Logotypes...Establishing Your Brand Image

What image do you present to your community? Is it one that sticks in their mind? Something that is easily recognizable, that can be identified and associated with your business? An image that conjures an emotional response in their minds, whether they've been to your practice or not?

Here's a quiz. See if you can recognize these logos and associate them with their company. It's not hard, but I also want you to think about what emotion this draws out of you...











I bet you even recognize a color as a logo, one that certainly stirs strong emotion...










Your logo is a big piece of your business identity...it helps establish who you are.

Here's some standard hints on what to do to pick a logo that will work:

1. Horizontal is the rule - ideal sizes are 2.25 units horizontal and 1 unit vertical. Why? Your potential customers are seeing it out of their eyes, which are mounted in your head on the horizontal plane. It should be the same shape as a windshield. Vertical logotypes are too difficult to read.
   
2. Must have a legible typeface - if words are what communicate the power of the brand, the typeface used enhances or hinders that power.
3. Who are you trying to attract? - use fonts appropriately. Sans serif typefaces are modern, serif typefaces are old-fashioned, bold connotes masculinity, and light typefaces look feminine.
4. Hire someone to design it for you - you are a master at adjusting and communicating, not in design (most likely!). Meet with a branding strategist to establish your brand properly. They will go through a detailed interview with you to ascertain your vision and then magically will identify several images to create it for you.

Maybe it's time you updated your logo. Is the one you're using now outdated? Is it aligned with the vision you have established?

If so, use these strategies to help your company be more identifiable.

Enjoy!!

Checking Your Commitment...

There are two levels of commitment:

• doing what you know
• doing whatever it takes

What level are you at?

What strategies, projects and tactics do you need to take action on to get the the next one?

Happy trails!

How Much Are You Willing to Gamble?

Read a neat little article in USA Today this morning about Domino's Pizza and the recent changes they've made.

It was a bold move...changing their entire recipe. Promoting it with a huge ad campaign most of you have probably seen. In a sense, the article was right...Domino's bet the farm on this massive change to their company. They took a risk, knowing that their former product was still generating sales for them with costs kept very low, allowing them to operate very efficiently.

But they did the right thing. It's been awhile since I've had Domino's, and I distinctly remember why...it was bad. Really bad.

The change proved successful for them. Quarterly sales up over 14% (especially when the industry fell 3%). When you're dealing with billions in sales, that's incredible. Stockholders were also quite pleased, with stock prices rising over 70%.

The point is that Domino's saw something they could do better, even though they were already doing well (#2 in the industry at $3B in sales in 2009). They created an opportunity to take their business to the next level, and even though there were risks aplenty, doing the right thing prevailed...and paid off. Big difference between doing things right (which they already were), and doing the right thing.

I'm not asking you to bet the farm with your business, I am asking you to create changes that will take your business to the next level.

Stagnation kills many businesses, innovation lifts them to new levels.

What innovation have you implemented in your business lately?

Get going!!

Wasting Time....It Costs You Dearly

Here's a typical office procedure too many get trapped in:

After you finish adjusting your patient, the patient gets off the table, puts their wallet, change, knife, gets their purse,(all their stuff!), etc, back into their pockets, looks in the mirror, checks their hair to make sure hair and face look presentable, gather themselves and leave the room with you accompanying them up to the front desk so that you can tell them and your CA when you want to see them again. You then call for the next patient, waiting for them to put down the magazine (probably not Chiropractic or vitalistic in its scope), gather their belongings they've set down (again the purse, cellphone, etc), wait for them to meet you and you walk them down the hall into the adjusting room, where they again empty their pockets....all over again and again, multiple times per day.

If you estimate the time that process takes between patients to be a VERY conservative two minutes (which it NEVER is!), imagine the amount of wasted time and money it costs you to do that.

Let's say you see 10 patient visits per hour at $50 per visit. $500 per hour you are making, a very nice living. Let's say now that a typical day has you seeing patients like this for 6 hours...a $3,000 day.

Wait a sec though....what could it be??

Remember, you're conservatively spending two minutes between every patient walking them up and down the hall, where really nothing goes on for any specific intent or purpose. That equals 2 hours of wasted time per day. Extrapolate that to money terms and you are missing out on potential revenues of $1000 per day. Further extended, let's say you're working 250 days per year. That equals $250,000 per year of lost revenue. Even more, extend it over the course of your typical 40 year practice career and you just lost $10,000,000.

Doing something as inefficient as walking up and down the hallway.

Time to check your systems for efficiencies...or lack thereof.

Getting rid of low-hanging fruit like this can make a huge difference for your practice and can mean the difference between a retirement of your dreams...or not.

Positioning Chiropractic...We Need a Change

Read another great piece* today from Al Ries and Jack Trout...in it he talks about positioning your business to create massive success for it.

He said for us to position our businesses (and profession I'll add) successfully, we need to answer six key questions. Play along with me and let's start some crucial conversations about these questions in the realm of chiropractic, health care, and our identity.

1. What position do you own? Not in your head, but in the mind of the consumer...how does the consumer position you as part of their health care? For the majority, we are their back pain specialists. Something that needs to be altered for sure...so how do we go about altering that position in their heads? It seems the way we're educating our patients is stuck. By that I mean we are educating them in an allopathic model, wherein we state they have this problem (subluxation) and they need to come to us so the we can correct it. In other words, they have something that we can help them get rid of, not unlike them having an infection and a medical doctor prescribing a drug to get rid of that. It may sting a bit to hear that, but it's exactly what is happening, which in a vitalistically based paradigm, simply does not work. You cannot hold two conflicting paradigms simultaneously. We must change the way we educate our patients about their life, what subluxation is and how chiropractic fits into their regular life schedule.
2. What position do you want to own? Certainly not the allopathic model for treatment of disease. It's archaic and not working for us or for the health of the world. In the US we are spending more, but sicker than ever...the numbers just don't add up. People spend large amounts of money to be healthy, just not sick. They are dropping huge sums on gym memberships, organic foods, clean water, even on a good night's sleep because all of these things have been positioned by the companies involved as getting them healthier. Why isn't maintaining a healthy spine that allows a proper brain-body connection part of that regular consumption?
   
