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Direction ADV - Creativity in Action
Branding Like Nowhere Else
Don't look elsewhere; here is your one-stop for branding

Branding is of great importance for companies and business houses in today's highly competitive markets. Branding can be defined linguistically as “the act of giving a company a particular design or symbol in order to advertise its products and services.” Artistically speaking, branding has evolved to go beyond the aesthetic elements of a mere logo or visual identity to brand recognition, standing out from the crowd and having brand loyal customers. Branding requires creativity in the sense of a creative design of the visual identity or company's logo as well as the brand recognition in today's markets to website development and e-marketing strategies.

Branding is what your business needs to break through the clutter and grab your ideal customer's attention. It's what transforms first-time buyers into lifetime customers and turns an indifferent audience into brand evangelists.

What are the elements of branding?

These are the elements of branding that you'll need to create in order to cultivate how your business is perceived by customers:

A better brand means better marketing

As a general rule, products have limited life cycles, but brands—if managed well—last forever. And once you've nailed down exactly who you are as a brand, it becomes much easier to market it.

Your brand guidelines, coupled with ongoing market research and analysis, should give you a tactical advantage in determining the best way to market your products. By continually consulting your brand guide, you should be able to focus your efforts on the tactics that really matter.

At the end of the day, marketing is the process that brings you the leads and sales, but branding is the foundation upon which you build your reputation and customer loyalty.

Empower your business with branding

The one thing you'll want to remember is that branding is an action. So while it might seem daunting at first—considering all of the planning, assets and personnel that go into cultivating an unforgettable brand—it is also empowering. Rather than letting others tell your story, you are speaking up with branding.

If you ever feel lost in the process, remember that support is always at hand. Once you have established your branding vision, get in touch with a professional designer help to bring your branding to life.

Empower your business with branding

The one thing you'll want to remember is that branding is an action. So while it might seem daunting at first—considering all of the planning, assets and personnel that go into cultivating an unforgettable brand—it is also empowering. Rather than letting others tell your story, you are speaking up with branding.

If you ever feel lost in the process, remember that support is always at hand. Once you have established your branding vision, get in touch with a professional designer help to bring your branding to life.

Branding generates new customers

A good brand will have no trouble drumming up referral business. Strong branding generally means there is a positive impression of the company amongst consumers, and they are likely to do business with you because of the familiarity and assumed dependability of using a name they can trust. Once a brand has been well-established, word of mouth will be the company's best and most effective advertising technique.

Improves employee pride and satisfaction

When an employee works for a strongly branded company and truly stands behind the brand, they will be more satisfied with their job and have a higher degree of pride in the work that they do. Working for a brand that is reputable and held in high regard amongst the public makes working for that company more enjoyable and fulfilling.

Altogether, the process of branding with #creativity_in_action is an integrated process that leads to empowering and sustaining your business globally.

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Annual Reports All at Your Hands
Inclusive, feasible, in-depth

To run a global business and follow up the growth of your business annual reports are a key. Annual reports describe operations and financial conditions of and help you make forecasts about the future of your business. Annual reports are public documents that are of benefit to shareholders, individual investors, money managers, company employees, financial institutions, and students. Preparing your annual reports with #creativity_in_action is inclusive, feasible, and in-depth process that leads to empowering your business globally.

What Does an Annual Report Contain?

Annual reports provide a significant amount of information for its readers who will be able to get a good overview of the company's overall performance in the preceding year. It is important to note that many annual reports are not traditional reports with large amounts of text; many companies often incorporate a lot of graphics and images, resulting in a visually appealing document.

Who Uses Annual Reports?

Annual reports are often publicly available and cater to a large external audience, including shareholders, potential investors, employees, and customers. The general community can also be an audience, as some companies or non-profit organizations will likely go through another company's annual report to better understand the latter's values to see if a partnership or other collaborative efforts are feasible.

While they are primarily used to convey financial and performance-related information, the annual report is also used as an advertising tool to highlight some of the company's key initiatives or goals that were recently achieved.

How to Efficiently Read an Annual Report

A company's annual report is the single most important way for potential investors to understand the financial state of a company. A company annual report is also a marketing tool designed to attract investors, and a company will attempt to present themselves in the best light possible without violating any Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations.

