.....YOUR BRAND IS YOU

Branding is one of the most important aspects of any business.

Be it: small, large, a  retail shop, B2B or B2C and the like,

An effective brand strategy gives you a major edge in an increasingly competitive market environment,

But what exactly does "branding" mean, and how does it affect you and your business? Simply put, your brand is your promise to your customer.

It tells them what they can expect from you, your product and services.

Your brand is derived from the following: 

• Who you are,
•  who you want to be and  finally,
• Who people perceive you to be.

The foundation of your brand is,

• Your logo.
• Your website ,
•  Your digital and media presence
• Your networking and process approach
• Your packaging, promotional, and marketing materials
• Does your brand reflects the image of your business.

All of the aforementioned should integrate in your logo, in other to communicate your brand. For instance Sibecks-Actualising progressive business ideas.

Brand Strategy & Equity,

In brand strategy and equity, certain things counts:

• Your brand strategy is to ask yourself, how, what, where, when and to whom you plan to communicate and deliver on your brand messages.
•  Where you want to advertise should be part of your brand strategy.
• Your distribution, and brand communication channels should also be part of your brand strategy
• Your target business audience and market space
•   Finally, what you communicate whether visually or verbally should all be part of your brand strategy.

Consistently, strategic branding leads you to a strong brand equity, which means the added value brought to your company's products or services that allows you to charge more for your brand than what identical, unbranded products command.

The most obvious example of this is SIBECKS consult. Because it has built powerful brand equity, it can charge more for its product and customers will pay that higher price.

The added value is intrinsic to the brand equity which frequently comes in the form of perceived quality of an emotional attachment.

Your brand is like a journey of business self-discovery. It can be difficult, time-consuming and uncomfortable.

It requires, at the very least, that you answer the questions below:

1. What is your company's mission?
2.  What are the benefits and features of your products or services?
3. What do your customers and prospects already think of your company?
4.  What qualities do you want them to associate with your company?

Do your research. Learn the needs, habits and desires of your current and prospective customers. And don't rely on what you think, they think. Know what they think. Thus the first step of the brand journey.

Because defining your brand and developing a brand strategy can be complex, consider leveraging the expertise of SIBECKS consult for small-business advisory services.

Once you've defined your brand, how do you get the word out? Here are a few simple, time-tested tips:

1. Get a great logo. Place it everywhere.
2. Write down your brand message. What are the key messages you want to communicate about your brand? Every employee should be aware of your brand attributes.
3.  Integrate your brand. Branding extends to every aspect of your business, how you answer your phone calls, text messages, as well as what you, and your salespeople wear on sales calls, your e-mail signature, and everything.
4.  Create a "voice" for your company that reflects your brand. This voice should be applied to all written communication and incorporated in the visual imagery of all materials, online and offline. Is your brand friendly? Be conversational. Is it ritzy? Be more formal.
5.  Develop a tagline. Write a memorable, meaningful and concise statement that captures the essence of your brand.
6. Design templates and create brand standards for your marketing materials. Use the same color scheme, logo placement, look and feel throughout. You don't need to be fancy, just consistent.
7. Be true to your brand. Customers won't return to you--or refer you to someone else--if you don't deliver on your brand promise.
8. Be consistent. I placed this point last only because it involves all of the above and is the most important tip I can give you. If you can't do this, your attempts at establishing a brand will fail.

  Contact us for your brand activation

Watch your time.....

There is no greater waste of time than regret.

If you want to manage your time better, the first step as suggested by Time Management Consultant Alan Lakein, is to ask yourself this question: “Exactly what are my goals?”

Take a blank sheet of paper. List your personal lifetime goals. Now, analyze your lists. 

They probably include more things than your reasonably can expect to do, so assign priorities.

Besides being specific, goals should be attainable and authentic, in other words, things you really want and are willing to work for.

Good time management involves an awareness that today is all we ever have to work with. The past is irretrievably gone; the future is only a concept. Everything that is accomplished in the world is the result of someone’s realization that today is the only time to act.

If it seems rather elementary to you, be assured that the vast majority of your fellow human beings seldom fully grasp that self-evident truth.

Thomas Carlyle put it this way: “ our main task is not to see what lies dimly perceived in the future, but to do the thing which lies immediately at hand”

John Ruskin had the word “Today” carved into a small marble block that he kept on his desk as a constant reminder to “Do it now”.

But my favorite quotation is this one by an anonymous philosopher:

Yesterday is a cancelled check,

Tomorrow is a promissory note,

Today is ready cash. Use it.

