An image that works for you!

Most successful businesses contact a marketing, design, or public relations agency when they want to create or improve their company, product, or service image. It's the responsibility of those agencies to apply creativity to the task, identifying alternatives and avenues that present your company or offerings in the most positive light.

If you're in a position to make decisions about the image that is being created or improved, don't respond to agency pressures to select an image that might be a mismatch and prove less effective. To facilitate good decision-making, always formulate your initial decision without bias or input from the agency itself. Ask your agency to provide unbiased presentations and ordering of selections for all proposed alternatives. Then, draw on your own company resources to determine the one that is the best fit for your company. After all, no one knows your company quite like you do. After you've made your preliminary decision, ask the agency for its recommended selection. If it differs from your selection, ask the agency why that alternative is better than the one you selected.

Be particularly wary of an agency rationale such as hot, trendy, the latest, especially if it's not backed by market research from your industry. Remember, the reason for the selection needs to be based on improving your company, product, or service image--not the portfolio of the agency. As long as you're in touch with your own company, its philosophy, its sales force, your industry, and your competition, no one is in a better position to make the decision than you. But do be receptive to new ideas, especially if the agency can explain its recommendation in light of those parameters. There's an advantage in an outsider's objectivity, but only when that outsider really understands your business!

You don't have to follow in the footsteps of the industry-at-large. Just make sure that when you launch that new image, your trail-blazing steps are controlled ones based on well-understood risks!

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