DW's Blog

Addition By Subtraction

by DW Green — November 15, 2023

No one brand can possibly have universal appeal.

Can a successful retail brand appeal to everybody? Nope. No one brand can possibly have universal appeal. Since you can’t be everything to all people successfully, you must purposefully limit what you offer and to whom. When you are identifying your strategic initiatives, choices about what not to do (subtraction) are just as important as choices about what to do (addition). Your success depends on the trade-offs you are willing to make. Simply put, a trade-off means that more of one thing necessitates less of another. A supermarket can choose to offer more service departments, adding labor costs and higher retails, or it can choose not to, offering less service and lower retails, but it cannot do both without bearing major inefficiencies.In a recent conversation with a high profile and successful Northwest retailer, I learned about their thoughtful and discriminating approach to creating their private label product line. The retailer understood that to be brand successful they needed to limit their retail brand product line to ensure the products themselves reflected the same brand benefits of the store brand itself. Only selecting items in product categories that could be distinguishable f...

by DW Green — November 8, 2023

Brand marks are like punctuation symbols…

A Brand mark is a simple, clean, and easily remembered graphic representation of a company’s Brand name. Brand marks are like punctuation symbols:. stop
, pause
; pause longer
! exclamation mark
? question mark Brand marks and icons can represent a deeper meaning of a company’s purpose or an abstract expression like the Nike swoosh. We have a Northwest client whose brand mark is a sailboat. Who would have thought of a sailboat icon for a food store? The sailboat is very meaningful to their company culture. It’s meaningful to me too. I’m proud to wear their caps and jackets that showcase their company icon.The DW Green icon reflects our design mantra “Less is greater than more.”So, if you’re considering a new or updated design for your company’s brand mark, give us a call.

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Patience

by DW Green — October 4, 2023

Patience is the natural ground of your being, whereas impatience arises out of fear and conditioning.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and it takes about nine months from conception for a baby to be born. Many things just take time to complete. Remember the movie Deepwater Horizon. The film, a dramatization of the April 2010 disaster when the offshore drilling rig, Deepwater Horizon, exploded, causing the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Poor judgment based on greed and impatience resulted in the deaths of 11 workers and billions of dollars of damages.More about Deepwater Horizon Explosion >Fortunately, these types of mega disasters don’t happen often. But impatience can result in undo stress, unhappiness, and poor judgment. Impatience can impact us, physically and mentally both personally and professionally. From a business standpoint, major projects like store remodels, new website roll outs, creating and implementing new marketing plans or brand development plans all take time to execute. Rushing their completion dates to meet forecasted, often-arbitrary timelines can cause problems including unexpected and unnecessary costs. And even when these large projects are completed, evaluati...

by DW Green — September 27, 2023

Focus on one task at a time.

Several years ago, a chiropractor friend shared with me a valuable insight: the concept of multitasking is, in fact, illusory. He pointed out that while humans can efficiently multitask with motor skills, such as walking and chewing gum simultaneously, the same does not apply to mental skills. In many instances, we find ourselves attempting to juggle multiple mental tasks concurrently—whether it’s engaging in one activity while our thoughts meander elsewhere or managing three distinct tasks at once, like conversing on the phone, doing the dishes, and preparing a pot of tea. Unfortunately, this often results in none of these tasks receiving our full attention, leaving our mental focus divided and strained. For me, mental multitasking resembles an illusion, like water in a mirage, a dream, an echo, a reflection, or even a hallucination—where everything seems distinct and apparent but ultimately lacks true existence. Thus, the wise approach is to focus on one task at a time, being fully present and engaged in whatever the current task demands.