SMALL BUSINESS BLOG

Any branding bod worth their salt will recommend that you implement a set of measures to enable you to benchmark the returns you get on your marketing investment.  But finding the right measures can be tough.

Some ingenious chappy had created a site that measures brand equity (and the words it resides in), in simple visual terms. His site, Brand Tags will engage anyone with a interest in brands and absolutely mesmerise marketing junkies - particularly if you were party to the one word equity debate that kicked off a year or so ago. . .

Pay it a visit.  It’s NEAT.

In case we thought it was going to get better, the Bank of England is now saying inflation is going to get worse. As if we couldn’t have guessed, thanks guys. And yet I don’t think things are as bad as all that.

I know that must seem crazy in the light of the current headlines but I don’t regard myself as particularly elderly (43, thanks for asking) and yet everyone is still running around claiming inflation over 2 per cent is some sort of disaster.

OK, let’s not get party political here but 1980 - yes, just after the last unbroken period of Labour administration and with a Prime Minister who took over after the elected bloke resigned - inflation’s peak was 20 per cent. The same link confirms that interest rates peaked at 17 per cent at the time, and they hit almost the same height, albeit only overnight, in 1993.

Younger readers (he patronized) will be now be staring at their screens in disbelief but these are facts. I’m not saying we’ve never had it so good, nor am I claiming it can’t happen again. Nevertheless, if everyone wouldn’t mind calming down a bit and remembering what’s actually happened in the past, they’d realise this isn’t anywhere near the disaster that’s being portrayed by certain members of my own illustrious profession. Inflation itself can actually be a good thing as long as people have the money to cope with it as it aids expansion - disinflation, in which prices go down, is the opposite and it’s when jobs start to get lost.

No, the real problem, as I’ve said before in this column and as the Bank of England hints in the BBC report quoted, is confidence. The Banks have been seen to wobble and that mustn’t be allowed. But inflation at panic levels? Don’t make me laugh.

We had an enjoyable time filming for BizPod TV at the Business Startup show in London a little while ago.

Ally did a great job interviewing two very different, but equally fascinating entrepreneurs: Caprice Bourret and Rachel Elnaugh.

I’ve copied in the YouTube version of the Caprice interview below.

For all her celebrity and model good looks, Caprice is clearly working her proverbial backside off to make her lingerie business a success. What’s more you can see her determination and passion for what she’s doing quite clearly throughout the interview.

I also interviewed Rachel Elnaugh for this week’s podcast and she faces the other side of the celebrity entrepreneur coin. Caprice was famous, then went into business, Rachel became a successful entrepreneur and then achieved celebrity through Dragon’s Den.

Celebrity and business do mix well together. As Caprice admits it’s a real boon for marketing your business. But the media is really just an amplifier, making success seem better and failure seem worse. Just ask Rachel Elnaugh.

As Morrissey once said: "Fame, fame fatal fame, it can play hideous tricks on the brain".

Remind me never to become a celebrity entrepreneur

For three months, I have been using Xobni, a free plug-in for Microsoft Outlook which removes a lot of the pain of using this widely-used but widely-unpopular application.

If you have trouble remembering the product’s name, it’s ‘inbox’ backwards. It works by indexing all your emails, not just those in your inbox. This gives you instant recall of emails by sender/recipient or by content.

Last week, after seven months of pre-beta trials, the product was launched to the public. I sent out several invites to use it to friends and they are all rather smitten.

When not in use, it sits quietly in a narrow sidebar in your Outlook, showing details of the sender or recipient of the current email. Without expanding the bar, you can see the size of their network (derived from cc’s and such), how many conversations you’ve had with them and how many files you’ve exchanged. Expand the bar and you can see their telephone number and scrollable lists of the items just mentioned.

Here’s a shrunken screen shot with the sidebar showing:

And here’s the sidebar expanded (I’ve deliberately shaded my phone number):

You can call people from Skype, email them or schedule time with them, all from inside Xobni. You can also see a pattern of when they’re most active, email-wise. This is borne out of the company’s original intention to be an email analytics firm.

If you use search, then you get back matching people and emails. Click on an email and you can reply, forward or open. You can also view the conversation and this has a dinky slider which enables you to see more, or less, of each email in the list.

Like so many programs, it is easier to just have a go than to have someone try to explain it in print. I have ten invites to send out, if anyone’s interested (send me your email address). But it’s just as easy to go to the Xobni site and pick up your own free copy.

Xobni runs on Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Vista with Outlook 2003 or 2007. Once installed, you do nothing. It is automatically updated when the program is improved.

If you’re anything like me, you mostly use the powerful search to find stuff that you know is in there somewhere. The rest is icing on an already tasty cake.

OK, sanity actually returning when it’s not shown all that many signs of having been around in the first place is a bit of a stretch. Nonetheless, there’s a lot to be said for Anatole Kaletsky’s recent column in the Times about the current economic crisis. Like the Bank of England last week, and the US Treasury today, he thinks it’s all been a bit overstated and suggests everyone should calm down a bit.

Long-term readers will be aware that I have a lot of time for Mr. Kaletsky. When everyone was panicking about the UK’s withdrawal from the Exchange Rate Mechanism over a decade ago, it was he who observed that this would offer a chance of lower interest rates and therefore a better standard of living. He was right then and I suspect he’s right now.

As always, however, the difficult stuff is in the detail. He is not, repeat not, saying the easy credit is going to come back. Business loans, like personal loans, will be harder to come by than they were six months ago. There are solid reasons for this. Banks had estimated the value of their assets at least partly on untested items - for example if you had a house and wanted to remortgage, the Bank would probably make you an offer and yet without the house on the market nobody would really be able to establish an actual value. This, on a massive scale, is what’s caused the short-term problem we’re suffering now.

If Kaletsky and two Treasuries including ours are right, that problem is about to go away. With a bit of luck its cause will also go away, and people won’t make rash valuations of assets and borrow against them again, either on an individual or national scale.

Unfortunately I remember saying something similar in 1995..

P. S. Interest rate day tomorrow and I got it completely wrong last time. So I’m going to stick my neck out and say ‘hold’ this month.

Are you assaulted daily by people claiming to make you greener? Do you listen?

I must confess that I get irritated by many of them because they’re using my guilt to stuff their pockets with money. And, very often, what they’re offering as a ‘cure’ to CO2 emissions or pollution actually turn out to be emitters and polluters in their own right, through their use of raw materials, manufacturing processes and delivery.

For example, do we really need one button to switch off multiple devices? Can’t we just take thirty seconds to switch them off individually. Or run them off a power block and switch that off? Or, as I do, use power blocks with individual switches, so that I only power the items that I’m using at any time. (I’m not claiming any great environmental virtuousness, by the way.) Perhaps the manufacturers would be able to tell us how much switching things off standby results in a nett gain to the environment.

Then you have the measuring things. They tell you how much power you’re using. Well, if you’re being sensible with your power use, do you need a measure? It’s a bit like bathroom scales. In my case, they merely confirm to me what I can see by looking in a mirror.

Okay, measurement can be useful. You can log progress and ‘prove’ to whoever needs to know that you are doing a better job than you used to do. This, no doubt, will come in handy for reporting your carbon footprint to those who wish to tax you. (Or reward you? I won’t be holding my breath.) Some computer companies are licking their lips at the prospect of selling you even more hardware and software just to enable you to keep track of, and report, this kind of thing.

Without question, a conscientious approach to the use of raw materials and noxious emissions is very important. It always has been. But, when faced with a green product or service, do take a moment to work out whose bottom line is really being served.