Upon all the time-saving techniques ever developed, perhaps the most effective of all is frequent use of the word “No”

………….to be continued

Simon Cobbina

Digital Marketing Strategist & Entrepreneur
sibecks09@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/sibecks09/

Leading the Ship - Leadership

No matter what direction you tilt the compass, it would always point to the north, when at its restful stage. Without a direction, it would be difficult to locate your destination.

At any given time, the arrows on a compass always point to a direction, but it takes the captain and the team in a ship to read the directions to the destination. As a leader, you must have a destination of where you are leading your team.

In our day to day activities, we often come across and hear words such as Leadership. What does leadership mean to you? What comes to mind? wait a minute. What is it to you?

Leadership means different things to different people around the word. It can also mean different things in different situations. For example, it could relate to community leadership, religious leadership, and leadership of a campaign group.

According to the idea of transformational leadership, an effective leader is a person who does the following:

• Creates an inspiring vision of the future
• Motivates and inspires people to engage with that vision
• Manages delivery of the vision
• Coaches and builds a team, so that it is more effective at achieving the vision

Therefore, leadership is proactive in solving problems, looking ahead and not being satisfied with things as they are. To create a vision, leaders focus on an organization's strengths by using the following tools:

• Porter's Five Forces
• PEST Analysis
• USP Analysis
• Core Competence and 
• SWOT Analysis

Leaders think about how their industry is likely to evolve and how their competitors are likely to behave. Our visions as leaders can be tested with appropriate market research and by assessing key risks using techniques such as scenario analysis. Persistently, leaders must innovate to shape their businesses, communities, families with strategies to succeed.

I am always happy to share my thoughts whenever the opportunity beckons. I am sharing this piece with you because I find it of great importance to share. I have a firm belief that as I continue to share and exhibit my intellectual prowess, it edifies me and whoever takes the time to read for knowledge.

We must first consider ourselves as leaders before we can lead a team, captain a ship or even a football team, steer the affairs of the family as head or lead a community activity.

In your opinion, what are some of the attitudes or attributes of a leader? The point is if you don't step forward to lead, who would lead? If there is a problem in your family, community, or country and you don't organize one or two people with like minds to solve it, it would in the long run become an albatross. In life, nobody will solve your problems, unless you do it by yourself. 

The onus lies on all of us to take the opportunity of leadership. That is the only way we can make the difference, the change and the transformation.

In my view , the following ten (10) qualities must be looked out for in a leader:

• Positivity - Looking at the favorable way
• Purpose - Place to lead
• Empathy - Walk a mile in the other person's shoes
• Humility - Better team than yourself
• Will - Wanting to get there, somehow, someway.
• Relentless - Your positive tone, message, vision, values and expectation.
• Persistence - The bar can always be raised
• Curiosity - You don't know everything
• Trust - Sacred bond between you and your team
• Love - Love to lead your team and not be afraid.

 To be continued.....

Simon Cobbina

Digital Marketing Strategist & Entrepreneur
sibecks09@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/sibecks09/

Speak Up

Every day, we are all looking for positive opportunities.

Opportunities for growth in business, personal growth, carving a niche, leveraging, building a network, advocating for change, seeking for information to reform and transform. According to Warren Buffet, the one skill you must learn is public speaking.

In my observation, research and practice, you flourish when you develop the art of public speaking. It makes you grow beyond leaps and bounds.

Mastering the art of public speaking is the single greatest skill to boost your career as a small business owner. Enhancing your public speaking skill could go a long way towards building communication with your customers, partners and prospective investors.

According to TED curator Chris Anderson, public speaking matters more than ever. In his book TED Talk, Anderson writes “As a leader or an advocate, public speaking is the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, sharing knowledge, insights, and promoting a shared dream”

Look within to see where you fall short.

Ask for help, my doors are wide open to show you the way.

Simon Cobbina

Digital Marketing Strategist & Entrepreneur
sibecks09@gmail.com

To Innovate or Face Extinction In Business

The Concept of Business and Technology

“He that will not apply new remedies must accept new evils: for time is the greatest innovator”……Francis Bacon

“The business of life is to go forward”….Samuel Johnson

Peter Drucker once said that " the business enterprise has two and only two basic functions: Marketing and Innovation. According to him, marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are cost"

Innovation comes like burning sensations, when you are yearning to do something differently; introducing something new. Some new idea, a method or device or finding solution to a problem; togetherness brings unity or conformity. When you loosen the broom to its individual sticks, it defeats its unity of purpose.

Team creativity calls for a special form of innovation.Organizations are team, and to continually improve existing products, and developing new products and services requires what I called team creativity. 

Research has shown that organizations which practices team creativity will survive and prosper. Those who do not will probably decline and disappear.

