Top Brands Every third import in the united European market is suspicious counterfeiting with infringed brand or design rights. The global loss is $30-50m just for one brand and billions per year for the top 5 cosmetic brands, mostly in less developed markets. Seems when your brand is 120 years old and you sell in 210 countries, you have an attractive critical mass to be attacked by counterfeiters, even if your licensee produces the goods in the same Chinese factory where the fake products come from. What would you do? You develop a brand integrity strategy, you invent... [Read more]

When we headed to London couple of weeks ago, we didn’t expect much even though we were going to attend the well known SES conference. London is our favorite European city, and despite the chilly drizzles we were happilly looking forward to spend few days there. The building where the conference was taking place was the well known Design Expo Center ( we were lucky to attend Surface Design Expo simultaneosly with the SES, but this is a topic for another blog-posting). Polite smiling faces, a meeting hall with tables in the middle and boots beside walls, small groups... [Read more]

The Dream Customer The New Year started (un)accidentally with projects for the top three storage system suppliers in Bulgaria. This gave us a great chance to update the rating and valuation system of customer accounts in our CRM plus the chance to monitor three top Google ranking projects in the same industry. The customer RFM value was implemented back in 2003, but we needed a simple Customer Rating system. The concept is basically that the account is given an ABC rating, which determines the general standing of the customer. Many clients have different rules for rating... [Read more]

Conversion as competitive advantage Happy, successful, healthy and wealthy 2010! It’s been more than a decade since we designed our first huge website. Customers were happy and excited just to have a webpage, visited from time to time by few patient and curious visitors… We simply love what we do and we care about the best results. Have you measured the outcome of your website for 2009? Traffic vs. Bounce rate Today 83% of businesses use the web to find potential vendors. Even though with an average website bounce (cart abandonment) rates of 70%, websites must... [Read more]

According to Huffington Post, calling is among the twelve things that became obsolete during the past decade. As we write about the current 2010 trends, it is necessary to take a moment and think about the things from our past, which seem most difficult to separate with. Are we being just nostalgic, or is it purely pathetic? Well, there are (real) historical museums and vintage-themed blogs. Ours isn’t among them. Calling was the second part of the famous ‘cold-calling’ method of advertising. Cold was what caused everyone of us to have dreadful memories of the nasty... [Read more]