3. Whom must you outgun? The answer is kind of sad....ourselves! We have no direct competition in the vitalistic arena. Substitutes sure; diet, exercise, other forms of "alternative care", but most of those forms of care I contend still have an allopathic slant to them. This is ours for the taking, but settling for bellying-up to the bar with other professions has cost us dearly. We have got such an opportunity for this market, and we're fighting with each other. A friend made a comment yesterday that the "straights" arguse with the "mixers" about how they approach chiropractic, and then the "straights" argue among themselves to fight over who's "straighter." Egads...this activity will never get us anywhere.
   
4. Do you have enough money? It takes money to hold a position, and especially to alter a position in the consumer's mind. It's gotta start grass-level for us, maybe even roots-level. One spine at a time has to become one enhanced life at a time. We don't adjust someone to correct, remove, prevent or minimize subluxation or anything else; we adjust them to restore the neurological connection within their body and the normal flow of Life energy to allow a return of their naturally healthy and vibrant state in order to enhance their life! It's not about minimizing anything; it's about MAXIMIZING health and life. Whether we have lots of money, or very little it all starts with the word. But it's got to be the right words, the right message...
5. Can you stick it out? If there's one thing we're great at, it's this: we love Chiropractic more than anything, we have a Lasting Purpose to give, serve, love and do out of abundance and our level of commitment to take this message to the masses has never been stronger. Our technology has never been so advanced to mass communicate our word in an instant, yet all I see on facebook is the bashing of medicine, vaccines, etc...the stuff we DON'T want. Granted, people need to be aware of these things, but not to the point where we offer them no solutions. We know what we don't want for our patients, are we confident in what we DO want for them?? Have you defined that for yourself and your patients? For your community? Making the switch in messaging is difficult...it's so easy to bash the other side and warn our patients about the devastating effects of medicines and vaccines. But the public grows weary of it...plus they already know! What they're looking for is an entirely new way to think, an entirely new way of looking at their health and life, but very few of us are out there offering it.
   
6. Do you match your position? This is where we are hurting the most I think. We know that Chiropractic care enhances lives, in fact saves lives. Yet our advertising (the 7 conditions we take care of), our educating (outside-in and fear-based) doesn't match our vitalistically based vision. We got off-kilter some time ago, and it's time to lay down some new track. Possibilities based education, helping our patients understand that they don't have something that they need to get rid of, but rather they've lost something that is theirs by rite of birth, and that is something that we can help them get back is the key.
   

Boy, it's a lot of work to do, and will take some time, effort, money and resources that we may not all yet have. But we've got people, and we've got relationships and we've got passion and commitment aplenty. Let's make this change and serve the world...

Who's with us??

*Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Screwing Up...

I was having a chat this morning with a colleague about the mistakes we make in life and how they can detract us from accomplishing the things we set out to do.

It's not so much that they detract us though, it's just the delay they cause in the process of meeting the outcomes we desire. The question isn't whether we're going to screw up or not (we ALWAYS will), but whether you keep screwing up the same thing over and over again.

If you do, you know you're not learning anything from the mistakes you made and aren't growing.

Mitigating the delay in the screwing up process is what you may want to focus on, and it starts with these simple things:

1. Self-awareness - being immediately aware of mistakes and creating change to correct them
   
2. Discovering your strengths and capitalizing on them
3. Surrounding yourself with great people who always call you to something bigger than what you would do on your own
4. Committing your life purpose to something BIG

These will lead to an optimal life of excellence, and who wouldn't want that?

Have a blast today!

Advertising vs. Publicity

Which form of marketing is best to create awareness for your brand? Advertising or publicity?

You may be asking...there's a difference?

Big difference...one that could make your business explode with committed followers excited to build it for you.

Simplified, advertising is a form of mass communication efforts designed to create awareness for your product or service in an effort to convince the consumer to purchase said product or service. It says "this is what we do and here's how it will benefit your life" all in 30 seconds on TV/radio or less as you're paging through a magazine. In a sense, it's throwing your service out there to as many people as possible and hoping there's some stickiness to it. In my opinion, a rather outside-in approach...fairly random, usually very expensive with returns that are hit or miss.

Publicity, on the other hand, is usually more focused, more inside out...targeted messages that are usually inexpensive, stickier and are farther reaching in establishing your brand identity. Publicity usually shows up as TV news interviews, op-ed pieces in the newspaper, articles done on your business for magazines and newspapers, testimonials given on your facebook, website, in public gatherings, in house and external presentations, etc.

Big businesses have been built by focusing almost exclusively on publicity over advertising. Starbucks, especially during its massive phase of growth, spent very little on advertising (only about $10M over 10 years) and The Body Shop, started by Anita Roddick, who spent years criss-crossing the country, promoting her natural products through TV interviews and newspaper articles. Wal-Mart and Sam's Club devote very little of their expenses to advertising, yet may be the first company to reach over a trillion dollars in revenues.

To me, publicity is more of a call to action, it's the story behind the service you're providing. It establishes you as the leader of a revolution in health. It's intriguing, and if done right, downright captivating.

And who has a better story for humanity than we do?

Go out and tell it.