The NAWBO Chicago Ravenswood Business Exchange Group is a peer-to-peer forum for independent small business owners to: share and discuss ideas, questions and solutions to common business issues; build relationships; inspire and energize each other.

When do we meet?
2nd Thursday of the month
9:30–11:00am at Lillstreet Loft
$10

Interested in joining us?
Contact a group co-chair:
Angi Semler  asemler@jumpdogmarketing.com
Joy Stauber  jps@stauberdesign.com

What topics do we cover?
We prioritize and set topics as a group, so that our roundtable truly meets the needs of its members. Here’s what we have planned so far:

June 2013
Be The Architect Of Your Own Brand | Crafting a powerful brand presence in the marketplace takes both a visionary plan and mindful execution.  A critical part of this process is a well-designed communications architecture that manifests the values of your brand and helps it connect with your audience in a meaningful way. Joy Panos Stauber and Melinda Cross from Stauber Design Studio will discuss the importance of building an integrated brand identity system, the key components of a distinctive visual and verbal identity, and the how to design a communications structure that will connect with your audience most effectively in a variety of media. Join us and learn how to get your brand act together!

May 2013
The Ins and Outs of Certification for a Woman-Owned Business | Are you thinking about having your business certified as a woman-owned enterprise? There are different types of certifications, each with different benefits, and different ways to go about the process. There is a lot of info out there, but not necessarily a lot of clarity! Cynthia Johnson from the Women’s Business Development Center will join us to discuss: Who should certify? With whom? How do you apply? How can you put your certification to use? Her presentation will be followed by a Q&A so we can discuss and share advice and experiences.

April 2013
Rock the Room with Your Introductions! | Catherine Johns will help us learn how to create a connection that makes people want to know more about you and your business.

March 2013
Who Are You and How Can I Help? | We’ll each have 5-7 minutes to tell the group about ourselves, our businesses, and the types of companies we look for as partners and clients.

February 2013
Sales | Kirsten Zoub with Dasein LLC will present Three Secrets to Setting and Achieving Your Revenue Goals in 2013.

January 2013
Social Media with Purpose | Mana Ionescu, our BXG’s resident expert on digital and social media marketing, will talk about the top 6 social media principles to get the most value from your social media investment. (Roundtable members can find a copy of Mana’s Daily Social Media Workouts in the private Facebook group.)

December 2012
Tax planning | Arlene K. Levin and Ephraim F. Abasolo from Steinberg Advisors on tax planning and strategies. Fiscal cliff? No problem. (Roundtable members can find a copy of the presentation in the private Facebook group.)

November 2012
Lessons Learned | Small business can be educational, and can even be high drama at times! Just about everyone has had a “Lesson Learned” experience. A cautionary tale, a wild success, or any type of lesson to help us all do better in business — and also to help us get to know each other since the group is new.

October 2012
Group kick-off | Please come ready to share issues you are grappling with as an independent small business owner; terrific solutions you have found that may apply to a range of industries; what you hope to learn, gain, and share as part of the group; and other ideas you have. Then together, we can prioritize and set an agenda to address members’ needs, and draw speakers from our combined expertise.

The business book sellers, readers and writers at 800-CEO-Read want to get the best ideas in business into the hands of people to improve the way business is done—and even improve the lives of the people who conduct it. They do so by working with authors, publishers and organizations in a variety of interesting ways.

The Everything We Do brochure was developed to provide a tabloid-sized review of… yes… everything they do for the various audiences they work with. The piece codified a visual language for the brand that has been extended and adapted to many other materials over the years, including In The Books, an annual look back at the year in business publishing, and their book, The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

800-CEO-READ’s Big Brain Business Book Club needed an identity and enrollment website. The overall brand’s visual language was adapted to work for the project. Brightly colored squares with big letters provide bold and simple identifiers for Left, Right, and Whole Brain categories that are applied to the website, book club shipping boxes, and other communications.

800-CEO-READ’s corporate website was developed to more comprehensively represent the company as being “in the business of moving ideas” via selling books, sharing ideas and expertise (via blogs, interviews and reviews), and creating content, tools, and events for their different business audiences.

