There are thousands of organizations that provide investment advice to everyone from the smallest investor who wants to grow and protect their nest egg to corporate retirement funds where so much is at stake they hire institutional portfolio managers to manage hundreds of millions of dollars. These money managers all attempt to out perform the stock market. Obviously, some do and some don’t; and, the top performers beat the market by several percentage points on an annual basis.

This is where it gets interesting.

The top performer doesn’t always win the business of managing the money. If performance were the only measure, then ½ of 1% of all of the money managers out there would have all the money to manage. They don’t and here’s why.

Other factors enter into the buying and hiring decisions. What is their investment philosophy? What is their style, large or small, value or growth? What are the risk factors? How diversified is the portfolio? Where does service and reporting enter into the equation? What are the client needs? Answers to these questions plus some emotional factors enter into the decision making process. Good performance is only the price of entry.

The most successful money managers with large pools of assets under management have excellent track records plus offer great service, market knowledge, are very responsive to their investors and manage investor relations extremely well. If you are a marketer with a product that is out performing the competition and are not capturing the market share you would like, look beyond performance. Think about conducting a brand audit to determine how you compare to the competition beyond product performance.



The idea that brands are like people is not a new thought. You often hear the terms brand personality, or brand character. Both terms make you think of a person. The brands are like people analogy is easy to understand in these terms. The thought of reinventing yourself to tie the brand / people analogy together may not be as obvious, but it’s important.

Successful people continually reinvent themselves. Yesterday’s CPA at a large accounting firm is today’s portfolio manager. The medical doctor interning at a large city hospital with a passion for infectious disease becomes medical director of the World Health Organization. In both cases the core person never changed. However, in both cases they continually improved their individual product offering. In short, they got better by reinvesting in themselves.

The same holds true for brands. Here are the five main reasons brands need to reinvest and reinvent.

1.     The consumer changes. Keep in mind that your target audience is constantly changing. They develop new tastes, attitudes and shopping habits.

2.     The competition changes. Count on a new and emerging competitor entering your market place, or an existing competitor offering a new product or spending more marketing dollars.

3.     Economic conditions change. How often have you heard the phrase lately, the reality of the new frugality? The recession has created new perceptions by both businesses and consumers. Some of these perceptions are based on fact while many are psychological. All need to be considered relative to your core brand.

4.     Communications methods are changing. Websites, social media, smart phones, e-readers, personal scanners for shopping and continually streaming information from all of these sources have a profound affect on how people perceive you. An organization’s ability to adapt to new communications trends is crucial.

5.     Your people change. New employees create a new dynamic within your company that needs to be carefully managed. Are they living your brand? A dialogue with employees will tell you if you need to do more employee training or use what you learn from them to tweak the brand.

At their core, great brands last a long time. Great brands are also dynamic. As circumstances change they make adjustments. They reinvest to reinvent.



Branding requires sacrifice. Companies with successful brands willingly carve away the minutia, and sculpt away those pieces of clay they won’t need. To define a brand persona requires the bravery to remove all the unnecessary clay to sharpen your image. Timidity and indecision will create an organization that will look like, well, an indiscernible lump of clay. Your target audience will view you as through a cloudy lens.

Some organizations believe the path to success is to be all things to all people. A case in point is a potential client that came in to the office for a cup of coffee and a discussion about branding. First thing I was handed was the business card. It listed no less than five different key competencies, all presented in equal weight. They were even listed in alphabetical order so as to make sure not one competency would seem more important than any other. The question was how do they penetrate their target market. They had great capabilities and still couldn’t garner the amount of business the competition does.  Competencies and capabilities are not a brand. They are product offerings.

Your brand is your story, and how people relate to your organization in rational and emotional ways. Your story needs to be sharp and to the point. Great brands are simple, easy to understand and can be told in a brief elevator conversation.

The simple idea that a sculptor throws away the clay they don’t need came from an artist friend when asked about their creative process. As you work through your creative process to define your brand, be a sculptor. Throw away what’s not important or relevant to your core brand. The challenge will be how much clay and which parts you throw away, but at least you will be on the right track.