Unfortunately, while many investors read annual reports, they fail to read them effectively. In other words, while annual reports do not deceive or reflect false information about the business, investors should always read them with a sense of skepticism. Learn how to read between the lines and decipher the actual condition of the company.

Components of an Annual Report

Investors should always read the 10-K filing if they're interested in investing in a public company. The report begins with a detailed description of the business, followed by risk factors, a summary of any legal issues, and the numbers.

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Catalogues: Uniqueness at Glance

Another important aspect to empower your business and have your brand and products recognized globally is to have your product catalogues with a creative design. Catalogues creative design is a graphic design that presents your products and services to your potential clients and customer. That is so because catalogues creative design prepares a company presentation for print and online edition. In all, catalogues with #creativity_in_action are designed by unique, creative standards.

A product catalog is a type of marketing collateral that lists essential product details that help buyers make a purchase decision. These details include product features, descriptions, dimensions, price, weight, availability, color, customer reviews, and more.

The best example of a product catalog is the Amazon marketplace, where you can get a host of information in a single click. Think about a book that you've been trying to buy - Amazon lists all the information that you need. It includes the book title, author name, publisher's name, number of pages, a brief snapshot of the book, price, dimensions, offers/discounts, reviews, and more.

These documents are quite common both in the B2B and B2C domains.
"A product catalog is a type of marketing collateral that lists essential product details that help buyers make a purchase decision."

Who Needs Product Catalogs?

Product catalogs are useful to several business users and groups such as sales reps, inside sales, buyers, store clerks, field marketers, and managers. Here's how each group uses it:

9 reasons why you need product catalogs

Before we go any further, let us understand why we need product catalogs.

Ingredients of a Product Catalog

What are the ingredients of a product catalog? What should they have to help different stakeholders meet their objectives? A business cannot have multiple documents for various stakeholders unless there are different use cases.

To save you the trouble, we analyzed documents across industries to come up with a broad list of must-haves. These are not specific to any company/industry, so pick the ones that are most suitable for your company:

Product Details (in alphabetical order)

Product Catalog Management

Product catalogs are detailed documents that need to be organized and managed to ensure higher utility. Here are the different aspects of product catalog management:

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E-Marketing Reach the Globe

To reach the globe, stand out from the crowd and grow your business globally, e-marketing, web marketing, digital marketing, internet marketing or online marketing is the key in the era of technology.

With #creativity_in_action, e-marketing is cost-efficient, less risky, accessible, and interactive. In addition, e-marketing with #creativity_in_action is your gateway towards personalized marketing in which you showcase your products in global markets, and get an instant response from global customers.

Moreover, e-marketing facilitates exchanges and satisfy customer demands. E-marketing provides customers with more competitive prices and enables businesses to reduce operational costs.

E-marketing is a process of planning and executing the conception, distribution, promotion, and pricing of products and services in a computerized, networked environment, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web, to facilitate exchanges and satisfy customer demands. It has two distinct advantages over traditional marketing. E-marketing provides customers with more convenience and more competitive prices, and it enables businesses to reduce operational costs.

As businesses offer e-marketing and online shopping, customers can get market information from their computers or cell phones and buy goods or find services without leaving home twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week (24/7). They can read ads on the Web or from e-mail, get e-coupons, view pictures of goods, compare prices, and make purchases with a few clicks of their mouse, saving the time and money it would take to shop in person at a brick-and-mortar store. At the same time, e-businesses can reduce costs in distribution channels and physical store space and thus pass the savings on to customers.

To make e-marketing effective and efficient, managers of e-businesses need to know online customer behaviour, e-marketing techniques, costs and benefits of e-marketing over traditional marketing, and pitfalls and legal issues of e-marketing. A discussion of each of these aspects follows.

E-MARKETING TECHNIQUES

E-marketing techniques can be broken down to pull and push marketing. Pull marketing is a passive technique by which online shoppers take the initiative requesting specific information on the Web. Search engines, product/service advertising, e-coupons, and e-samples are part of pull marketing. For example, e-marketers can register their e-commerce sites, products, and services with search engines such as Google and or Yahoo, thereby enabling online shoppers to search for product/service information using Google or Yahoo and link to their sites. Similarly, e-marketers can also register their e-coupons and e-samples with e-coupon sites such as ecoupons.com and e-sample sites such as yes-its-free.com.