SDS collaborated with 8CR’s in-house team to establish a clear structure for information and navigation, a flexible area for featured projects, a simpler book purchasing process, and templates for main page types that incorporated ad space—all within a new interface designed to fit with the visual language of other brand communications.

When developing a new marketing campaign, it’s good to remind yourself of an obvious fact: Your target audience is not you.

Why? Because sometimes it’s easy to kick off a project based on knowledge you have and unintentionally forget that, while your audience/consumer understands their own needs, they most likely do not know everything that you know about your organization, product, or service. You need to put yourself in their shoes—in their situation, inside their head. Sometimes, it’s helpful to pretend you know absolutely nothing about your brand/product/service and what makes it special. And start thinking about communicating from that point. Not from some midpoint that assumes a level of knowledge that you and your organization have. Avoid what Chip Heath and Dan Heath call “the curse of knowledge” in their must-read book Made To Stick.

Your internal POV may or may not be relevant. What is definitely relevant is where your target market is—what their day is like, and how what you offer fits in and makes something better for them. Your job (and ours too) is to connect those dots for them. How does your website support a parent researching a school online at 10pm? Does the site navigation reflect your organization’s internal structure (which is probably not so relevant to them), or does it reflect the questions your prospects have, the process they are immersed in, and support them in that activity (at 10pm when your offices are closed, if needed)?

It’s about building a relationship. Demonstrate that you understand your audience and how your offering fits a real need that they have. Create a dialog, with good branding and customer experience from points A to Z. They will appreciate it, and they’ll probably tell others too.

~ JPS

To advance their mission of accelerating the adoption of health information technology, The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) tests and certifies HIT products and services, ensuring that they meet defined criteria. Their brand communications need to help healthcare providers understand the benefits of HIT and find certified products, support EHR developers who are getting products certified, and present CCHIT as the trusted certification body. Communications are designed to be streamlined, clutter-free, and help people get to information and tools as efficiently as possible without a lot of distraction.

SDS developed CCHIT’s identity and first website in 2005. After a few website evolutions, tremendous growth in content and functionality, and the organization’s transition from a government sponsored body, we redesigned the site to work with a new CMS and to retune the CCHIT image to present an independent, highly-qualified and competitive non-profit. CCHIT is still recognizable, but as a much better version of itself.

Before and after views below

At left: Governmental feel – flat, blocky, lacking defined content hierarchy

At right: Independent nonprofit feel – clean, smart, airy and inviting, more contrast, clear content hierarchy addressing user’s point of view

When James W. McLamore and David Edgerton founded Burger King in 1962, they knew they were going to sell a lot of Whoppers in Miami, but they never planned on selling scrambled eggs. Even today after spending a gazillion dollars on advertising, Burger King holds no place in our breakfast imagination. It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out burgers and eggs do not correlate like champagne and caviar. The same is true for Kentucky Fried Chicken and red meat or Burlington Coat Factory and swimsuits. Yet, executives still choose names and designs that limit their business potential. They may own burgers, chicken or coats, but in the long term, investors want growth and that means marketing managers need to think about the elasticity of their brands.

While names need room to grow, designs require the same long term strategy. The insurance company, CIGNA, overcame its meaningless nomenclature by choosing a tree for its logo. It could then wrap itself around all the symbology of trees (strong roots, a protective canopy, branching leaves, growth buds, even support Arbor Day), whereas AFLAC, an insurer with 40 million customers, uses a quacking duck and stock images of perfectly perfect people to build consumer recognition.

Any design agency worth its salt will help its clients design not just a logo, but an identity system with a bagful of tools that go beyond stationery and brochures. To avoid McBranding (the dilution of intangible assets), companies should consider a large design vocabulary that includes a secondary color palette, a range of original and stock images that supports the company’s design objectives and a voice made up of real words that reflect company values. Applied consistently over time, these images, colors and words, in concert with a company’s name and logo, will create a strong and meaningful organization that has real value in the minds of its constituents. Note: good design equals better revenues. Eureka!

The point is simple. Make sure you choose a name and logo that has depth and breadth to meet the changing needs of any business and build an identity system with a rich vocabulary of secondary images, colors and words. ~

~ David Ray | David was a Senior Consultant at Landor Associates prior to running Marketing Communications at various healthcare start-ups.

