Fresh New Web Site - Feels like Spring!

If you have more time on your hands, and a few dollars left in your budget - consider reviewing and evolving your web site for higher returns. What ever gains you make now will reap rewards when the market picks up. The market will be a new market, likely quite different from where we came from - but as always your clients will appreciate (and reward) fresh, timely, simple to navigate web sites that expound beliefs, explain the proposition and say and do it all in an authentic tone.

DUO.CA, my marketing and design firm has just launched our new site and we are all invigorated! We invite you to visit http://www.duo.ca and to talk to us about how you can evolve and relaunch your web site with our expertise and the drupal open source backbone.

Keep your chin up and focus on the horizon. There are lessons here. Innovate your methods and put your clients at the very top of your priorities - keep them there, communicate with them regularly, tell them your story and invite them to know you better. Respect, value, relationship building efforts and continuity will be rewarded.

Do Not Go Silently Into The Night

I am giddy with excitement. For the past six months and more, we have been focused on research and development, we have been putting the finishing touches on our new service offering, and through it all, we have been producing a printed NEED TO KNOW newsletter that arrives by mail each and every month personally addressed to you. You are our valued client or you are someone we want as our valued client.

Sharing our ideas for leveraging your marketing communications and sales, demonstrating the power and value of storytelling, and offering a monthly dose of creativity to get your creative juices flowing is the order of our day, every day. So when the economy took a beating, we became the evangelist of being creative instead of reactive, of being smart and vocal when others are silent, and of questioning each and everything you do and have ever done with a view to innovating for measured outcomes.

The January issue of NEED TO KNOW is entitled On Your Mark. Get Set. Go! It is a double-issue loaded with ideas to move your market. But before you embark on a brave new path for marketing communications and sales, answer this one question: Are you in this business for the long term? If you answer YES, then don’t miss the January issue of NEED TO KNOW. It is your road map to winning in this economy and the next.

If you have been receiving NEED TO KNOW each month, look for your special issue on your desk the week of January 7. If you want to start receiving this provocative newsletter, send your full mailing address to info@duo.ca and we will put you on our mailing list pronto.

Why be silent when you can tell your story to your 100 most important clients, employees, suppliers, donors, investors...and be heard? Use this opportunity to stop doing what you’ve always done and evolve and innovate your way to greatness.

As I said in my opening, I am giddy with excitement – you should be too.

Best of the season to you and your family.
It will be a great new year if you take the word REACTIVE and move the C to the front, making your future CREATIVE. Be thoughtful, purposeful, inclusive, and unforgettable.

Regards,
Nora

Nora Camps
DUO Strategy and Design Inc.
416 255 0775
ncamps@duo.ca

http://www.duo.ca

brand marketing communications strategy publications

Keep the child in you!

Your role as a leader is to plan like an adult and believe like a child.

Have you lost your youthful step, your sense of wonder?
Here is a challenge: Tell a story about your last trip, share observations that enable your family and your associates to see the person who still sees the world with wonder, who revels in fun.

"When I Grow Up" by Marchette Chute.
When I grow up, I'll carry a stick and be very dignified, I'll have a watch that will really tick, My house will be tall and made of brick, And no one will guess that it's just a trick, And I'm really myself inside.

There is a time for adventure, to believe in the unusual tactic, to bet that what is essentially good in people can be coaxed out for everyone's benefit.

For example, do you have enough optimism to leverage what might appear to be a SOFT initiative. SOFT initiatives can provide very HARD (read: financially sound) results.
Read: SOFT becomes HARD at http://www.duo.ca/hello/articles.asp?section=2

There are no AVERAGE days - thanks be

Being the first one in the studio has a certain privilege. I set my computer bag down near the rocking chair, hang up my jacket and search for the clicker to control the stereo. Brahms today, loud, before the guys come in.

