I know you are probably thinking I am going to chat about the little TM symbol signifying a registered trademark on an item, short answer, no

And so to “trademarks”, I heard about this through my wife’s school, they are working with the students on establishing things that are of value to them and they call them trademarks, the things that clearly point out what their class stands for - tolerance - forgiveness - support etc… Now when I talk to businesses, large med or small, the values they have become an issue and its usually early on in the discussion. Now if I talk about “trademarks” I can do the same but make it a bit more ’street smart’ for some of these organisations.

Which does it for you? Which do you appreciate and or understand better, values or trademarks? I guess for me it was a difficult paradigm shift at first but when I looked at it in the cold hard light of day, using ‘trademarks’ was in many cases more straight forward.

So lets give it a go…

What things are your trademarks? E.G. things that are vital and or important above all else to your business. Here are some examples.

• Profit

• People

• Customer service

• OHS

Okay there are some basics, now what would you do to embellish these to make them MORE of your ‘trademark’, things that you would be able to assist or tell your staff about the CORE things of high interest (of value) to your business.

Profit, (hey you’re in business right… not a charity) lets focus on this one for now, so how do you add to that one word to ‘tell yourself and the staff’ about it, what qualities if you like would make it stand out, or seem better for you (and in the end them). - lets try this, “We develop sustainable profitability as it is one indicator that we are providing goods and or services that are valued by our consumers.” Okay now instead of just profit, we are afer sustainable (ongoing) profit, and we use it as an indicator our goods and services are valued, now it has more MEANING, meaning that is of use to us.

Using this to our advantage, we can cover people that think we are too money hungry, if we just say profit for example, and use it as an idicator of our effectiveness. So over time, if we made a $10k profit and then in the next time frame we made a $15k profit then we are simply grabbing more customers and influencing them to buy, our market share must therefore be up! (It’s simplistic I know but hey its a basic indicator at this stage.)

Lets go further, lets note that it is an indicator, so for this to work we would need to measure things to be able to report it has grown, if its in decline then we would want to make urgent changes to the system to improve the profit. (Powerful huh!)

I hope you can see that the org’s values and ‘trademarks’ are one and the same, and can be very useful in making things happen in your organsiation large med or small.

Explore the idea of ‘trademarks’ with your people, ask them what are the most important things at the core of the business, start a list of words (like I did above) and then work to add to that to give each one more meaning. Then your business will develop a solid foundation to work from, be able to see what things need development and then you can put in place action plans to make them happen as they will have more meaning than before.

For more information on “Trademarks” click here.

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