Concluding Part:Keypoints From The Speakers @ The Platform Enterprise Last Saturday

2^ND SPEAKER:Prof Anil Gupta

How To Grow A Business

Why Is Growing Your Business Important

1.To raise the economic value of your business

2.To bring about innovation

3.To employ and retain  top talent

Challenges

There are three major challenges

1.Strategic Challenge

2.Financial Challenge

3.Organizational Challenge

Six Strategies To Grow Your Business

Strategy number One

You as an entrepreneur must be growing with the market you are into first,ensure you maintain the normal market share with others.

Strategy Number Two

Increase your market share either by doubling it WALMART did it by focusing on rural America for about thirty years then moved out to the urban America in order to increase their market share after having dominated the rural America.

Strategy Number Three

Selling New products To Your Customers: Well as we go on the strategy it becomes more difficult and complicated.

Nike was able to successfully diversify into sporting materials and equipment starting from ordinary a single product making.

Same goes with coke.

Same goes with IBM and others.

But the challenge is that you must have the capacity to deliver so that your diversification does not bring about more problems to your enterprise.

Strategy Number Four

Taking your products to new customers, focusing on new customers will help increase your customer bases.

So this strategy is all about growing your customer base.

Strategy Number Five

This strategy simply means creating new products entirely for new customers. Amazon did this using cloud computing and believe they did it perfectly to the extent of them competing with the big names and that field like IBM, Microsoft and even google.

Strategy Number Six

Going into a new line of business where you have no capacity or knowledge of  but having the money.

The risk of doing this is on the high side and moreover it is highly not recommended and it is too illogical you have to be extra careful when trying to do this,

Yes note that it is highly RISKY.

FINAL WORDS

You must understand that doing business is like trying to climb a building. You must take the stairs but having the knowledge of where the stairs is, is the most important if one is not aware of this fact then one will never climb such a building.

You must at a balance work on your old capacities and get new ones.

3 Ways To Access New Capacity

1.Organically

 

2.Acquisition

 

3.Joint Venture

3^RD SPEAKER: Mr Leke Alder

Understanding The Power Of Branding And Marketing

The most interesting Topic to me, I said me o.

Email:leke@lekealder.com

Branding And Marketing

You have to study the law of basic economy to understand the power of branding. It is a kind of programing that makes us pay arbitual obedience to something.

Branding operates in the principle of hearing and seeing.

It goes beyond just designing a logo it is like building a house

First you lay the foundation

You develop the first floor, second and then others.

You can never build a brand without quality, it is the foundation of it all you must pay great attention to quality I order to build a brand.

You can achieve this by paying attention to two things basically

1.The product function

2.The Corporate function

The Product Function

 The product must do what it is said to do, it must work what it is said to do and do it very perfectly.

Corporate Function:

 This I think is one of the most important because without organizational support the product and the brand will die eventually.

You must understand that building a strong organizational structure will affect your business in the long run.

Have higher quality staff

You can even start your organization with a secretary, don’t be the do it all type.

Also always document your business because this is critically important.

You must have a corporate culture to business not just the money making culture a lot of people have.

And note that without culture you are a business risk.

Don’t ever think small except if you want to remain small.

BRANDING

The Concept Of A Brand

We must understand that the concept of branding goes beyond just money making, branding is an economic asset which has a big value.

Google this just the brand value of Apple Corporation is bigger than the GDP value of some countries in the world, check this out just a brand value not even the company’s value that is bigger than the GDP of a whole country.

Brand don’t sell products they sell dreams.

Pepsi for instance use big names like Messi, when you see Messi which represents greatness standing in a pepsi advert automatically your mind turns to the products looking great just like Messi.

NAMING YOUR BRAND

The name of your brand is the name of the company the brand represents infact what you are doing is branding a company.

Things to consider why naming a brand

1.The name it invokes.

2.It pronunciation.

3.The visual it correlates

ALSO NOTE THAT

Some names are tied to a place, they are regional names.

Some names are symbolic names like Nike

Some names are after the founder.

Names like Firstbank shows that the bank is the first bank in the country.

Also don’t name a brand as abbreviations because most company’s like that are either merged or something else but they never started like that.

Always consider your vision when naming your brand.

Don’t ever make your name provincial.

YOUR LOGO

You logo is also very very important in a business, it is not just an identity mark it is a very strong asset.The BMW licensed Roll Royce car by buying it logo for forty million pounds.

A brand have different tentacles of business buying from her, it is an economic discipline.

CORPORATE COLORS.

Colors matters.

Because brand gives a personality to itself so that there can be brand loyalty from people.

Check out most successful fast foods like KFC,Mr Biggs,Chicken Republic and others they go with the color  RED because they believe that is what suits the food industry.

Also we must note that in branding

Red--- means energy and passion

Blue---means stability

Black---means professionality.

Brand Promises

People buy promises from brand

Types Of Promises

1.Generic Promises

2.Declared/Corporate Brand Promises

Corporate Brand Promises

---Competence

---Integrity

---Continuity

SUMMARY

1.You must have a credible product or service

2.You must have and run a credible business structure

3.Always define what you do positively , package your business very well in all you do 

advert, location of business and others.

4.Have a good name

5.Have a Unick logo

6.Get your corporate colors right.

7.Always add a phrase of what you do to your business card.

8.Keep your business promises.

9.Customer satisfaction is the most paramount.