This week, NASA released a new book entitled Touch the Invisible Sky. It is a 60-page tome with embossed images of various heavenly bodies, accompanied by large-print and Braille text, thus making astronomical study available to the visually-impaired and blind.

The author, Noreen Grice, had worked in the mid-1980s at a Boston planetarium. One day a group of blind people attended a planetarium show. After the show, Ms. Grice asked the group how they liked the it, curious about their reaction. “This stunk,” they said, and left the planetarium. Thus began her mission to share astronomy with the blind. Two books later, the doors to astronomy have been opened to the blind and visually-impaired thanks to Grice.

The lessons to marketers and communicators are abundant:

Inspiration: Grice’s passion for astronomy forced her to find a way to share her field of study with others. With almost evangelistic fervor, she figured out a way to get it done. If there is any one thing that must underlie the creativity and technical requirements of our business, it is passion. If an in-house marketing department or an agency is not passionate about a product or service, it will show: predictable creative; muted enthusiasm; cleverness without purpose. On the other hand, if the passion is there, the audience will catch the contagious energy.

Translation: There is always a way to speak in the language of your audience. It takes listening. It takes hearing “This stunk!” so many times that you finally figure out a way to get through to folks. You have to be humble enough to stop talking and start listening. After all, we have two ears and one mouth…

Tactilization: OK, I made that word up, but think about it: Grice got her readers to literally feel the constellations. In our digital, flat screen world, the more we can help an audience feel the brand—through experiences, humor, smell, sound, touch, risk, taste—the more people will see what you’re trying to say.

Ambition: I guess the most wonderful thing about Grice’s work is her sheer unwillingness to accept that astronomy was off-limits to the blind. It’s the kind of ambition that animated all the great innovators.

So when a communications or marketing challenge seems truly impossible, chances are you’re closer than you think.

Our team received the ultimate compliment this past week when a technology client for whom we had done a complete brand makeover—including visuals, messaging, the whole works—informed us that three potential buyers had been attracted to purchase the company and that the work The Creative Alliance had done contributed to their interest.

OK, enough bragging about my team here, but it goes to make an important point:

Brand building is powerful and profitable.

Crafting a compelling brand out of the right words, messages, visuals and customer experiences results in a higher perceived value of the company or product being branded. Brands are belief systems, repositories of confidence, tools for alignment with customers.

In our client’s case the customer was the buyer of his company; for other clients, it’s the buyer of bottled water or a corporate aircraft, or a non-profit’s need for support. Whatever the transaction looks like, branding is the shared mental model that unites buyer and seller. It creates a shared perceived value of a product, service or company.

The reason branding is profitable is that allows for some amazing advantages in the marketplace:

A strong brand commands premium pricing. Translation: less price-cutting and greater profits.

A strong brand cultivates more loyal customers. Translation: greater lifetime revenue per customer.

A strong brand makes product launches easier. Translation: earlier adoption by customers and faster ROI on R&D.

A strong brand increases employee loyalty. Translation: reduced HR costs.

A strong brand increases the value of a company. Translation: increased shareholder value + more profitable exit strategy.

Which brings us back to our client. The increased competition to buy his company, and its higher perceived value, will far outweigh the investment he made in the branding process. Thousands of dollars invested in branding can sometimes yield hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars in profit.

Given the stock market’s recent instability, I think I’d rather invest in branding.

As featured in the Boulder County Business Report:

Consider this before jumping on ‘green’ bandwagon
By David Heitman

You wear green on St. Patrick’s Day so no one will pinch you. But try wearing “green” as a business, and you just might get pinched.

While thousands of companies are jumping on the green bandwagon, it’s probably worthwhile to hit the pause button and think this one through. It reminds me of the 1990s, when everyone announced they had boldly embarked upon an Internet strategy, even though most corporate leaders had no idea what the Internet was all about.

Virtually every company is feeling compelled to embrace some sort of green policy. This is the result of the sea change taking place in society. Environmental responsibility is increasingly included in corporate values and mission statements. This corporate response is part of the larger cultural shift in attitudes toward the environment as a major issue.