Push marketing is a proactive technique that enables e-marketers to "push" their product/service information to Web visitors or shoppers without their requesting it. Banner advertising, pop-up advertising, e-mail promotion, and spamming belong to push marketing. For instance, e-marketers can rent designated space from Internet service providers such as America Online or MSN for their banner or pop-up ads. Using animated graphics, appealing messages, and links, e-marketers try to lure visitors to their sites to buy their products or services. Many Internet users, however, find such ads annoying and employ software that blocks pop-ups and banner ads.

E-mail promotion is widely used by e-marketers to send new product/service information to their registered customers. For example, airline companies periodically e-mail their registered customers about their e-fares and promotional vacation packages. Spamming refers to sending millions of e-mail promotions to recipients who have never asked for the information. These recipients' e-mail addresses are often purchased or swapped with other businesses. Spamming is at best unethical and at worst illegal.

COSTS AND BENEFITS OF E-MARKETING

E-marketing can offer more competitive prices than traditional marketing because e-marketing reduces costs by not having to maintain physical store space and by strategically placing distribution centres throughout the country. Second, because the Internet is available 24/7, e-marketing enables shoppers to search for product/service information and buy goods at their convenience, not just when the store is open. Third, research indicates that the cost of Internet-based promotion is one-fourth of traditional promotion, because it does not incur the costs of paper, printing, handling, and mailing. Fourth, e-marketing enables buyers to custom-build products such as shoes, clothes, computers, and automobiles on the Web, options often not available in stores.

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Content Writing Beyond Words

All language services within the reach
With #creativity_in_action, content writing is within your reach to take your business to the next level beyond words into a world of creativity that opens your way to the globe.

Content writing services (also known as online content writing services and content marketing services) is a category of work that first surfaced in the early 1990s, due to an exponential rise in online activities. Content writing services are firms, companies or group of writers that provide services such as blog writing for websites, web content writing, marketing material content, white papers, research articles, proof reading services, infographic content, social media content, press releases, product descriptions, copywriting services, and many more.

Content writing services generally charge a fixed per word rate which is popularly known as PPW (pay per word or price per word). However, many content writing firms also have pricing plans that offer fixed amount of content against subscription plans.

Present day content
The 21st century distinguishes content writing services into multiple segments. Such categorization comes from a diversified approach of presenting information in the World Wide Web Consortium. Today, in addition to its utilization for commercial descriptive purposes, individuals have taken up writing as a means to communicate with their global audience. The main subdivisions of content writing services today include.

Industry-wise Content Writing Services
Today content writing services are offered for various niche and industries. The popular industry-wise content writing service categories are:

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Printing Professionalism in Details

Seamless designs and publications
Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. It has two major forms: offset and digital. Printing, whether digital or offset, is a key to the promotion and publicity of your visual identity, products and activities.

With #creativity_in_action, printing is an incomparable experience that provides seamless designs and publications in a creative digital and offset forms with the finest details mastered. Printing that goes beyond printing is at the click.

History of printing
Origins in China

By the end of the 2nd century CE, the Chinese apparently had discovered printing; certainly they then had at their disposal the three elements necessary for printing: (1) paper, the techniques for the manufacture of which they had known for several decades; (2) ink, whose basic formula they had known for 25 centuries; and (3) surfaces bearing texts carved in relief. Some of the texts were classics of Buddhist thought inscribed on marble pillars, to which pilgrims applied sheets of damp paper, daubing the surface with ink so that the parts that stood out in relief showed up; some were religious seals used to transfer pictures and texts of prayers to paper. It was probably this use of seals that led in the 4th or 5th century to the development of ink of a good consistency for printing.

A substitute for these two kinds of surfaces, the marble pillars and the seals, that was more practical with regard both to manageability and to size, appeared perhaps by the 6th century in the wood block. First, the text was written in ink on a sheet of fine paper; then the written side of the sheet was applied to the smooth surface of a block of wood, coated with a rice paste that retained the ink of the text; third, an engraver cut away the uninked areas so that the text stood out in relief and in reverse.

To make a print, the wood block was inked with a paintbrush, a sheet of paper spread on it, and the back of the sheet rubbed with a brush. Only one side of the sheet could be printed.