Espresso maker on, I wait for the gurgling and move into my own space, deep blue art-covered walls and a large window facing the city, with a hairline view of the lake. Computer on, I lean back, and consider my top three deliverables for the day:

1. Dash off four letters about new articles for Special Glasses magazine
2. Add polish to an article on our research about featuring little-to-moderate text for legibility for interest, for action.
3. Submit proposals including flow charts to demonstrate progressive deliverables.

The front door opens and with it the instant panic of paws on the too-smooth floor as, one of two dogs has arrived, with master in tow. Is it Darko and Bella or Jason and Denby? The quieter of the two is Jason (and Denby),who will pop his head into my office only after he has settled in for the day. We have been in touch late into the evening before, exchanging ideas and outcomes around a design project. Text messaging is handy for communicating, in short code with my kids and the extended DUO team.

The door opens again and Raymond enters. He sets down his satchel and plunks himself down on my blue sofa. Today we review design concepts for an annual report, an exciting milestone, and Raymond is clearly animated and ready. The client presentation is two days from today. This is what we work for, to synthesize our ideas and strategies with the client’s aims and needs, to achieve a piece that is elegant and powerful.

The next two issues of our own publication NEED TO KNOW are laid out and ready for review or, for scrutiny, to be more accurate. Committing thoughts and beliefs to print in order to share those with peers, clients and those we want as clients is a process that requires courage tempered by careful deliberation, each and every month.

Darko and Bella enter. Bella comes looking for a scratch and a treat. Our canine ‘girls’ add a certain grounded-ness to the studio atmosphere. The studio is our calm oasis as we settle into the day. We draw comfort from our collegiality, engaged in the grand enterprise of graphic design and marketing communications strategy.

We have been together as a core group for more than 10 years. Through interest and inclination we sublimate the business of our clients and endeavour to express it through the opportunity at hand. There are days when I no sooner settle in and begin to work, only to discover that it is now late afternoon and the day has flown by. I can't understand when people describe how their work week drags on. I feel fortunate to be doing what I love - but then I would not suffer it any other way.

Here is where our confidence resides – through our ingenuity and tactical approach, DUO STRATEGY AND DESIGN is evolving again after 26 years. Our new signature offering, a tactic, produces very satisfying results. We will convene as a team tomorrow to discuss our web site redesign and the next issue of Special Glasses magazine.

We welcome you to join us as a visionary client. Would you like to apply storytelling to your communications? Would you like to add ‘gravitas’ to your brand by attaching purposely selected residual memories? Would you like to extend/expand a single belief into a legacy?

I welcome you to DUO.CA
Nora
416 255 0775

Ideas for today – in books from yesterday

Here are some works of fiction that have concepts that translate vividly to today.

Reading List:
Atlas Shrugged by Anne Rand 1957
Pudd'n'head Wilson by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) 1894
Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley 1928
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri between 1308-1321

Market Crashing! World Evolving?

What does it mean? Should we stop in our tracks and hunker down for a long winter with a cellar full of potatoes, squash and Vanity Fair magazines? Does it mean that we adjust our value meter so that we ensure each dollar we spend is well placed...well considered...well judged, or do we optimistically keep on carrying on just as we have been - shopping across the border when our dollar shines?

In speaking to another small business owner the day the USA House of Representatives voted no to the $700 billion rescue plan - the strategy was clear and precise...review every client and be able to demonstrate how we add value to the bottom line, how we are not an expense to do without...how we are an integral partner. Of course this is a brilliant strategy regardless of the economy!

One week later the senate approved the bail-out plan and we seemed to breath a sigh of relief that once again we didn't have to take responsibility for our actions. Could it be true that 85% of voters in North America want to have the Government regulate, legislate and generally control all the facets of their life? It seems everyone is looking for the next leader who will bring their company, their county, their local, national and global economy out of the red.

We deserve a house, a car or two, holidays, $100 jeans, cell phones for every family member and flat screen TV's!!! It's the dream - the great North American hallucination. The only difference between the red maple leaf and stars and stripes is that Canadians cannot deduct interest payments from income when filing income tax returns - otherwise we northern neighbors bench mark ourselves against our southern brothers.

