Fragmentations, Extensions, Subs and Spin-Offs -Brand Yoga Can Save Your BusinessA Company’s brand is one of its largest, most important assets, one that takes years to develop, one that must be nurtured, massaged, cultured and maintained. For broad-based product and service companies, sometimes putting your brand through some yoga-like exercises can lead to tighter targeting, enhanced revenue and improved profitability. The creation of brand extensions, brand fragments, sub-brands and divisional spin-offs can allow your business to more closely identify potential customers, better serve existing customers, and create more value for the parent company over time.In general marketing practice, it is clear that being everything to everybody is not the most efficient way to market your company and its products. The one-size-fits-all approach leaves much to be desired, as it is wasteful and inefficient in reaching the right customers at the right time without falling on deaf ears 99% of the time. Yet, knowing this, many businesses still hold themselves out as offering “whatever you need, we can do,” in an effort to effectively attract and serve clients. Top-flight business executives have realized that building into their core business, “sticking to their knitting,” is a strong, effective strategy for solidity and growth.With the realization that the core business should be the only business, many companies divest themselves entirely of their non-core enterprises, effectively sacrificing the revenue from these businesses, regardless of their health. There are other solutions that are less grueling, primarily revolving effective use of brand.Service businesses, especially those who offer a wide range of related services to a variety of industries, are often over-extended – so much so that their brand effectiveness tends to suffer or is made so diffuse as to be irrelevant. One of the powerful elements of a well-defined brand is the ability of the company to create a set of narrowly realized characteristics that are easily recognizable and transferable to all services offered. Without that central running theme, the brand becomes less effective and loses its power.One solution to this challenge is to create sub-brands or extensions, each with slightly differing characteristics, to attach to the most closely related baskets of services. Market and customer research will often highlight clear break points among the services, allowing management to group them effectively, based on how customers use and perceive those services.Sub-brands are presented differently than extensions – typically, the new brand is launched along with a tag line identifying the parent brand, i.e. “Orange-Glo, an S.E. Johnson Company” – using the cache of the parent company brand, S.E. Johnson, to “buff” the new product, Orange-Glo and transfer those positive characteristics to the new product.An Extension tends to carry more of the parent brand’s appearance and nomenclature with it, and is most effective with closely related products. An example can easily be found in the processed food industry: Cheerios and Honey-Nut Cheerios. An extension is essentially a new flavor version of the original product. The new product carries all the same positive characteristics as the original, but is held out as an improvement or lateral shift to serve a new market. General Mills owns many brands, and several of them are cereals, but the Cheerios brand has been extended without using the parent company’s name.Fragmentation is when the main brand is broken down into separate entities all owned by the same parent company. Coldwell Banker successfully created fragments to contain some of their acquisitions and essentially gave their internal divisions an external brand. These included one for residential and one for commercial real estate, one for financial services, one for thrift services, and one for loan servicing, all of which carried the Coldwell Banker moniker along with them. Fragments can more easily be separated into and potentially sold as self-supporting, freestanding entities if they are profitable, allowing flexibility for the core business to remain consistent. These would be Spin-off companies, which from a brand standpoint take a few of the main characteristics as the original but roam the furthest of the bunch from the core business.Each of these brand adjustment strategies has a specific set of circumstances that trigger their implementation, based on the service model, customer profile, goals and objectives of the company and its management. Broad-spectrum service businesses are often well served by adopting a fragmentation strategy, allowing for baskets of services to be bundled and marketed more effectively to a tighter customer profile. More disparate conglomerate companies often benefit from a combination integration and spin-off strategy, which allows them to gain some specific resources under the main brand, polish them and standardize them, and then put them into action and launch the freestanding company without diverting significant operating resources to do it.Extension is often used to broaden the service or product mix incrementally to slowly penetrate new market niches and widen the target market for greater revenue. Sub brands are often used to integrate acquisitions and absorb the newly purchased company under the larger umbrella brand. This can only be taken so far, especially if the parent company has never shown evidence of a connection to or possessed the expertise in the new company’s core business. Best evidence of this in history is when AMF bought Harley Davidson motorcycles.AMF was known as a manufacturer of sporting goods, from bass boats to basketballs and bowling balls. On paper, seeing motorcycles as another piece of sports gear, AMF management applied the same manufacturing techniques and tolerances and marketing strategies to motorcycles, with disastrous results. AMF’s brand wasn’t strong enough to overcome the inherent business and production problems that followed.Quality, previously held at a premium, plummeted, tanking sales and nearly destroying the brand. A company once known for building bullet-proof cycles for a very specific segment of the riding population, now offered troublesome, leaky, unreliable bikes that spent more time in the shop than on the road, and that had to be positioned at the rear of public parades to protect those behind from the parts flying off. H-D’s management eventually bought the company back from AMF, and implemented highly effective, rigid production standards and started rebuilding the brand. They eventually turned a near failure into one of the most rousing successes in product brand history, creating an iconic American brand in the process.HD’s brand is now one of the strongest in the country, and now lends its own cache to hundreds of carefully screened and scrutinized licensed products, driving huge revenue streams and building the brand further, and spawning its own sub brands including Buell (an acquisition), Screaming Eagle (a partnership), and HD Street (an extension).Clearly, all these brand gymnastics are not to be taken lightly, but undertaken after significant introspection and consideration by senior management. If their expertise in-house doesn’t include brand experience above the product level, often a qualified consultant is enlisted to help guide them through the murky waters of touchy-feely brand differentiation, in conjunction with a qualified business transition team. However it’s done, a plan is needed to map out the strategy for the forward five years, to allow the team to assess the potential impact of these moves and to take steps to mitigate any negative fallout from the changes.Whatever route a company takes, the change in brand status will allow them to more tightly group and accurately target prospective customers, serve them better, and maintain higher customer retention rates, boosting lifetime value. It can build more robust revenue streams over time, and in some cases, these types of changes can allow marginal businesses to weather economic strife, grow more powerful and build cache sufficient to allow greater success in the future.

