This week I read an article about Florida’s Hillsborough County Jail and the inmates who’ve created a ‘Jailhouse Fire’ hot-pepper sauce.  The sauce is made and sold by inmates at the minimum-security jail with peppers grown on-site.

Their strapline is “created with conviction” and they use sales messages such as ‘murder on the taste buds’.  Have a look at www.jailhousefire.org for more info – all proceeds support inmate programmes.

Logos and straplines conjure up all kinds of images in our minds.  If I mention ‘Mercedes’, your mind will already be thinking about your perceptions of the brand; it’s culture, typical customers, strengths and weaknesses etc.  But, all a brand is is a collection of lines and colours and sometimes letters or words.  Don’t you think it’s strange how much we read into something so simple.

Brands are often seen as something that’s only important to big companies, but, do you not think that people who see your logo make up their minds about your company from the outset?

This follows on from our discussions of first impressions from last week.  For many of us, our website or shop window may have to make the first impression on our behalf.  We may not ever get to the stage of meeting that prospect, because they may be turned off before they make the initial contact.

So can you afford to ignore branding and the messages it sends to your prospects?