Forward through the rearview mirror. [Marshall McLuhan]

The 1929 stock market crash ushered in the Great Depression. Stocks were down about 80% from their high, high, highs in the late 1920’s. Demand for goods declined. New investment could not be financed and the banking system was in chaos. President Roosevelt closed banks in the the USA for three days – referred to as a "bank holiday." A select few banks re-opened with limits on withdrawals. Eventually, confidence returned to the system and banks were able to perform the functions of savings and loans.

In the 1970’s the USA experienced Stagflation, a condition of slow economic growth and relatively high unemployment - a time of stagnation. Fuel was in short supply and North Americans realized for the first time that they were dependent on fossil fuels. Bicycling was went through the biggest boom in USA's history.

In 1983, we experienced the Goldilocks economy. What was considered to be a recession ended in 1991 with a steady and steep upward climb, low inflation rates and low unemployment.

Canada's economy depends about 75% on the USA, so Canada is vulnerable when the USA is vulnerable. Canada has a resource economy: oil and metals, natural resources but unless Canada sells fully 75% overseas and 25% to the USA, they will remain within yanking distance.

Lessons are learned in a bad economy. Lots of lessons. For example, Canada did invest in sub-prime mortgages and so, out of this debacle new regulations will float to ensure that sub-prime investments are a thing of the distant past. Made in China looks like it no longer passes the purchase test and people might be wiling to pay a little more for something manufactured in North America – we might even increase the middle class, the working class. The big lesson is about being a debt economy, about not relying on home equity to finance other purchases and we need to consider, in a very serious way, our dependence on energy or fuel.

So is the ecological plan completely different than the plan for the economy... Preservation, pollution reduction, revising how and why we travel...thinking twice before we make a short-sighted decision to strip lumber off the sides of mountains – these are ecological considerations, but they are also reminiscent of leveraging what we have for short term gains. My brother told me the other day that the Ice Age was only 10,000 years ago...That’s incredibly recent, actually. Is this a wake up call? A time, finally, to be forced to stop and ponder many of our recent bad decisions around over-building, around cashing out farmland, around water, product and the actual cost of fuel – in production, consumption and to the environment.

What have you done differently as a result of the screaming headlines and the doom and gloom forecast for a worsening situation? There are gross excesses and abuses yet it seems no critical lessons will be learned this time around either.

It's acid raining on my SUV!

Falling into the Generation Gap

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity. ~Christopher Morley

We have always had generation gaps what we haven’t had before was 30 year old music and 55 year old musicians being played by our teens. This is an opportunity!

For me It begins with talking to teenagers, and five year old nieces and the girls across the street... driving long distances together listening as one person dj’s the music and everyone comments... And then one person begins to sing something about cutting my hair changing my name and becoming a rock star...which is funny and (kind of) endearing and that song will forever be the song of the cottage drive...Or yelling Hey! that’s song’s going to blow my speakers when my son chooses: Love Lockdown by Kanye West, which begins a discussion on base and bands, ear plugs and hearing loss... Moving right along to why so many rockers use drugs... Kris Kristofferson said in an interview that it was because facing the massive crowds and being ON and at the TOP of your game – required some help...

TV and Video games divide us...because they exclude real life interaction. Playing Rock Band, the interactive game, together and/or good old fashion drives in the country provide the opportunity to tell stories, ask questions and establish trajectories for personal experience sharing. A recent trip to Italy prompted a story which became an inside joke with my daughter, which is now a story written down for posterity [ http://nora-creativechaos-unbridled.blogspot.com/2008/07/here-is-story-i-shared-with-my-kids.html] Make the Time and Take the Trouble to get to talk with as many generations as possible. A lunch out with small children is so worthwhile that the expense can be written off as focus group testing or research and development... Stay with your own sort, your own generation and grow narrow and long toothed.
~Nora

Stubborness does have its helpful features. You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow. ~ Glen Beaman