eMarketing Blog

Does your company adopt a website by numbers approach, starting with the company background and directors’ biographies.

How about thinking of your customers as the primary focus. What do they want?

Research the user requirements, and set goals.
Who are they?
What they need?
Key reasons they visit your website?

Then you can identify what content to include and decide the key reasons they visit your website.

Principal mistakes companies make in designing their website:

Jam the home page - confuses and disappoints the visitor.

Text-heavy website - graphics and signposts will help visitors naivigate.

Combination of background and foreground colours - may meet the brand requirements but can the visitor see the navigation option?

All easily remedied at the planning stage.

So best of luck.

By Gomer Williams (HML Marketing Coordinator)

One of the biggest changes affecting business over the past 50 years has been the rise in importance of intangible assets, including brands. They typically account for between 30% and 70% of company’s market value, but in certain market sectors, such as luxury goods, this figure can be higher. Experts agree that value of intangibles has trebbled over the past 30 years. There is according to these experts, an ‘Intangible Revolution’ so company’s should prepare to  demonstrate the value of their brand-building activities.

What are Intangible assets?

• Technological assets (patents, copyright, know-how)
• Strategic assets (licences, natural monopolies)
• Reputational assets (Company, product and service brands)
• Human resources (skills and flexibility of employees)
• Organisation and culture (values that shape commitment and loyalty of employees)

Source: Value-Based Marketing, by Perter Doyle. (Wiley 2000)

And now new accounting practices such as the IFRS3 on ‘Business Combinations’ requires listed companies to break down the value of intangible assets into 5 categories to highlight value of brand acquisitions, rather than group them under ‘goodwill’. Some time soon we may see ‘Brand Equity’ in the Profit and Loss to highlight the marketplace i.e. the place where the profit arrived, rather than what to spend its money on.

So where do you start?

1. Clearly articulated market overview showing opportunities, view of competitors and perceived advantages
2. The Strategy
3. Critical value creating activities; brand, innovation, customers, people, supply chain, environmental
4. Financial performance

‘Most companies start at (4) and work backwards, with very few articulating at the front end, what drives their financial performance.‘ according to David Phillips, senior partner at PwC.

Summarised Courtesy of Gomer Williams CIM (HML Marketing 2007) 
Acknowledge: Jane Simms, The Marketer Apr 2007

Brands are the key intangibles in most businesses. Survey after survey shows that intangibles typically account for between 30% and 70% of a companies market value. Intangibles such as brand, are transforming management and reporting practice. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) outlines a number of inititiatives coming into force to account for intangibles. The IFRS3 is an international reporting standard to be introduced on 1 Januray 2007 that will require companies to breakdown the value of intangibles when valuing a company; no longer lumping them together in the catch-all ‘goodwill‘ phrase. 

Read more..

by Jane Simms (Marketing News 2006)