Greasebusters Franchise launches new site

Among my many blessings, I am particularly grateful for long-time customers like Monika Palmore at Greasebusters. This Rockville, MD-based commercial kitchen cleaning and fire prevention firm hired Julie & Company over a decade ago to create a new brand and website. Since that time, Greasebusters has grown like gangbusters. If you've visited a national chain like McDonalds, TGIFridays, or Bob Evans, Greasebusters has probably cleaned that kitchen exhaust system. The company also works with privately owned restaurants, government facilities, hospitals, and other commercial eating establishments, too.

Since I redesigned the corporate site a couple of years ago, the company has expanded even further. Greasebusters now offers a full-fledged franchising program throughout the United States. The program's new website, GreasebustersFranchise.com, launched this morning. Targeted to potential franchisees, the site provides information about the Greasebusters brand, corporate history and values, the franchise program, and available territories. Greasebusters now offers franchises in every state and in Vancouver, Canada, too.

I designed the new website to be responsive, which means that the site automatically displays optimally for the device on which its being displayed. The image below shows how it displays on a desktop computer. 

But on an iPhone, the website reconstitutes optimally for a smaller screen size.

I also designed the site for the WordPress content management system which allows authorized staff members to make changes from any web browser and improves search engine placement. 

If you know people who are looking to be their own boss, have them check out GreasebustersFranchise.com. Or for business owners who need superlative branding and website design, visit www.julieandcompany.com or call 301-330-9353.

Case Study: Absolute Pressure Washers

Since 1989, Absolute Pressure Cleaning Equipment has provided a variety of high pressure cleaning equipment, accessories, cleaning detergents and supplies for professional industrial and commercial cleaning companies.

The BEFORE Website

The Problem

Absolute spent several years working with ineffective and unprofessional web design companies. The company's most recent website:

• Offered incredibly ineffective branding that made the company look like a provider of pressure washing services rather than a distributor of professional cleaning equipment
• Made the company indistinguishable from its competitors
• Relied on the look and feel of John Deere, the farm equipment company, further confusing potential customers

The AFTER Website

The Solution, by Julie & Company

After losing both time and money, Absolute hired Julie & Company to to build a compelling branding and web presence. Julie & Company:

• Created a new logo that rebranded Absolute and set it apart from its competition
• Focused on the company’s commitment to selling US-manufactured  products 
• Provided detailed pages that feature the company’s equipment, accessories, and detergents
• Added a branded shopping cart
• Delivered visually interesting experience for potential customers

The Client Says

Over the past four years, Absolute has worked with a number of web companies who just could not get the job done. Our owner is hard to please, but these companies did a terrible job, too.  Julie & Company, as per usual, did a spectacular job with the branding and website – our owner is 100 percent happy, which I hope you take as a HUGE compliment because it is.

- Shawn Mahaney

Contact Julie & Company to learn more about what we can do for your company. Call 301-330-9353 or info@julieandcompany.com.

New websites! Susan Coll and Opulent Beverages

I launched two new websites this week!

Susan Coll, the best-selling author of books like Beach Week, Acceptance, and Rockville Pike, is publishing her latest book, The Stager, this spring. It's a comedy of rabbits and real estate in the D.C. suburbs. As the book description on Amazon states, "Questions of friendship, loyalty, fidelity, sobriety, and sanity are raised to hilarious effect in this dark comedy of how we live now in the age of planned communities, cookie-cutter mansions, and cutthroat careerism." Sounds like the burbs to me.

I've worked with Susan for years. I met her during a book club discussion of Rockville Pike and built her first website soon after. With the release of each of her new books, I update the site. This time, I moved her website to the WordPress content management system and freshened up the look and feel. "This is a fabulous web site. Truly, you did a fantastic job! Thank you so much," she wrote this morning.

Also new this week is new branding and website for Opulent Beverages, a relatively new drink distributor based in the MidAtlantic. Opulent's product lines include several high-end waters, fruit juices, and health drinks. I had a ball developing the brand with the president, Tonya Davis. I wanted to give her a fresh, retro, and classic look that would set her apart from her competition.

Tonya is happy, as evidenced by her most recent message: "The website looks great!  Color, contrast, font sizes and space all work together, creating a polished look." In the near future, I hope to add e-commerce to the site as well as a separate login area for her wholesale customers.

