Greetings everyone!

I am very pleased and excited to announce the grand prize winner for this years Making the Brand Contest!

Table Mountain Vision, in Golden, Colorado!

Thank you again to our sponsors, and to everyone who entered this year. The judging was challenging with all of the wonderful business who entered!

As the branding process progresses, we will be posting updates to keep you informed, and to help educate the local business community on the benefits of branding.

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The contest presenters of Denver’s Making the Brand are pleased to announce the three finalists of the 2009 Denver’s Making the Brand contest!
String Beads of Highlands Ranch

Chatteau Shutter Company of Englewood

Table Mountain Vision Clinic of Golden

The judging process included initial reviews of each nomination form including reviews of each business model and current branding. The next step was to narrow our nominations down to 9 semi-finalists selected for a lengthy phone interview. Based on the phone interview and clarification questions asked of each semi-finalists the three finalists were selected. Each of the three finalists will attend a final in-person interviews with the contest judges on Tuesday, March 10th.
Congratulations to these three finalists and thank you to everyone who entered!

Check back on March 16, 2009 when the Grand Prize Winer will be announced!

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Sponsors Galore!

I know Denver is one of the best places to live and do business, but I am so proud of our local business community right now!

The 2009 contest has obtained a total of 8 sponsors!! This means that the lucky grand prize winner will receive a very exciting package including:

• marketing plan
• graphic design for every component of the prize offerings
• messaging and content development
  and thanks to our sponsors….
• offset printing services
• search engine optimization for the new web site
• custom photography
• billboards
• public relations support
• custom video
• custom screen printed apparel

In addition to providing support to the contest winner, the following sponsors are also supporting the contest in various aspects:

• Print Colorado - offset printing for contest marketing materials
• Mindfull Business Solutions - official contest judging tally
• The Solution - PR consultation, pre and post contest

Give our sponsors a round of applause for being dedicated to the local community.

I cannot wait to unveil the 2009 brand!!!

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Beth, Travitt and I are all very excited to be speaking at the next Design to Print / Denver Media Group next week!

The group invited us to lead a discussion on branding, and creating a branding team. We are pleased to share our knowledge of the field, branding, and of course working within the local community.

Feel free to stop by the event, network, and get a chance to meet the MTB crew in person!

Full event details are on the Design to Print / Denver Media Group Web site.

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The work is completed - and Renaissance Adventure Guides is now enjoying their new brand!

The final package included a basic marketing plan, tag line, logo, stationery, company brochure, billboards, and Web site.

We will be checking with Max and Lyle over at Renaissance over the next year to bring you updates on how the brand is working for them.

We thank our sponsors, Print Colorado, Outdoor Promotions, and seOverflow, for their dedicated contributions to the contest and look forward to the 2009 Making the Brand contest.

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With so many brands existing, how hard is it to create a truly unique brand icon?

greeNYC apparently found it quite difficult and Apple Computers is filing a claim against the trademark request for their “Apple like” icon.

I posted the gist of the claim and counter claim over on design review, along with images of the two logo’s.

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What is a brand? Why should you care? How will branding benefit your company? These are great questions, the very basic questions in fact that you’ll need to answer in order to effectively market your company. These are the questions that Making the Brand was founded to help answer.

Branding is one of the most fundamentally misunderstood concepts in all of business, even by some of its practitioners. At the same time, a strong brand is one of the most powerful tools your company can possess, so understanding what it is and how to use it could determine whether your company succeeds, fails or flounders.

So, what is a brand? You have a logo. You have a tag line. Isn’t that what we’re talking about here? Not exactly. These are components – important components, absolutely, and probably the components most of your customers will see and hear more than any other component of your brand.

But a brand is more than the sum of its parts. A brand is the impression your customers and employees have of your company in their hearts and minds. If you have a business, if you’ve interacted with customers you have a brand. If you’ve hired and trained an employee, you have a brand. The question is, are you in control of it?

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Building a strong brand will benefit your company in ways that are easy to foresee and ways that are impossible to foresee. Think about the great companies of the 20th and 21st centuries: Coca-Cola, IBM, Apple, Nike. What do these companies have in common? All of them have weathered storms, hard times, and periods of struggle. Remember New Coke? The Nike sweatshop scandals? The Apple Newton? What allowed these companies to persevere and ultimately thrive?