The pressure is coming from consumers, special interest groups and in some cases, a company’s own employees. Fueled by daily media coverage on climate change and energy consumption, the issue of environmental responsibility, once on the fringes of society, is now becoming mainstream.

One form this green focus takes is attempting to achieve carbon neutrality. The term “carbon neutral” was named the Word of the Year for 2006 by “The Oxford American Dictionary.” This term suggests that a company can offset its carbon footprint – the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses emitted as a result of using fossil fuel energy – by investing in green energy sources, planting trees and the like. Fuel consumption, recycling, zero-landfill and similar practices round out this environmentally responsible approach to conducting business.

But here’s the warning label: “Blindly committing to green policies before counting the cost can be hazardous to a company’s health.”

To begin with, a commitment to environmental responsibility is best made when the company’s leadership really believes that it’s a moral imperative to do so. That kind of sincerity will trickle down through the organization.

Here’s the ultimate test: If a company can honestly say it would pursue the same environmentally responsible policies whether it was known to the public or not, then it is authentic. In the long run, consumers tend to reward authentic brands more than inauthentic ones. They recognize and shun the me-too brands that jump on the latest bandwagon, including the one painted green. If the commitment to environmental responsibility is sincere, the prospects for success are good.

One approach companies should consider is going a full year under new environmental guidelines without making the company’s green stance public. That would give the new green practices a chance to be embraced, adjusted and confirmed in order to find a sustainable policy fit. Before going public with your green stance, it might also be good to really think through its long-term ramifications. Committing solidly to a few things is better than a shallow commitment to broad, sweeping reforms that get shelved at the first sign of lower earnings.

Also keep in mind that what appears progressive today when it comes to environmental responsibility is destined to become tomorrow’s commodity. What seems like a big, expensive commitment to green practices soon will be the expected norm. No one will applaud your environmental responsibility – they’ll assume it. The self-congratulatory “Look at Us …We’re Green” marketing that you see and hear these days will seem pretty antiquated in another year or two.

Perhaps the greatest pitfall lurking out there is the temptation to buy carbon offset credits as part of a corporate green strategy. The purchase of these credits is handled by one of many international exchanges. The problem is that the entire carbon offset exchange is rife with fraud. A recent Financial Times investigation found that quite often no actual investments in reforestation or renewable energy projects ever takes place after a donation is made.

But beyond fraud, the carbon offset concept is really a weak idea for two reasons: First, the results are far removed from the company that purchases the credits and equally far removed from their customers; and second, it is the least creative way to reinforce one’s brand as environmentally friendly. It’s like saying, “We’re pro-America because we paid our taxes to the IRS!”

A better alternative to purchasing carbon offset credits is to launch or support your own special project – one that makes a demonstrable difference, preferably close to home. This is far more engaging to employees and customers than paying environmental penance with carbon offset credits. For example, we helped one client build a strategic relationship with the National Arbor Day Foundation. No vaunted claims to offset the company’s entire carbon footprint were made, but rather a tangible commitment to the environment with the planting of thousands of trees here in Colorado, and giving new trees away to customers. That is far more tangible and engaging than writing a check to a mysterious carbon offset exchange.

When it comes to going green, it’s vital to remember that no matter what you do, you could always be doing more. That can be used against you by activist customers or watchdog groups wanting to make an example out of your company. This was evidenced by the recent Fox News expose showing Al Gore hopping the country in his fuel-hungry private jet urging adoring audiences to use low-energy light bulbs. Now there’s an inconvenient truth. The hypocrisy of the Nobel Prize winner’s stance has not yet reached beyond Fox News’ conservative audience, but eventually Gore’s fans will call him to task for this one.

Perhaps an honest and authentic approach for companies to take simply would be to say, “We’re doing better than we have in the past. We intend to do better in the future. We’re open to your ideas.” That refreshing kind of honesty should win a lot of fans, while keeping companies away from the shark-infested waters of competing for the title of most environmentally responsible player in their respective industries.

This is the kind of authentic response that just might also keep you from getting pinched for not wearing enough green.