I wrote a post on Linkedin a few days ago on the value of a logo. I was upset reading (yet again) about entrepreneurs going to a $5 site to buy their identity. This is how much they value their image and the perception from the public.
It’s understandable having a little budget when you’re new to the business or you’re facing difficult times, especially since we’re still going through the demise of the pandemic. However this is still a sign of how many entrepreneurs don’t understand or don’t value the necessity of branding, let alone just their logo.
Yes, your mom&pop bakery doesn’t need a full corporate branding with multi-platform social presence, all it needs is a sound logo with a small website and maybe an Instagram account to keep fans aware of the latest goods for sale. This is important because it creates value for customers to believe in and to connect with the product and its maker.
Purchasing your logo for $5 website will save you money and will give you the appearance of your business worth those five bucks. That is equivalent to opening a shop and spend $5 to renovate it, so imagine the look on people’s face when they see the front and leave. But beside that, entrepreneurs are missing a chance to connect with designers and seek true help from professionals, leaving behind the most important thing of their enterprise which is customers’ first impression.
Vaccines are working, cities are full again, the dust is settling, or is it? Over the last six months the press and the media have emphasized furthermore the problem of empty cities due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the need for shops, restaurants, and venues to reopen.
Despite the great hopes of going back to our 2019 life and routine, we have to be honest with ourselves and admit the post-pandemic reality won’t be the same as yesterday. Too much has changed and this whole terrible period is now a trauma on our body and soul.
But how are we going to fend the next six months and eventually the whole 2022? Do we have a strategy beyond what governments and health experts have already told us? Apparently not. We are scrambling amidst the lack of exit plan from the pandemic, masks will continue to be part of our lives, hand sanitizers will be everywhere like smartphones, but what about people and their workplace?
I’ve seen a struggle of public relations coming from politicians and CEOs on the topic of working from home, or working away from within the walls of their companies both in the public and private sector. Smart working saved countless lives and brands were praised for the effort taken by their workers staying away from their offices, finding the living room environment more productive than their cubicle.
Let’s not just make smart working a publicity stunt by rushing workers to immediately go back to their desks or else. It already happened at the Washingtonian Media where employees stopped publishing for a day in protest of their CEO’s message on the consequence of not coming back to the office.
The worst strategy leaders can pull off is to publicly threaten their employees. Threatening workers to remove their healthcare, 401k, and other fundamental benefits that are essential to any individual is as cheap as it sounds. A shot below the belt that will cripple the fragile situation many are still facing due to the effects of Covid-19.
So what can companies do to facilitate the transition to “normality”? CEOs should first admit to themselves the world has drastically changed. We cannot turn back the clock just like it was two years ago. The post-summer period will be chaotic as flu season will cycle back threatening the global healthcare, offices will risk to become again hot spots for any disease to spread.
Employees who are threatened to go back to work from the office will look at their leaders under a whole new different light, CEOs will lose that precious trust from their workers that allows performance and confidence to strengthen their success, and trust has become a rare commodity to treasure. Many will leave and seek new and more hospitable companies to work for, places that can offer even better conditions by hiring talented professionals from high-ranking companies.
Brands should talk to their employees by offering options to keep work schedules flexible. Let workers give back by extending that trust that was placed on them when working remotely and keep it that way, allow them to choose by not forcing on them. This will create even stronger bonds between the management and employees, many will choose on their own will to work again from the office.
Workers have faced traumatic experiences getting ill or having a loved one becoming affected by the pandemic. Stressing this scenario will backfire immediately upon companies ignoring this element. People want normality back and working with less stress as possible will help them through the transition, many will take longer to adapt and that’s fine, we can’t rush certain things especially since their lives have been touched forever and companies are not today what they were yesterday. –
After a long period of slow morphing from social platform to market place, Facebook has set a new course towards publishing by developing tools for independent writers that will allow them creating contents and have them ready on the platform.
The project will start in the US with the possibility for small businesses to expand their reach through new channels and media formats. This will highlight furthermore the importance of content-creation as the main tool to move information and reach users.
It’s an important move by FB especially since Twitter leaped towards newsletters by acquiring Revue, a service similar to Substack, going beyond the boundaries of their platform and reaching new audience segments.
FB will likely face new challenges in terms of online debating and censorship now the company fully steered into publishing. Users subscribing to this type of service can expect topic limitations on what they can publish if FB policies are included, so we can anticipate the online debate to expand furthermore into a micro galaxy of its own.
Publishing has moved from mainstream realms onto smaller and more successful authors/creators over the last ten years, this thanks to internet and the wide availability of electronic devices that allow for a better variety of content browsing.
Personally, I think it’s a great idea to improve how businesses can connect to their audience and customer base. Fresh new approaches are essential to create new curiosity by developing ways to understand social behavior especially in these pandemic times.
During a hot July in Milan in 2009 I was scheduled for two job interviews in one afternoon three hours apart. I still remember that day because of the heat exhaustion I got along with the stress of performance for trying to land a job, those types of meetings can really dissect you on the spot giving you no room for poor choice of words when asked a question.
You are nervous and afraid of making a bad impression because in the back of your head you know the person interviewing is x-raying you, paying a lot of attention to your speech and the way you sit and move. They want to know how you behave under certain quality of questions, there’s a script they are following to obtain specific answers and reactions from you for their right profile to hire.
