Marketing has always been a source of intense fascination for me. It requires the mastery of visual and communication arts, psychology, sociology and economics. It asks of its practitioner an advanced understanding of human behavior. Consider that a simple marketing slogan can conjure up a particular set of emotions in a person - “Just Do It”, “The Ultimate Driving Machine”, “It's The Real Thing”, “Diamonds are Forever”.
Early in my career I worked for a printer in Newport Beach California where I met several fascinating entrepreneurs. My job was as a sales representative and that gave me the opportunity to sit beside them and assist in producing stationery and collateral information for their businesses. That was my first conscious experience of the power of a logo and the art of branding. There was always equal parts excitement and foreboding because of the high attrition rate of small businesses. I knew many of them would not survive. The SBA (Small Business Administration) says that 50% of all new businesses established will fail in three year and 90% will fail in ten years.
Having ran businesses before, I have always felt a kinship with entrepreneurs. Their energy is something to be experienced. For most of them, they want nothing more than to change the world. With hard work and persistence, many of them succeed. Every time you see a large business, you can be assured that at some point there was one person or a group that got together and drew a map to bring their ideas to fruition. Hewlett-Packard and Apple started in a garage. Dell Computers sprung its first roots in a dorm room. The list is endless.
The battlefield now is in acquiring a little space in a person's mind. Companies pay a premium for your attention. They understand that people are incredibly busy these days. They are also bombarded with a constant stream of messages from all directions. What a brand tries to do in a scant moment is to rise above that noise, capture your attention and try to make a binding and lasting connection with you. And that's precisely what we want to do at RobertsJustice. Unfortunately, we don't have a huge marketing budget so we can put together a focus group to help us tighten up our message. Of all the slogans out there, ours is probably one of the longest - “He was an entrepreneur until life threw him one wicked curve-ball. Then, he became his own trial lawyer”. Marketing experts would probably call it wordy or even clumsy. When I coined that slogan I just wanted to make sure it spoke the truth.
So, this year, we would like to introduce our logo, or at least the first iteration of our company colors. As in anything we do, it has to be organic and it cannot cost very much money. So, I sat down one evening a few months ago and started matching the colors of our blog. I recently returned to it and decided to put it to use. Ironically, the colors on the blog was based on one of the Blogger templates which we still use but is no longer available for new subscribers. The colors on my work were not exact matches because I was using Microsoft Word. I tried to match the colors as best as I can and layered one color on top of each other. That's how I came up with our colors. Eventually, we'll probably have to redo that to make sure we have exact matches. We'll likely also revamp the blog completely. It's just that I've gotten so attached to the RobertsJustice blog that I am averse to replacing it with another template. Something really special will have to come along before I decide to do that. And that may take a while.
The amazing thing is, I absolutely love what we do at RobertsJustice. So, I was very pleased to have a chance to tinker with the visual aspect of our enterprise. I asked myself this afternoon, “Wouldn't it be great if one day as I was driving down the freeway I saw the RJ colors on some person's bumper. Wouldn't that be something else?' That will let me know we are doing something exceptional.