ChangeThis publishes manifestos written by inspiring authors and thinkers such as Michael Pollan, Tom Peters and David Meerman Scott. The original idea for ChangeThis came from Seth Godin and a great design team. In 2005, 800-CEO-Read took over, continuing with the monthly e-publication of ideas aimed at changing minds and spreading ideas. In 2007, Stauber Design Studio became involved, updating the manifesto format and implementing a better process for monthly production. Recently we evolved the manifesto format once again to make it mobile-friendly.

For the ChangeThis website and blog, SDS designed primary page templates that keep the focus on the individual manifestos—the stars of the show—and creates a user friendly and easy to update site.

You can subscribe to this inspiring (and free) monthly collection of business ideas at ChangeThis.com.

See more covers and read manifestos on the ChangeThis website.

I got an email this morning with this Tom Peters quote: “Design is … an understanding that all the senses were created equal.”

It’s true. And it’s interesting to think about what on earth that might really mean.

I was talking with a marketing colleague this morning about a potential project she has for a website aimed at moms. As a mom, I’m always very suspicious of any kind of “marketing to moms” because it’s often like other marketing to women … lots of pink and cuddly photos, as if that is all it takes to be relevant to me as a female consumer.

What does any of this have to do with “Design is … an understanding that all the sense are created equal.” ?

It is this:

Design is not about making something look cool (or cute, or mom-like, or macho, or techie, or whatever it is you think the audience is).

Design is about making something relevant. It is about making a connection with your audience.

Which means you have to truly understand them, and you have to have a clear communication strategy. The messages need to be relevant to the audience. The way in which they are delivered needs to be relevant. You need to consider which senses to address, and how. (Is the color palette friendly or serious? Is the nomenclature for website sections based on an internal organizational structure or does it truly support the user’s point of view and needs? Does the paperstock textured or smooth, heavy or light? How should all of these elements, and more, feel to the user/audience?)

Designing a website for moms — like any website, or any form of communication for that matter — requires the integration of form with communication strategy, and a careful prioritizing of messages. Then the final content, design, and all details in execution support the higher communication goal, serve the end user well, and track back to what you figured out needed to be done in the planning stages.

I wholeheartedly agree with Tom that “Design is … an understanding that all the senses were created equal.” Creators (marketers, designers, writers, technical developers, etc) of any type of communication have to remember that all of the senses truly are involved. The eyes, hands, heart, brain … a website user or brochure reader takes in many elements and processes them via all of their senses. All of the elements require careful attention and need to be considered from a user’s point of view. If the visuals are strong but the naming of website sections isn’t right, the user won’t respond as well as they would otherwise. If the brochure copy is great but the typesetting makes it feel like a chore to read… oh no!

All of the details need to work together in a holistic, integrated way to support each other and the user experience — and thus build a relationship with your brand.

~ JPS

We’ve developed a range of printed and online communications for DePaul’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business since 2001. Overall, materials address a KGSB prospect or student from a personal, rather than institutional, point of view.

The MBA Viewbook was created to support prospects in the decision-making process by focusing on the individual attention of the Kellstadt experience; connections forged with the Chicago business community; the range of program choices; and real student outcomes.

Consistent brand messaging and visual language were also carried through to a range of related materials, including HTML email templates, a family of program brochures, and more.

The MBA Career Management Center website was designed to reinforce DePaul’s position as the business school with deep Chicago connections and provide access to a wide range of “do-it-yourself” resources for its users.

The project was broken into distinct phases:
1) Planning. Research, site architecture, and content approach.
2) Design. Development of one design direction that could be applied to two sister websites: an Employer site for companies who are looking to recruit MBA students, and a Student/Alumni site to support the career building process.
3) Implementation. Design and production, content development, and coordination with programmers for build-out of all pages for both sites.

Information was organized to recognize the user’s situation and support their needs. For example, the Student site was organized with steps like “Step 1: Meet the Guides” and “Step 4: Go for the Job” to make the site approachable and break down what may feel like an overwhelming process into smaller, doable chunks.