Bucharest seen from the top of the Arch of triumph

Brand Evolution and the Progress Mark

In The evolution of brands there are some stages of development.

The first stage is the Trademark. It’s the first stage of development for an incipient brand, which is at the level of legally protecting its elements of intellectual property. This stage is inferior comparing to the usual brand, accepting that a brand is more than a Trademark.

The second stage is the “usual brand” – a brand that has reached a certain development. These brands are known by their target and are associated with various ideas or characteristics. Most times they are known for something good, for something different or something good and different.

The third stage of development is the Trustmark – a brand that succeeded in earning the trust of its customers. A trustmark developed further than a “usual brand” because it is not just known for something good and different, but it gained the trust of a large part of its target group. A trust mark benefits of the trust of its consumers.

The fourth stage of development is the LoveMark – a brand that is loved by its customers, that benefits of loyalty beyond reason. The lovemarks are the brands that gained not only the trust of their target group, but also have strong emotional links with the individuals in their target group.

I believe that another brand concept exists: The Progress Mark. A progress mark can be also a trust mark or a love mark. It is not another stage of brand development, but is a particular case for brands that are successful.

A progressmark is a brand that pursues the personal and / or professional development of its customers. A progress mark has the trust of the public and has created some emotional links with its target group.

A progressmark is something that people use when they want to be better professionally or personally.

A very good example of a progressmark is a good university. Somebody buys the university’s services for professional development (the actual knowledge received) and personal development (being a part of an elite group).
The customer of an university wants to progress in his or her career and life, and knows that that university will help him or her make that progress.

Another example of a progressmark is that of a publishing house. The customers of a publishing house buy the books or magazines for their intellectual development (professional or cultural).
Universities, training companies, publishing houses are obvious examples for a progress mark, but progress marks are not only about education and culture.

For example a tool manufacturer can develop a new tool that will help its customers work better and faster. For sure this is a progressmark because the customer made a considerable progress in being more efficient in his or her work.

Even a store can be a progress mark if it helps people find faster what they are looking for, or having trained personnel that helps people making the best decision and not spending money on something that they don’t need.

I gave some examples of categories of products or services where progressmarks can develop, but these are not the only categories and not all members in these categories can become ProgressMarks.

The long way from communism to democracy

In December 1989 in Romania took place a revolution. Its goal was to change the communist regime. Some historians say that the revolution was prepared by foreign secret services. That’s probably right, but one certain thing is that people died in that revolution - The revolution for democracy.

Now, 20 years later, I see that we still have a long way to democracy. I don’t mean democracy as political democracy. We have that. We vote, there have been changes of power between different parties; we have free speech, free press, private property, private businesses etc.

I mean that we still have a long way to go in really empowering the people in daily life. In real life we Romanians don’t have the power in small matters like the relationship with banks, hypermarkets, real estate developers, state authorities or any other kind of organization that we pay.

For example real estate prices are similar with other countries in the EU. Last year a one-bedroom apartment (one bedroom and a living room) with a surface of 70 sqm was priced at 90.000 euros (about 130.000 USD). Unfortunately in Romania the minimum wage is about 150 euros (200 USD). In Bucharest the capital city of Romania a young person (up to 35 YO) can earn about 700 euros per month (I’m talking about the average person with high education). So a family of 2 average young people can’t afford more than the one-bedroom apartment and that by taking a loan for 25 years.

Also there is no power to the people in the relationship with banks because we have huge loan costs. There are situations that banks have doubled the monthly pay of a loan.

Also we have huge prices for food. The tomatoes are 1.5 euros / kilo, a lot more than in other EU countries.

I personally had an awful experience with one of my company’s suppliers that did not respect the contract and I could do nothing because I needed them and there were no other suppliers in that field.

We are not yet used to democracy, to the power of saying “NO”, to the right of not being bullied around by state authorities or by imbecile companies.

20 years have passed from the 1989 revolution. How many years do we still need to have true democracy in our day to day life?

I’ve lost 3 businesses in 5 years

I have 6 and half years of entrepreneurship.

At the age of 20 while in university along with other colleagues I’ve started an NGO of students called DaAfaceri (YesBusiness). Its goal is to support young people to start their own businesses. It was not much, but we have contributed to some startups and other students that took contact with the NGO got better jobs that they would have got without the NGO.

I left this NGO after almost two years of being president so that other students will get the chance to take it further. In November this year the NGO will be 7 years old.

After I left DaAfaceri (the NGO) I’ve started a small business along with another member of this organization. We were at the age of 22 and we said: “After what we did with the NGO we can’t fail”. Well it took us 5 months to fail. We lost all of our money, we had no investors and our project was a disaster.

It took me 6 months to recover from that failure.

In the summer of 2005 we (the two associates in the company) finished the university and decided to separate.

In September 2005 I have decided to try again on my own. I had no money (in fact I had about 350 USD), but I said that if I do not try again, I’d be sorry.

So I din try again this time with a less ambitious project. And with a lot of hard work, a lot of enthusiasm and not that much business knowledge I was successful … at least for about 16 months.

The business made little money, the market was very small, I wanted it to grow, but soon I realized that there was no place to grow unless I made a large investment. I didn’t have the money to invest; there were no investors willing to invest (in fact in Romania there are very few investors that are venture capitalists and invest in startups).

So in march 2007 I said that my small, very small business is almost broke. So I decided to start a new business along with a friend, a business on training for companies – marketing and management trainings for companies. That business is called PICANT.

PICANT started in July 2007 and we were more successful than we expected. It is true that we didn’t expect too much. 2008 started a little slow and business wasn’t very good, but since May 2008 till December 2008 the business was booming. We worked 6 days a week at least 10 hours a day.

The money was ok, we’ve built a nice brand and 95% percent of our customers were very happy with our trainings.

Unfortunately in 2009 the Economic Crisis touched Romania and the companies cut off their training and marketing budgets. So we who sold marketing trainings lost another business.

The great thing is that we are only 27 years old. (My partner turned 27 last week. I still am 26 for the next 3 months).

So after almost seven years of entrepreneurship, at the age of 27, maybe it is time to do some business…

Elections for the European Parliament

On 7th of June in all the 27 EU countries will be held elections for the European Parliament.

The European Parliament is a unique structure, being the EU’s Legislative. The European Parliament in theory represents the 490 million citizens of the EU.

But it is expected that only about 30% of the voting population to take part in these elections.

This might mean that Europeans are not that much interested in the EU… What I believe it’s very encouraging is the fact that a lot of young citizens will vote. At least this time the young ones will chose the future and not the ones over 70.

Enjoy the EU Anthem

Peace and Prosperity

Have you noticed that most of the fairy tales with young (male) heroes that fight with some kind of evil creature or person end with the young hero becoming king? And all of these fairy tails end with the phrase “And the new king brought peace and prosperity”?

Well, it seams that today’s leaders of the world ignored all of these fairy tales, because in the last hundred years no one understood that war and military spending will not bring prosperity to the people.

All of the wars were followed by recessions and hard times for the simple citizens.

I heard an economist’s (I can’t remember the name) speech on FORA.tv saying that now we have the same situation as the one after a war, but without a war. Well… some of the world’s strongest economies are at war (USA and UK) for at least 8 years.

The USA and other countries spent huge amounts of money on the military budget in the last 8 years. Why this taxpayer’s money wasn’t spent on investments that all the taxpayers would benefit?

We all need leaders that bring peace and prosperity!

Enjoy this Manowar song on war heroes and remember that these wars and war heroes belong in fairy tales.

Weird road signs