).

The fact is, trying to cling to a “borrowed” business model often fails for two reasons:
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