In recent years technology has made tremendous advancements. These advancements have reshaped the organisations by creating their business functions integrated and streamlined. Beyond the standard office computers and smart devices, organisations are now implementing new software’s and latest technology equipment’s to run their operations smoothly. One such technological advancement is Slide presentation software PowerPoint is one of the widely used Slide Presentation Software. It is a powerful tool to make your presentation more attractive and engaging. If you want visual effect, collaboration tools, easy access, then PowerPoint will be the perfect option.

Nowadays in every field, there is huge competition. Business and professional firms use the presentation as a tool to educate, train, motivate the internal and external audience. At any point in time, you may require to give a presentation. The presentation is an essential part of branding because the presentation is the primary source which companies use for communication with clients, general public etc. The presentation demonstrates the company profile, and it’s the only tool which makes sure that all your representatives are turning into sales. A well-designed presentation shows presenters professionalism and also builds organisations corporate image.

Presenters are mainly of two types. Firstly, the great ones, who with their commanding charisma, speaking skills and great presentation styles can grasp the audience attention and secondly the Mediocre one who only focuses on the content of the presentation. They come up with great with great content and speak amazingly but fails in their presentation skills. Many times, lacks in gaining audience attention.

You may have complex data for presentation, a great content will be a scrap if not delivered in an entertaining way. Templates contains layout, colour, fonts, effects. powerpoint template helps to convey the information in an attractive way, grabbing the audience attention throughout the topic.

Benefits of an Effective Presentation:

• Face to Face Interaction: A presentation enables to meet your customers and prospects. Face to face interactions strengthens the relation and bond with the customers. An effective presentation can improve sales. According to a recent survey conducted, face to face meetings is fifteen times better than other marketing activities.
• Engagement: Presentation is the easiest way to engage with the audience. Attractive slides, astonishing layouts can hold the audience attention easily. Bullet points and summary texts help the audience to focus on the main subjects.
• Flexibility: Flexibility is the vital feature of the presentation. It helps in saving the time of professionals. PowerPoint presentations allow the user to quickly change the content and change the designs based on the audience.