The process of innovation begins with the creation, invention and discovery with a focus upon the conception of the idea. Note, that innovation covers the whole process whereby the new idea is brought into productive use. Eventually, innovation takes us into the realms of supply chain, organizations, money, buildings, management and production.

In this contemporary times, we cannot do away with technology, because technology is in our DNA, whether you accept it or not. It is a fact! 

Technology plays a key role in the Supply Chain. Innovation may take place at the design level, in the kind of supply chain to be adopted, or at the process level deciding how parts of the designed supply chain can be implemented. Technology may offer opportunities for either or both to be addressed, and supply chains are changing as a result of technology adoption, though perhaps not fast enough in some countries, where over-regulation and an unsupported infrastructure hinder rather than help.

The Supply chain is the sequence of processes and activities involved in the complete manufacturing and distribution cycle. This could include everything from product design through materials and component ordering through manufacturing and assembly and onto warehousing and distribution until the finished product is in the possession of the final owner, the customer as well as the consumer.

The Business Landscape

Most manufacturing companies are well aware of the changes that are taking place in the business environment. These include increasing globalization, savage price competition, increased customer demand for enhanced quality and reliability, etc.

At the same time, there are changes in technology which are enabling new forms of working and trading. E-commerce is the obvious example.

Such changes mean that manufacturing organizations need to re-appraise everything they do if they are to remain competitive. They need to manage all aspects of the supply chain to improve customer service levels and to reduce cost.

The nature of the supply chain and the priorities to be met varies from industry to industry and from product to product. The supply chain for a stable, high-volume product should be engineered to be highly efficient, exploiting economies of scale:

Just in Time, strategic inventory, etc. That for a low-volume highly customizable product should be engineered to be highly responsive.

In Type 1 manufacturing, characterized as make and sell. The manufacturer determines efficient manufacturing parameters to build, using long production runs, to create an inventory from which wholesalers and retailers are supplied. The emphasis is on structured planning and scheduling.

 The alternative, type 2 manufacturing, is to sense and respond, where the manufacturer must have detailed information on current, actual demand so that products can be built to order, or to an aggregate of orders.

The rate of change in supply chain management is evidenced by the fact that the major traditional proponents of type 1 manufacturing, the car industry, are increasingly moving towards type 2. Many of the processes and characteristics of type 1 manufacturing stem from the early moves towards mass, flow production within the auto industry. The make and sell philosophy is nowhere better typified than by the phrase "any colour you like, as long as it's black". Now car makers get detailed information from their dealers on the actual models that customers have ordered, and tailor their manufacturing schedules accordingly.

Innovation in the Supply Chain

Supply chain management and innovation is much more important, and more difficult, for type 2 manufacturing. Synchronization between the various players in the action is critical and supply chain management is aimed at creating a supply chain network which integrates information and action across organizational boundaries. In the auto industry example, the information from many dealers must be part of the manufacturer’s decision-making process and this information must be collected and aggregated quickly if it is to be of any use.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) allows fast, secure communication across such boundaries but it has been adopted by only the largest manufacturers and supplier’s means to communicate. It seems to have been regarded as being expensive and unfriendly.

Other communication routes are the Extranet, a web-based information service also operating coherently and securely across a number of organizations and the integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

Many organizations, especially large retail groups, have been experimenting with, and piloting, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags to track the movement of goods. In most cases, such tagging is at the pallet level but as the tags get cheaper, we can foresee the use of tags at the item level, especially on high value items.

For example, in mid-2006, Northern Foods, which is a major supplier to Marks & Spencer, is tagging its supplies. Marks & Spencer, like a number of the larger supermarket chains, has insisted on its suppliers using RFID, and now - since it has over 100 food suppliers it is the country's leading user of RFID tags with currently about 60% of the pallets that pass through its food distribution centre’s being tagged. .

It claims significantly better control of its supply chain but also suggests that its suppliers are themselves benefiting. Northern Foods confirms this as it sees the information that the tagging provides driving improvements in a range of business processes.

A modern supply chain network might include a mixture of classic manufacturing software packages together with a web-based catalogue, an e-commerce transaction and payment system and so on.

Examples of innovative approaches to parts of the supply chain include:

§ Mass customization: The buyer in a retail store perhaps chooses his or her individual form of the product. The 'system' aggregates such individual orders and schedules picking, assembly or production as appropriate.

§ Online bidding: This is a new model of procurement in which a manufacturer sends a specification and drawing to a number of potential suppliers, perhaps worldwide, and then holds multiple bidding rounds until a mutually agreed price is reached within the parameters of the bidding process. The UK government used this process in March 2000 to auction licenses for the next generation of mobile phone services.