New! PlateSafe Locks branding & website

Today I'm proud to announce the launch of our latest new branding and website, PlateSafe Locks, a new security device created by one of our favorite clients, Shawn Mahaney of RestoreATag. Shawn, literally the world's best antique license plate restorer, developed these U.S. patented, tamper-resistant locks to address the growing problem of license plate theft, which has risen by an astounding 36 percent in the United States.

PlateSafe Locks can be used on any vehicle, including antiques. They are also useful around the home, at work, or in any commercial application where items are secured by mounting screws or bolts.

PlateSafe Locks are sold online at www.platesafelocks.com and www.sears.com and will be available in other retail outlets soon.

Shawn has made RestoreATag such a tremendous success. I look forward to seeing his PlateSafe Locks in auto parts and home improvement stores across the country. 

Congratulations, Shawn, and thanks for your business!

New! Branding and web design for LeadYourPack.com

Is there anything I love more than dogs? No. I love dogs more than anything, especially my dog, Moose. He's the love of my life (and that doesn't take anything away from my boyfriend, btw).

When Dr. Susie Homire contacted me about branding and web design for her dog behavior consulting company, Lead Your Pack, I was delighted. Finally! A chance to work with dogs. Creating her logo and look and feel were truly an act of love. In fact, that was the goal: show that love of all canines is at the heart of Susie's work.

Frustrated and frightened dog owners come to Susie looking for strategies to relieve their dogs' aggression toward other people or dogs, fear, home destruction, and more. Susie works closely with the owners to develop the just-right solutions to their dogs' particular issues. She teaches them to lead their pack with confidence, love, and understanding, whether they have one dog or 10.

I was happy to sneak a pug in this design - it's not my pug, but it's the next best thing. And he's yawning no less - my dog spends a third of his life yawning, a third sleeping, and a third begging for food. Maybe I ought to call Susie Homire. :-)

Prince William ceases and desists using its new logo, drawing board ahead

From the Washington Post, June 6, 2013, by Tom Jackman

Prince William County’s new two-blue-square logo is being pulled down from county letterhead and signs, county clothes and county vehicles after the Board of Supervisors decided Tuesday it wasn’t ready for prime time, yet. Supervisor John Jenkins (D-Neabsco) said the public hadn’t had a chance to weigh in on the logo, and “I didn’t want to see us bring some kind of logo out here that had no meaning to the people of Prince William County.”

Supervisor Peter Candland (R-Gainesville) said the logo should articulate the identity of the county, not just be a symbol. “This logo was meant to mean something,” Candland said.

So the board, in addition to issuing a “cease, desist and rescind” directive to county staff, ordered up a work session for July 16, to decide the next step in rebranding the county.

County communications director Jason Grant said the logo was developed as part of a process to unify Prince William’s marketing approach. A design firm in Michigan, familiar to Prince William economic development official Brent Heavner who previously worked in Michigan, was enlisted to come up with a design, and agreed to do it for $750, Grant said. Board members wondered Tuesday why a local company couldn’t have been involved.

Grant said the design was shown to all the supervisors except Jenkins, and that most approved. But Jenkins felt the board should have voted on it and allowed the public to participate in the process. He was surprised to see it starting to turn up all over the county without a board vote or a public hearing. “The approval process,” Jenkins said, “just bothers the dickens out of me.”

Jenkins’ directive to suspend use of the logo was based in part on the public’s “overall dislike for the design of the proposed logo.” As proof, he cited a Washington Post online poll from these very environs, where 70 percent of the 400-plus respondents voted, “It’s bad. Start over.” Seventeen percent voted, “It’s OK,” and 13 percent voted for, “I like it. It’s a keeper.”

Candland said the mission of the logo was to represent Prince William County to the world.
“We spent $750,” Candland said, “to develop a logo that represents hopefully hundreds of millions of dollars in Prince William County. I think we’re selling ourselves short.”

Candland said county uniforms were being changed, county decals were being changed, and this was “a much broader change than was ever portrayed to me.” The logo was intended to replace individual agency logos with one county-wide logo. “I don’t think the logo was properly vetted,” Candland said. “For a Michigan firm to develop the face of our economic development department is troubling to me.”

Ax the acronyms!

When it comes to company names, I am adamant: NO acronyms. Why? Because they are impossible to remember and impossible to brand.