• Adds professionalism: Presentation can decide the success of any business meetings. The presenter should convey the information most attractively and entertainingly. Adding attractive templates can ensure maximum engagement of audience over the topic.

• Storage: After the presentation, the slides can be quickly distributed among the members for further reference. It can easily be saved on the computers which minimise the chance of loss or misplacement.

• Presentation Important for Business Growth: Having a superior product can never result in success. Advertisement of the product is also mandatory. The product demonstration should be attractive, clear to the audience. The presentation should be eye-catching and should create a lasting impression on the audience. Adding an attractive slide, Infographics icons can ease the work of the presenter.

• Adds Creativity: Nobody like a wall of text, the presentation should look interesting and conveying. The audience can easily remember visual information. Adding images to illustrate point will surely make your presentation engaging. PowerPoint allows the user to add creative clipart’s, attractive fonts to the presentation.

I believe that in order to judge the true efficiency and performance of a trading system, one need to trade every set up that it offers, not just the ones that occur when you happen to be at your trading desk. If you apply an automated trading system to your trading you will be able to accurately assess your system to determine its effectiveness. Trading programs are a very effective means of eliminating errors and emotions from your Forex trading. For this reason alone, many discretionary traders moved over to automated trading programs.

Automated trading strategies are becoming increasingly popular amongst private individual Forex traders. In a recent study conducted (by IBFX) 94% of traders said that they would use the same or increase the amount of automated trading they will perform in the next twelve months. Only 6% stated that they would decrease their use of automated trading strategies. On top of that the study also showed that as of September 2010,Guest Posting 56% of all trading activity on the New York Stock Exchange was high frequency, or computer automated trading.

In 2004 Algorithmic trading made up a mere 4% of total Forex trading. By 2007 this figure had risen to 28% and estimates are that currently around 50% of all Forex trades are automated and these figures are expected to continue to climb rapidly. There is no doubt that automated Forex trading systems are gaining in popularity.

The main reason for this growth in automated trading is technology. As technology is a driving force in most other fast moving sectors, so it has had a huge impact on Forex trading systems? The first major step towards the development of auto trading systems was the move away from floor trading to computerised trading. Once this occurred trading firms developed their own trading systems to place orders through the new electronic exchanges.

Retail traders now have access to technology that previously was only available to these large banks and institutional trading desks. With the highly advanced trading platforms now available to individual Forex traders around the globe, they can now compete on an equal footing. As traders began to implement automation in their Forex day trading systems they soon realised the huge opportunities that they presented. Traders began to share ideas and approaches and now automation is the way of the future for individual traders.

Automated strategies will improve your performance as your auto system is able to follow more markets, more efficiently, more of the time. Manual trading is limited to the number of hours you can stay focussed in a trading day. Realising this, many long time manual traders have moved over to Forex auto trading programs.

Automated trading systems are so much more efficient as they require less human intervention and therefore less cost. Traders may only have a few hours to spend on their trading each. An auto trading system will allow part-time traders to trade full time by trading the market on their behalf. Traders then just need to monitor their systems performance. Day traders are now able to focus more on research, system improvements and keeping up with market trends rather than sitting in front of their trading screen waiting for the next set up. This serves to improve their overall performance by focussing on important issues, not merely the mundane tasks.

I believe that in order to judge the true efficiency and performance of a trading system, one need to trade every set up that it offers, not just the ones that occur when you happen to be at your trading desk. If you apply an automated trading system to your trading you will be able to accurately assess your system to determine its effectiveness. Trading programs are a very effective means of eliminating errors and emotions from your Forex trading. For this reason alone, many discretionary traders moved over to automated trading programs.

Forex auto systems have become easier to build due to the availability of universal scripting languages such as MQL4 or Ninja script. These programming languages are not difficult to grasp and once you understand them, the possibilities are endless in terms of automated trading system development. Spend some time learning how to build your own auto trading program and you will then have the skills to create multiple systems for different markets, with unique objectives and targets. Professional traders have learnt that their time better spent in development than in implementation and for this, automated trading is the answer.