§ Shared distribution linked back to production: The use of a shared warehouse to supply a number of retailers is common. However, the technology now allows the data acquired at the warehouse as shipments are made to retailers to be aggregated and used to generate automatic replenishment orders to the manufacturer.

Some of the changes that are possible may be encouraged or delayed by the infrastructure, including transport links but also government policy, regulation, legislation, etc. Governments have their part to play in encouraging and supporting supply chain innovation. In a global economy, elements of the supply chain can often be moved elsewhere.

In the UK, there is a serious debate, for example, on the influence of joining or not joining the Euro Zone, and the implications of the decision for manufacturing organizations. The jury is still out as to whether the Euro would trigger supply chain re-configuration or whether its adoption is basically a financial and political event.

Now, in my opinion, with the Brexit, Britain can have a more negotiating power and a wider market to operate without many restrictions, depending on their negotiations with other countries outside the euro zone.

In brief

Supply chain innovation is essential if manufacturing organizations are to remain competitive.

An efficient supply chain network can provide:

§ an ability to source globally

§ online, real-time information networked around the organization and perhaps wider giving full supply chain visibility

§ information management across, rather than only within, organizational boundaries

§ an ability to offer 'local' products globally

§ improved customer response times

§ lower inventories

§ Shorter time to market for new products.

To stay alive, is to innovate continuously.

To be continued……………

  

Simon Cobbina
Digital Marketing Strategist & Entrepreneur
sibecks09@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/sibecks09/

The Climax of Achievement

LIFE BEGINS:

My life began, with all its twist and turns. I kept my head up, through all the thick and thin, 

In life, everything we do comes with a reward. The rewards must be positive. We must strive to achieve positive laurels.

When you run a race and you win, you get a medal, when you complete your University education; you get what we call a degree in the form of a certificate.

Some years ago, I had a dream of becoming an international communicator and an entrepreneur. But becoming an international communicator  and an entrepreneur does not come on a silver platter.

One needs to be disciplined and committed to the course. My Toastmasters' journey started when I mustered the courage to break the ice with the title “to be determined and think positive”.

I knew I had a challenge, a challenge of not been able to speak in public. But because I had set goals for myself, I have been able to come this far. I earned my competent communicator award from Toastmasters Communication Program.

GOAL SETTING: FUELS SUCCESS TO HIGHER HEIGHTS

Goal setting is what would actualize your dreams. You must have a goal; it is the goal that would fuel you to success. The point is, if you have a vehicle and there is no fuel, I don’t think you can be able to move around.

Goal setting is one of the essential elements of our lives, without goals one cannot achieve anything in life.

To be successful, you need to set goals; successful people set goals at personal levels. Sometimes we discourage ourselves with the phrase “I cannot do it”; let us remove the “not “to rather make it “I can do it”. We can do it when we adjust our thinking.

A written goal becomes your action plan. The action plan is what turns out to become your performance measure.

THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE STORY

There is this story about the tortoise and the hare - they all had ambitions. But our ambitions need to be backed by strategies.

One day, the tortoise and the hare decided to embark on a race. But the Hare had a strong belief that he would win the race. Tortoise had it at the back of his mind that he could maintain a constant steady speed till he gets to the finish line.

The race started and lo and behold tortoise won the race. The Hare's strategy was to run fast, rest on the way and later continue. He was by passed whilst he was taking a nap under a tree.

No matter which course you take, the ultimate goal is to get to the finish line. The moral lesson is to know who we are and what we are capable of doing.

S.W.O.T.  STRATEGIES

We need to have SWOT strategies in other to achieve our goals. The adoption of the SWOT analysis strategies is what would get us to our destination.

The S – means Strength, the W – means weakness, the – O means Opportunity and the T – means threat.

The S and the W are internal, where as the O and the T are external.

SMART GOALS

In setting goals, we must have what we call SMART GOALS.

Our goals must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and finally, must be Time bound.

When we commit ourselves to the course, the sky would no longer be our limit, but we would strive to go beyond the sky which has been a limit to most people today.

We must continue to be innovative and creative at all time......


Simon Cobbina
Digital Marketing Strategist & Entrepreneur
sibecks09@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/sibecks09/

Speak to convince.

Do you know public speaking, would take you to places?

No matter where in the world, and no matter what industry or sector you find yourself. Public speaking is essential to exercising leadership. It happens when speaking up in a meeting or at a conference, giving a presentation before a boss or clients, or when inspiring an audience to take action on an important issue -  in business or in the community. You public speaking skills can let you travel beyond boundaries, people would recognize your innovation within. Don't hesitate be coached to hone your public speaking skills.

Talk to us for directions

Simon Cobbina
Digital Marketing Strategist & Entrepreneur
sibecks09@gmail.com