The oldest known printed works were made by this technique: in Japan about 764–770, Buddhist incantations ordered by Empress Shōtoku; in China in 868, the first known book, the Diamond Sūtra; and, beginning in 932, a collection of Chinese classics in 130 volumes, at the initiative of Fong Tao, a Chinese minister.

Invention of movable type (11th century)
About 1041–48 a Chinese alchemist named Pi Sheng appears to have conceived of movable type made of an amalgam of clay and glue hardened by baking. He composed texts by placing the types side by side on an iron plate coated with a mixture of resin, wax, and paper ash. Gently heating this plate and then letting the plate cool solidified the type. Once the impression had been made, the type could be detached by reheating the plate. It would thus appear that Pi Sheng had found an overall solution to the many problems of typography: the manufacture, the assembling, and the recovery of indefinitely reusable type.

In about 1313 a magistrate named Wang Chen seems to have had a craftsman carve more than 60,000 characters on movable wooden blocks so that a treatise on the history of technology could be published. To him is also attributed the invention of horizontal compartmented cases that revolved about a vertical axis to permit easier handling of the type. But Wang Chen’s innovation, like that of Pi Sheng, was not followed up in China.

In Korea, on the contrary, typography, which had appeared by the first half of the 13th century, was extensively developed under the stimulus of King Taejong, who, in 1403, ordered the first set of 100,000 pieces of type to be cast in bronze. Nine other fonts followed from then to 1516; two of them were made in 1420 and 1434, before Europe in its turn discovered typography.

Transmission of paper to Europe (12th century)
Paper, the production of which was known only to the Chinese, followed the caravan routes of Central Asia to the markets at Samarkand, whence it was distributed as a commodity across the entire Arab world.

The transmission of the techniques of papermaking appears to have followed the same route; Chinese taken prisoner at the Battle of Talas, near Samarkand, in 751 gave the secret to the Arabs. Paper mills proliferated from the end of the 8th century to the 13th century, from Baghdad and then on to Spain, then under Arab domination. Paper first penetrated Europe as a commodity from the 12th century onward through Italian ports that had active commercial relations with the Arab world and also, doubtless, by the overland route from Spain to France. Papermaking techniques apparently were rediscovered by Europeans through an examination of the material from which the imported commodity was made; possibly the secret was brought back in the mid-13th century by returning crusaders or merchants in the Eastern trade. Papermaking centres grew up in Italy after 1275 and in France and Germany in the course of the 14th century.

But knowledge of the typographic process does not seem to have succeeded, as papermaking techniques had, in reaching Europe from China. It would seem that typography was assimilated by the Uighurs who lived on the borders of Mongolia and Turkistan, since a set of Uighur typefaces, carved on wooden cubes, has been found that date from the early 14th century. It would be surprising if the Uighurs, a nomadic people usually considered to have been the educators of other Turco-Mongolian peoples, had not spread the knowledge of typography as far as Egypt. There it may have encountered an obstacle to its progress toward Europe, namely, that, even though the Islamic religion had accepted paper in order to record the word of Allah, it may have refused to permit the word of Allah to be reproduced by artificial means.

The invention of printing
Thus, the essential elements of the printing process collected slowly in western Europe, where a favourable cultural and economic climate had formed.

Colour printing
As early as 1457 a psalter, which Peter Schöffer signed but which some researchers now attribute to Gutenberg, included, in imitation of the contemporary illuminated manuscripts, paragraphs beginning with ornamental capital letters printed in two colours. This was accomplished by the use of two wood blocks that fitted one inside the other and could be separately inked.

Experiments to reproduce pictures in several colours on wood blocks were made in Germany in the 16th century. In the 17th century, different inks were applied to the different parts of the same engraved metal plate in such a way that all the inks were transferred to the paper in a single pressing. In 1719 a painter, Jacques-Christophe Le Blond, took out a patent in England for a process that used the three primary colours, blue, yellow, and red, and black for outlining shapes. Using a dense grid, he engraved four metal plates, bringing out on each plate the relative importance of the colour involved. The same sheet of paper then went through four successive impressions, each in a different colour.

In the 19th century the scientific definition of the principles of trichromatism, the enunciation of the fundamental theories of three-colour analysis and synthesis of colours by photography, the perfecting of coatings selectively sensitive to colours, and finally the use of the screen, instead of Le Blond’s hand-drawn grid, established the modern trichromatic technique (which becomes quadrichromatic when black is also used).