Maybe I'm more sensitive to this problem because I grew up in the Washington area which is awash in acronyms. Over 140,000 people here work for Federal agencies, - DoD, CIA, FBI, FDA, FEMA, etc. - so many that George Washington University has put together a glossary! These agencies compound the problem by creating more and more acronyms within their organizations. Life is just one big can of alphabet soup. 

So if you're choosing a corporate or product name, skip the acronym. No one will remember which three letters you've chosen. Ever. Is it MBA  or MAB or AMB? Only the business owner knows for sure.

Another reason to avoid acronyms? Other organizations already have your three letters no matter which three letters they are. For example, take ATG. A quick Google search shows that ATG stands for:

ATG Stores Oracle's Art Technology Group ATG Rehab Advanced Techology Group Applied Technology Group ATG Credit

ATG E-Commerce Platform ATG Electronics ATG Records Attorney's Title Guaranty Fund Attorney General of Washington State And so on

This makes ATG - or any other acronym - impossible to brand. Branding is all about uniqueness. If your company name is the same as a gazillion other companies' names, you're not unique - and your company is difficult if not impossible to brand.

So do the right thing: ax the acronyms!

Tiger Woods Disappears From Accenture Web Site; Ads Pulled

Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Accenture Plc, the consulting company that built its marketing around Tiger Woods, removed him from its Web site yesterday. It also pulled print ads featuring the golfer, said a person with knowledge of the matter.

An image of Woods among cactuses, rotating this week on Accenture’s main page along with photographs of a skier and skaters, was no longer on display last night. Its sponsorship page excluded any mention of Woods and a search of the site for his name returned no results. Accenture pulled ads from more than one publication, said the person, who declined to name them and sought anonymity because the decision isn’t public.

Read the rest of the article

Accent on Embarrassing

This morning, a client asked for me to look at the Accenture website. I was shocked by what I found: Tiger Woods (or his body double?), lost in the cacti, confused and trapped. Meanwhile, beneath this pathetic image, the company's Twitter scroll features this particularly harrowing phrase: Failure to learn from mistakes. The irony! During the week Tiger Woods is found out to be at best a sex addict, Accenture shows him literally lost in the weeds - and even worse - lost in Accenture's weeds.

Aghast, I continued to read the Twitter scroll and discovered another ironic message, especially given that I am writing about the company's marketing missteps this morning:

Just shut up and listen? You no longer control the conversation about your company.

LOL! No kidding!

Throwing away that damaged umbrella (brand)

From today's Washington Post (see below), we read of General Motors' unprecedented dumping of its (previously invaluable) corporate brand. Instead, the company will focus solely on building individual vehicle brands.

What a smart move. All the American car brands - with the exception of perhaps Ford - are black and blue after taking billions in stimulus dollars from the Red, White, and Blue. It will be years - even decades? - before these companies recover their business and their good names.

I applaud the wise GM marketing pros who made the wise decision to fold up the umbrella brand and wait until the rain has passed.


GM to Remove Its Logo From Cars, Stress Brands

By Kimberly S. Johnson
Associated Press
Wednesday, August 26, 2009

DETROIT, Aug. 25 -- General Motors will begin removing its "Mark of Excellence" logo from vehicles as the company places greater emphasis on its individual brands.

GM spokesman Terry Rhadigan said Tuesday that the company would phase out the placement of the GM logo on its cars and trucks, leaving just the GMC, Chevrolet, Cadillac or Buick logos on the vehicles.


"We really want to elevate the prominence of our four core brands," he said. GM is discontinuing or selling four brands: Hummer, Saab, Pontiac and Saturn.

The final decision to remove the silver square logo was made earlier this month, although executives had mentioned the possibility of such a move months ago. The company found that consumers had a greater affinity for GM's individual brands than the corporate name.

"What we're seeing is the GM brand gets dinged big-time in terms of considering a GM vehicle," Mike DiGiovanni, GM's executive director of global market and industry analysis, said during a monthly sales conference call in April. "But when you look at Chevrolet, Cadillac and our other brands, they haven't changed." The company began putting the logos on all its vehicles in North America in 2005.

Rhadigan said removing the logo -- which is generally placed on the lower section of the door panel -- will be more difficult on some models than on others. On vehicles where a specific indentation is made in the sheet metal for the logo, phasing it out will take longer. On models such as the Camaro or Equinox, removal is easier and will begin immediately, Rhadigan said.