Strong, flexible brands. They made it through the choppy waters because their brands helped them establish long-lasting, trusting relationships with their customers and their employees.

Strong branding can establish your company’s identity in the public’s mind, but it should be the basis for communicating with your employees as well, because they may be the main point of contact between your company and its customers or clients.

By forging a strong brand, using it as the basis for building long-lasting relationships with your customers and employees, deploying it as a tool to maintain your company’s focus, your brand will help your company weather downturns in the economy, marketing mistakes, poorly conceived advertising and a host of other impossible-to-predict challenges. In periods of strength, a strong brand will ensure that your company’s growth is targeted and intentional, that your customers always know what your company stands for and that its core values are communicated effectively.

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As branding professionals, we tell ourselves (and you) that branding is a business tool of almost mystical power. And some of you are probably skeptical. But every so often a piece of evidence comes along that is hard even for us to believe.

This study, from the April Journal of Consumer Research, finds that seeing the Apple logo for even a fraction of a second – too quickly to consciously register it – made test subjects more creative, while seeing the IBM logo for the same amount of time had no similar effect. Seeing the Disney logo made test subjects act more honestly than did the E! logo.

How does your logo affect your customers?

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A Brand is Reborn:

The Presenters and Sponsors of Denver’s Making the Brand 2008 have announced a winner. Denver’s Making the Brand 2008 is an annual contest designed to re-brand one small, independent, metro Denver-based company, and to educate Denver’s small business community about the importance of branding to their continued success. Renaissance Adventure Guides (www.raguides.com), a Denver-based adventure travel firm, has been selected as recipient of the $20,000 brand and marketing package offered as the Grand Prize in the first annual contest.

“I was so excited when we made our decision,” says Beth Boen, owner of CreativeXchange Marketing (www.creativexchangemarketing.com), who is presenting the contest along with Phases Design Studio (www.designfiles.net), a local graphic design company, and The Write Stuff (www.travitthamilton.com), a copywriting company. “Renaissance Adventure Guides is exactly the kind of business we were hoping to award the Grand Prize to. They are a small, local company on the verge of great things, and they have a real commitment to making our community and the world a better place.”

The official announcement was made to the public Tuesday morning on 9News Mornings during an interview with Renaissance Adventure Guides’ owner, Max Young. According to Young, “We’re really fired up about this, because it’s something we’ve known we’ve needed to do for a while now, but weren’t sure how to really get the ball rolling. We’ve been doing our own marketing for a few years, and really didn’t have a firm grasp on our branding. It just seemed like the time had come to step up. And then we heard about the contest, so the timing and everything has been just perfect.”

Kandra Churchwell, Creative Director of Phases Design Studio says, “Max and Lyle (Phetteplace, co-owner of Renaissance Adventure Guides) are exactly the kind of business owners we want to work with in general, but especially for the contest. They’re excited about the process, open to trying of new ideas, and willing to go through the whole thing in front of the entire metro Denver small business community. We think this is going be powerful experience for Renaissance Adventure Guides and the small business community alike!”

The two runners up were also announced today:

Gift Basket Junction (www.giftbasketjunction.com), and M&D Kitting Solutions (www.mdkittingsolutions.com), a mail order fulfillment company. The runners up will receive a branding assessment (valued at $795) provided by the Contest Presenters.

The Grand Prize Package includes marketing research and a marketing plan, a full custom design package (website, collateral, stationery, business cards), as well as brand and marketing messaging (tagline or slogan, web copy and brochure copy). The package will also include printing, SEO services and, if determined necessary by the Presenters, web video, product photography, and billboard advertising.

“All three of the finalists are great companies with a lot of potential,” says Travitt Hamilton, owner of copywriting company The Write Stuff. “So it was really tough to pick just one. All of them met the requirements of the contest and they all stand for a lot of the same things that we believe the contest is all about. In the end, it was a choice between three really worthy companies, which made the process exciting, but really challenging!”

Renaissance Adventure Guides’ new brand will be presented in June.

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