The first interview took place downtown Milan in a very fancy and historical building, one of those places that are a few hundred meters away from the Duomo cathedral, near pricey lawyers studios that only assist large corporations and bill by the thousand per hour. I was around 25 years old at the time and without the confidence I have today at 39.
I sat in front of this lady who was in charge of interviewing candidates for a sales position and foreign client relations. One of the major requirements beside the standard ones for the position was good written and spoken English and I knew I had it, I also fit the profile. So I sat in this large office with a tall ceiling and the interview began with the usual questions: my education background, my previous job experiences, and so on.
As the interview developed I managed to catch a glimpse of the time gone by through the clock on the wall without looking at my wrist watch for obvious reasons. We were twenty minutes in and yet no questions to test my English proficiency, the set of questions of the interview was more of an interrogation than anything else, there was no goal to what I was supposed to work for if hired and the lady wasn’t interested in understanding my skills but rather to let me know the terms of the contract weren’t flexible, the pay for a full-time job was €800 gross per month. Gross.
Such nefarious low wage has been proposed in Italy fifteen-something years ago when government implemented new rules and new contracts under the false pretense of “contract flexibility”. A whole new ‘rebate strategy’ had been used to save money by hiring overqualified candidates willing to accept full time positions for a part time salary. No holidays and no benefits of any kind. Recruiters would prey on the candidates’ desperate conditions of being unemployed for long times or being their first job, so they would sign these type of below minimum wage contracts out of desperation.
Somehow I knew there was a trap along this meeting like there always are. With that salary I wasn’t able to cover any rent and so I had to delay moving out from my parents’ home. That sum didn’t reflect any of my skills, time spent learning them, commuting costs, and so on. I politely made the case for a higher salary highlighting my experience abroad, my high level English, to no avail, the recruiter was impassable and I knew that moment they were hiring on rebate to save money rather than investing on their employees to grow.
I thought they would invest in me, or at least partially, to build the skills they required in order to have the right candidate by training. I was wrong, they were looking for some ‘pick and choose’ candidate as if they were choosing a product off the shelves, as if they were selecting their snack in front of the cold glass of a vending machine.
The second interview was more disappointing with the recruiter in front of me asking generic questions and eventually closing the meeting in the most unprofessional way: he admitted he didn’t have any opening available yet they were setting up interviews yet I was there investing my time in the hope for a position. I went back home tired, almost getting a heat stroke and while sitting on the train thinking about the day, I felt disappointed because of the poor quality of job recruiting done by people who had no idea how to invest in candidates to improve their companies. It wasn’t the first time I sat through that kind of interviews and my fear was that this had become the new norm, the new standard, the way things are after the 2008 financial crisis struck and that’s how it was going to be.
I had the hunch things weren’t going to get better from there on with companies posting constant losses throughout Europe, and an unstable political landscape that gave little hope for the job market to get back on its tracks in the best of shape. However a bad day has always something to teach you, it was clear I had to shake the disappointment off quickly and focus back on the next interviews. I didn’t mind not getting the job, but it would have been worse getting it with a bad company who is there to exploit you asking you way more than they’re paying you without leading or inspiring their workforce in the wight direction.
The difficulties between yesterday’s and tomorrow’s business models continue to exist in a struggle to find a balance. Companies who found their comfort zone are clashing against those who seek new horizons through innovation, but the disruptive element is still worrying old-school business models who found self-validation surviving through the Covid-19 pandemic.
A company works best balancing their services/clients ratio in a value zone that allows them to find fertile land to thrive. On the other hand, there are two danger zones to consider and also to avoid at all costs: A) too few services and many clients, B) too few clients and many services.
Case A starts with an old school imprint of business core decisions where the enterprise has been coasting for years, more likely over a decade where it found a cozy comfort zone that is in fact a danger zone. As markets and economies shift faster and faster, having only one or just a few services or products is harming any business activity. No restaurant offers one dish and one drink, so why should companies do that? Yes, some might claim “location”, yet until a competitor spawns right next to you, then your days are numbered.
Case B is where a company sets to make a difference too fast and too energetically forgetting to build first a solid and basic line of clients. Companies doing this are just showering their few accounts with too many services that will appear distracting to them, but more importantly, remove any focus from their business core. Despite the need of adapting to new scenarios, companies ought to develop one important primary asset to satisfy and make clients happy.
How to achieve the value zone? This target is not a precise point that requires unfathomable resources or time to obtain. The value zone is first accepting the fact there are danger areas to avoid, places to which are often taken for comfort zones. Once you raised awareness the following step is to admit mistakes were made, where the best solution to this problem is to accept the fact new strategies must be taken: 1) Do I have few services and many clients? Expect such service to be taken away from you by some competitor with better prices; or, expect the next economic turmoil that pushes politics and markets to pull the rug from beneath you. 2) Do I have few clients and many services? Expect such clients to run away because the lack of focus brings up the lack of experience and confidence; therefore you will provide average to below results as your energies and resources are spread on too many fronts. Less is sometimes more.
In the end, we can identify the value zone as a place where companies understand their potential through team work, being open-minded, but most importantly acknowledging times are changing faster and faster, that there no room for inside politics, pride, or ego.