Taking the logos off the vehicles will save GM a "nominal" amount of money, Rhadigan said.

An unstimulating logo

From today's CapitalBeat:

Taking a Play From FDR, Obama Announces New Logo For Stimulus Projects

By Paul Sherman

Taking a play from the New Deal, President Obama announced on Tuesday that projects funded by the $787 billion stimulus plan will be marked with a special emblem (see logo on right from ABC News). "When you see them on projects that your tax dollars made possible, let it be a reminder that our government — your government — is doing its part to put the economy back on the road of recovery," said Obama during a speech before the Department of Transportation.

In 1933, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt passed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) and created the blue eagle logo (see below) that became ubiquitous in shops throughout the country. The NRA aimed to set a floor for wages and prices. The Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court 1935.

*********************************************************
My take? The new logo sucks. Here's why:

• It looks clip art-y.


• It's bland.


• It's way too busy.


• Recovery.gov will never be able to be seen at small sizes.


• Where are the stripes from the flag?


• It looks like Recovery.gov is for environmental and industrial causes - not for the thousands of people who are losing their homes, or for the greedy and irresponsible bankers who sucked up recovery money and gave themselves big bonuses.

I've never been that big a fan of Obama's logo either; it relies on a tired image of peace and prosperity as well as on the big O - which is always Oprah territory.

But the Recovery.gov logo is truly just awful. If it were up to me, I'd grab that great art deco NRA eagle and run with it. Fast. Because that logo can fly.

Uh oh... Mountain Dew changes its logo

One of the joys of Facebook is that I occasionally get to see life from an adolescent perspective. Avery, my cousin Caroline's oldest son, is 16. This morning, Facebook reported that he joined the group, "I hate the new Mountain Dew Logo." The group's description reads:

What is with the new Mountain Dew Logo. WHY has it been changed. It is so ugly. Why change for the sake of change. Why change what needs not be changed. And what is with the (MTN) anyway. I feel like I'm going to a ski resort or something.

For the uninformed, Mountain Dew is "a soft drink distributed and manufactured by PepsiCo... it often incurs the disapproval of health experts due to its relatively high caffeine content for a soft drink... The drink is mainly marketed to people in the 12-30 year old demographic group, creating a connection to activities like extreme sports and to the video game culture." (Source: the font of all knowledge, Wikipedia)

From my visual survey, this Facebook group's membership encompasses almost exclusively white, teen-aged males - Mountain Dew's (excuse me, Mtn Dew's) target audience. I'm certain Pepsi performed lots of market research before making this change, but it still strikes me as another example of branding influenced by the internal machinations of a company. As I wrote in my entry about HLN (Headline News), it's just plain dumb to rename companies or products based on how you refer to them internally. For years, I'm sure every Pepsico staffer has referred to the company's super-caffeinated, lemon-lime soda as Mtn Dew, but that doesn't mean anyone else should.

As one member named Brian writes, "mtn dew can diaf!!!" (Translation for the middle aged like myself: Mountain Dew can die in a fire!!!) We'll see if Pepsi suffers the repercussions of changing the brand fourth most popular soda in the world (Coke, Pepsi, and Diet Coke come first).

But I concur with the Facebook group. Why change something that need not be changed?

What were they thinking? Headline News becomes HLN

I.H.A. (I hate acronyms). They S.U.C.K. (Super uncreative corporate kaka)!

Acronyms, the friend of FDR, the New Deal, and Washington, DC, obliterate meaning. If you are a new or even an old company, the last thing you want to do is to create a three-letter name. No one can remember the letters, especially in the DC area.

Even worse, acronyms are almost completely unbrandable. Unless you are IBM, CNN, or AT&T, forget about turning to your bowl of alphabet soup for a name change. The Feds claimed this territory a long time ago; commercial enterprises don't stand a chance.

Given this, you'll understand why the Powers That Be at CNN's Headline News H.L.T.F.M. (have lost their fricking minds). According to a December 16, 2008 Reuter's article:

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - At the end of what will be a record year for viewership, Headline News is getting a name change.

The 26-year-old news channel will be known as HLN. It follows in the footsteps of such other Turner Broadcasting networks as TBS, TNT and, of course, CNN. Along with the new moniker, the channel is getting a new logo and slogan: "News and Views."