Ink quickly became a favorite destination for pen enthusiasts of all stripes. Business was brisk, and the pens-by-appointment model allowed Barry to ensure that every customer always received his undivided attention. But then 2008 arrived, and with it the Great Recession. The high-end pen market shrunk, business fell off, and the store that had reinvented retail was itself in need of a little reinvention.  Barry wasn’t sure yet where his business was headed, but one thing was certain: he needed to sell all of his existing merchandise and start from scratch.

Since Kazoo had helped launch the business, Barry asked us to create an email marketing campaign to publicize his “moving forward” sale in a fun, positive way. The messaging we crafted remained true to the brand’s spirit of fun and friendship while paving the way for a new-and-improved Ink, one that was nimbler and better suited to the new frugality.

Several months and a few concessions to the traditional retail model later, Ink is in great shape. The store remains at its location in the IDS tower, but it’s now open weekdays from nine to four and walk-ins are welcome.  The pen selection is smaller, but because each pen is personally curated by Barry and supported by regular e-mail marketing, sales are strong. Business is once again brisk, and it looks like it will stay that way as Ink continues to grow, evolve, and adapt. 

 In the Twin Cities alone, there are thousands of men, women, childr en, and teens who don't have telephones. Some of them are homeless. Some of them are jobless. All of them are desperately poor. Without telephones, their troubles are compounded, and their ability to compete for jobs, housing, and services is diminished. Pay  phones solve only half of the problem, enabling the phone-less to make calls but not to receive them.

In 1994, a  nonprofit organization called Twin Cities Community Voice Mail was founded to confront this issue. For the past fifteen years, the organization has provided free voice mail service to nearly 60,000 people, enabling them to receive phone messages from family, friends, employers, health care providers, and others.

By 2010, however, the organization had expanded its operating are a b eyond the Twin Cities and had extended its service offerings to include cell phones and other communication tools. In other words, Twin Cities Community Voice Mail had outgrown its name in a major way. A brand makeover was in order.

We Kazooks led the organization's leadership through an exercise which helped them redefine their brand essence and develop a vision for the future. Once this strategic foundation was in place, we began the process of creating a new name for the organization. Out of a field of several dozen candidates, "Open Access Connections" was chosen as the name that best represented the organization's newly-clarified mission and longstanding democratic values.

"It's not easy being green." So sang Kermit, and we find the frog's words to be both wise and true. We Kazooks first discovered the challenges of being green earlier this year, when we took on our first green client, ShetkaStone. ShetkaStone takes paper out of the waste stream and recycles it into sustainable tabletops, countertops, moldings, tiles, vanities, office furniture, and more.

Though ShetkaStone has been in business since the early nineties, recent organizational changes prompted management to take a new look at the brand. They hired Kazoo to re-energize the company's identity and develop a visual and verbal language to help ShetkaStone tell its story and stand apart from the hundreds of other green products vying for attention in the building materials industry.

We started our rebranding process the same way we always do: with intensive internal meetings with managers and employees. We then took what we learned on the inside and tested it externally through interviews with architects, designers, and furniture manufacturers.

Next, we created a new logo and identity system: the visual signature of the ShetkaStone brand. The logo combines a sideways letter "S" (for "Shetka") with a simple paper airplane to create an attractive, playful image appropriate to a company that has found a creative way to repurpose waste paper. We followed that up with sales literature, presentation materials, a press kit, a trade show booth (made entirely of ShetkaStone, no less), and a website. (See a small sampling of our work for ShetkaStone here.)

Being green, it isn't easy. But it is fun, and we hope we'll have the opportunity to help other green companies tell their stories in the future. Viva planet earth!

Elliot recently got a new van, and the police department was kind enough to allow the biz association to put their own sign up on the van. They asked us if we had any big ideas for the design, and you know what? We totally did. 

The printing was donated by the Northeast Sir Speedy location. Here's a photo of Elliot with the van on the day the sign was installed:

 The reverse sides include contact information and a brief summary of the company's services. They look like this: 

At Kazoo, we're conflicted about branded entertainment's potential to influence consumers, mostly because it's done so badly so often. The following video from Microsoft is a particularly egregious example. Watch it. You will laugh.