CNN Worldwide executive vp Ken Jautz said Wednesday that the channel is acknowledging that it has evolved beyond the headlines-every-hour format that marked its first two decades or so. Since 2005, Headline News has been, at least in primetime, more like cable channels MSNBC and Fox News Channel in programing talk shows. Nancy Grace has had her own 8 p.m. program for the past three years, and Glenn Beck held the 7 p.m. slot for two years before he left for Fox News Channel.

"We feel (the tagline and name change) is more representative of what the channel has become in primetime," Jautz said.

First off, I question the rationale of changing the name at all. If the network soared by 15 percent last year, why fix something that ain't broken? The execs see the network name through their own eyes and not their viewers and it's a huge mistake. Yes, we all know we can turn on Headline News during the day and get the latest news in a half-hour segment. But that doesn't mean that the name becomes nonsensical when execs schedule Nancy Grace at night. As a matter of fact, if you're into sensationalized, up-to-the-minute news about the world's latest scandal, Nancy Grace provides genuine (if rather seedy) headline news.


Second, having all Turner properties adopt acronyms offers another example of H.L.T.F.M. I possess vague recollections of Cable News Network and Turner Broadcasting System, so I know what CNN and TBS represent. But that collective social memory evaporates as younger people watch these networks. Ted Turner is an innovator. I can't for the life of me understand why he'd make all his channels sounds like CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS.

Third, taglines should elucidate for consumers the unique attributes your product or service delivers. "News and views" could be the tagline for CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, MSNBC, CNBC, and the like. This generic tagline is useless, meaningless, and BAD.

Fourth, look at that new HLN logo and tell me that you don't immediately think HSN - Home Shopping Network. I want to whip out my credit card and go buy something dumb on television! The only thing I like about the logo is the voice bubble. The rest S.U.C.K.S.

So what does this mean for you?

1. Don't name your damn company with a damn acronym.
   


2. If you are a sole proprietor, don't name your company with your initials. Remember, your company isn't about you, it's about your customers. Don't ever forget it!
   


3. If you have a real company name, use it. Don't turn The Washington Post into WP, for example. Use the most important or distinguishing word in your name as the corporate moniker instead. Thus, most Washingtonians call our city's paper the Post. Remember, people will remember your name - but never your acronym.
   


4. Pick a meaningful, useful tagline.
   


5. Hire Julie & Company to help you with naming issues. Just like everything else in branding, it looks easy but it's not. It's tough work and belongs in the hands of experts. Truly. Headline News would never have been renamed HLN if its execs had hired Julie & Company - even if it meant we didn't make much money!

To conclude: HLN is SOL. And that's the truth!

Designing Logos - Lesson 1

What have I learned about designing logos over the past 12 years in business? Plenty. From time to time, I'm going to post some lessons learned about logo design.

Lesson 1: Always remember who your customers are and design everything for them.

In The E-Myth Revisited, (required reading for all entry-level business owners, btw) Michael Gerber suggests that start-up entrepreneurs almost always name their companies after themselves. Why? Because business owners cannot see a distinction between their inner selves and their companies.

I know this is true because this is exactly what I did - my company is named Julie & Company, after all!

So what are the implications of naming your business after yourself? Business owners:

• End up working IN their businesses rather than ON their businesses, which leads to burnout, misery, hopeless, and failure.


• Take every business success or disappointment personally because they've invested their very soul in their companies.


• Believe the business should reflect their inner being - and this includes most particularly their branding.

Creating a brand to match your internal self is simply ineffective, bad, wrong, dumb, meaningless. Your logo is NOT yourself, just as your business is not yourself.

Which takes us to the primary purposes of a logo: to attract customers to your product and/or services and to then get your more attention and make you more money. That's why you go to all the trouble to brand your business - so you can be successful. Period.

So given this, what is the most important thing you should do when designing a logo?

Make it customer focused. Design the logo to meet the expectations and desires of your prospects and clients. Get in their heads and figure out what look and feel you need to have to get their attention. Then remember that whatever that look and feel is doesn't have anything to do with who you are as a human being - and that's just fine.

Let me give you an example from my own business. I am a graphic and web designer. My clients come to me because they want creative people to solve their business promotion problems. They want my service offerings to be fresh but professional. Therefore, my business needs to look fresh and professional, so:

My corporate colors are saturated hues of rust, avocado, and plum - usually more color than most of my clients want for their own businesses. But this color usage shows that Julie & Company has the creative spark that they need. I once had a client over to my home. She was disappointed that I didn't live in orange, green, and purple land. I don't. My home is much different from my corporate online presence. My home is about me. My business is about my customers.

The Julie & Company website doesn't look like other designers' sites and for good reason. I don't want us to look like everyone else. Julie & Company needs to be distinctive but in the right way. Instead of having a Flash website with lots of gizmos whirling around, I tell our corporate story in a solid, steady, business-like way. My clients aren't Coke or Nike and almost none of them sell to teenagers or young adults. They are instead B2B or B2G firms who generally despise gratuitous animation. Therefore, on my website, I give them straight HTML pages with a little Flash animation, just enough to get them interested but not so much as to make them (of me!) epileptic.

My customers want sober grown-ups with 20 years of business experience to help them - not post-adolescent kids who make every business look like an alternative rock band. Which brings me to another point: don't ask your teenager for approval of your logo. Kids do NOT want to see what ADULTS want to see in terms of branding.

A perfect example: for Christmas, my 53-year-old boyfriend asked for a black belt to wear with dress slacks. He got two belts, one from me, a 49-year old woman, and one from his son's 17-year-old girlfriend. Guess which one I picked out? And guess which one he'll actually wear with his dress slacks?

So be careful asking for your kids' approval. They will almost definitely point you in the wrong direction if you are selling to adults. (However, if you're selling to teenagers or twentysomethings, make them your own personal focus group. Listen to everything they have to say about design because for the kids' market, they'll be absolutely right.)

Bottom line: See your business as you want others to see it and then create a logo that matches that vision. That's the bottom line to your success, too.

The bloom is off the rose (and brand) at Bloom's

Bloom, a relatively new entrant to DC grocery marketing, blossomed in Rockville last year. And blossomed it did: there isn't one department that isn't simply splendid. The store features a good bakery, prodigious produce, delectable meat and seafood, and just about everything else you can imagine. Unlike Safeway or Giant, it is actually fun shopping at Bloom.

Bloom's marketing department created a glorious look and feel for the chain. The corporate palette includes saturated food-based colors, such as avocado, apple red, blueberry, plum, and wheat. While the logo's lower-case lettering conveys a friendly openness, the store's icon seems like it will start to spin any moment, leaving shoppers feeling energized and excited.

All of this sounds great because it is. But Bloom suffers from two enormous problems: ridiculously high prices and virtually zero customer service.

Problem Number 1: Bloom's prices are outrageous. Granted, Bloom is on par with Safeway (which is also obnoxiously overpriced), but unless you're a rich heiress, you'll be planning to live in the gutter by the time you finish your shopping trip. I went to Bloom yesterday to get a halfway-decent deal on New York strip steaks ($5.99/pound) and ended up doing the rest of my shopping there. My goal was to make a ham and veggie fettucine dish for my boyfriend - that doesn't sound particularly expensive, does it? But here's how it added up at Bloom:

• 1 ham steak $5.29
• 1 bunch of asparagus $ 3.99
• 1 yellow pepper $1.76
• 1 red pepper $1.96
• 2 tomatoes $3.78
• 1 package shredded mozzarella $2.99

Grand total? $19.77. For ONE meal! I realize that we're in a recession/depression and that it's the middle of winter and the vegetables are out of season, but c'mon, this is ridiculous. I wasn't making filet mignon, for God's sake. Bloom proves to be simply too expensive for weekly shopping. Next time, I'll go in for the steak sale and leave with one package of meat - that's it, that's all.

Problem Number 2: At Bloom, you get virtually no service. When you first enter the store, you are faced with a huge rack of self-scanning devices. The idea is that you scan products before you place them in your cart. When you are finished shopping, the device calculates your total and allows you to pay via a self-service kiosk when you are finished shopping. I tried this exactly once. It took me at least twice as long to do my grocery shopping using this newfangled pricing gun. Forget it. My time is worth a lot more than that. I want to get in and get out, no matter how pretty the store is.

Bloom's we-offer-no-service pledge goes deeper however. The store's employees routinely badger shoppers into using the self-check out aisles. During a busy shopping day, Bloom opens six self-service lanes and only ONE full-service lane; full-service means you have someone scan and bag your groceries. Not a lot in terms of service, right? Don't you expect your grocery store to provide grocery clerks to ring up your groceries and bag them? At Bloom, the management apparently thinks customer service is a big luxury - one they are are not going to provide if they can possibly help it - even if you are paying through the nose for their products.

I don't think the gas station self-service approach works in a grocery store environment - especially one that charges you a premium price for groceries. America started pumping its own gas during the 1970s gas crisis because it cost us less to fill our tanks. We might consider scanning and bagging our own groceries if it meant we could save some dough - but Bloom is asking us to serve ourselves and pay a higher price to do so.

Bloom's brand suffers greatly under these policies. Bloom could be greatly improved by lowering prices and increasing the number of open full-service lanes. Without these changes, the company will surely wither otherwise.

Branding the Bailout

Today we wait for Congress to stop screwing around with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's $70 billion bailout plan and just pass the damn thing so we can sidestep financial armageddon. John McCain's Mighty Mouse imitation last week - "here I am to save the day!!!" - is just the latest symbol of our elected leaders inability to do a single reasonable thing. I'm scared and everyone else is, too. I wrote back in March that I feared the Next Great Depression, and sadly, I was right.


But I'm not here today to add my incredibly meager voice to the populace's outrage over this debacle. I want to focus on the marketing - or lack thereof - of Paulson's plan and how it should be rebranded to make the bailout more palatable to the American people. This is the USA, after all - we are all victims of marketing.

CNBC's Jim Cramer has been lobbying to call the plan "The Investment in America Plan" - and he's right. Paulson's plan is not a bailout or a donation to those greedy tycoons on Wall Street. It's a cash infusion into the American economy. It is an investment. The USA is getting a ton of crappy mortgages - all of which represent property soon to be owned by the United States of America. After the world stops panicking (which admittedly could take some time), property values will rise and the USA may actually make money. That's what Cramer says - and again, I think he's right.

The American people have invested in their country before. FDR led our nation out of depression 80 years ago by investing in America. You remember all those acronyms from the 30s: the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), the WPA (Works Projects Administration), the CWA (Civil Works Administration), and many more. Those agencies plowed tax dollars back into the USA by establishing or improving our nation's infrastructure, creating public artwork, revolutionizing farming, and much more. I remember the post office mural at the Silver Spring post office (which has been moved to the library), and from a genealogy perspective, I've benefitted from the hard work of WPA staff members who transcribed the country's censuses. We invested in the nation once and we need to do it again (without participating in World War III though).

So I second Paulson's plan and even more strongly support Cramer's suggestion that we rebrand the plan "The Investment in America." God willing, this investment will pay off. If it doesn't, I'm moving to Southern Maryland with my boyfriend. He has three acres of land where we can plant crops and keep a chicken or two. I won't tell you where it is... I don't want you showing up for free food if worse comes to worst!

A real mission that has nothing to do with mission statements

Last week, Jeanine Gajewski, my favorite reporter (other than my brother anyway) interviewed me about mission statements for an article she is writing for SmartCEO Magazine. What are your clients doing, she asked? What is their process? Do they find them effective?

Mission statements? Girl, I said, I haven't thought about those babies in at least five years and as far as I know, my clients haven't either. Mission statements went the way of swoosh logos (grace of God, people finally stopped asking me for swoosh logos ala Nike!) and three-word taglines (you know what I'm talking about: STRENGTH INTEGRITY TRUST... or... SMELLY STINKY MALODOROUS).

Mission statements were all the rage during the dot com days when companies bathed in money and paid PR consultants big bucks to examine their corporate navels and spin up carefully worded and completely meaningless drivel that they plastered on their websites. No one ever read that crap except for job applicants who dutifully memorized it and blathered it back to the jean-clad interviewers in HR. Eventually, during the much-needed redesign of the corporate website, I suggested to the CEO that company ditch the damn thing and that was that.

I jest. But I do believe that the silly days of PR and marketing consulting are over and that companies now insist on real-world value for their money. ROI is the name of the game and let's face it: mission statements don't return jack.

So don't waste your money on elucidating corporate values for a mission statement. Instead, figure out how those values influence your brand... and if your customers would never, ever associate strength, integrity, or trust with your company, give me a call. We've got some real real-world work to do.