Episode 185: “The Benefits of BNI’s New Branded Look”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Synopsis

If you have questions about BNI’s new branding initiative,

• BNI members—please connect with your local Director
• BNI Directors—please connect with your BNI National Office
• BNI National Offices—please connect with BNI Headquarters

This week, Dr. Misner wants to talk about the benefits of a consistent branded look for BNI members and chapters.

• The new visual look makes it easier to explain BNI to non-BNI members.
• BNI becomes more visible and credible. The more brand recognition you have, the easier it is to bring new members into the group.
• People will no longer be confused about which groups are affiliated with BNI. This saves us from the risk of unfair negative perception.
• This will help cement BNI’s continued leadership as the world’s largest networking organization.

Links

1. Example of the New Branded Look
2. BNI Branding PowerPoint Presentation
3. The BNI® Branding Standards

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 185 -

Priscilla:
Hello everyone and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. I am Priscilla Rice, and I am coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkley, CA. I am joined today by the Founder and Chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello Ivan. How are you and where are you?

Ivan:
I am doing great, Priscilla, and I am up in Big Bear Lake, California this week working with my co-authors on one of my upcoming books. I think we talked about it on a podcast before. The title of it will be Business Networking and Sex- Not What You Think. It’s about the difference between men and women and how they network.
We’re hiding away after this podcast, and we will be spending four or five days working together to help move this book along. It needs to be completed in the next three to four months for a release in early 2012.

Priscilla:
Sounds great.

Ivan:
So today am talking about the benefits of BNI’s new branded look. Last week we talked about why we did it and there is something I left out of last week’s podcast that I want to start this one with. That is what if you have questions about BNI’s new branded look? If you are a BNI member or team leader, please connect with your local BNI Director. Very important. If you have any questions about branding, please connect with them. If you’re a BNI Director who is listening to this podcast, please connect with your BNI National Office. If you are a BNI Director- Assistant, Area, Executive, or Regional Director- please connect with your BNI National Office. National Offices, if you are listening to this podcast, please connect with BNI Headquarters.

So members, connect with your local directors. BNI Directors, connect with your National Office. National Offices, connect with BNI Headquarters. Boy, that really is a great segway out of last week’s podcast talking about us being global. We are definitely global, and we try to make this as easy as possible to have the branded look continually passed on down.

There are specific benefits to having a visual branded look that is consistent, and that is what I wanted to talk about this week. One of our greatest strengths as an organization is the enthusiasm and dedication of our BNI members, who love to give referrals and promote BNI. This word of mouth can be so much more powerful for and will benefit BNI members and chapters so much more now that it is backed up by a unified global brand image being used- or will be being used- all around the world. It increases visibility and brand recognition for BNI, and it makes it easier to explain BNI to non-BNI members.

So the new branding will help you as a member bring more members into your chapters, ultimately creating opportunity for more referrals by creating greater visibility and familiarity, along with credibility, with the worldwide general public. Now, the new image makes the BNI brand more memorable from a visible perspective. This increases the probability that people will say, “I visited a BNI breakfast,” rather than saying, “I visited a business breakfast meeting.”

This will help you spread the word about your BNI chapter. The more you have that brand recognition, the easier it is to bring members into the group. This new professional brand image is being systematically implemented all across the globe to ensure that all BNI chapters, Directors and National Offices are using the same instantly recognizable BNI artwork and logos. This increases the chance that any given person around the world will have heard about BNI and gives credibility and validity to others when they tell that BNI is the world’s largest most successful networking organization because it has that visual look that is consistent.

In last week’s podcast, I talked about three links. We are going to have those same three links in here, in this week’s podcast. That is a link to a PowerPoint slide that gives you the visual look across the globe. There are slight variations, depending on whether you are in the Americas, Europe or Asia. Those different continents are highlighted, Austraasia- those areas are highlighted so you know it is from that area. Otherwise, the visual look is very consistent. So we are going to have that link.

We are going to have Why We Are Changing the Corporate Look, a corporate counsel edited version of a PowerPoint presentation of that if you really want to go deep and understand why- this is a value to you as a business person if you want to expand your business into more than a local community business. The kinds of things in here are truly worth their weight in gold because it’s the legal advice over many years of how and why we wanted to do this.

The third link is the BNI Standards. You have to understand what you can or can’t do in terms of the visual look of the chapter. People within the BNI organization and outside the organization will no longer be confused as to which materials or websites are affiliated with BNI. If you look over that corporate counsel PowerPoint presentation, you’ll understand what I mean. Just do a search on Google. There are so many websites and they all look so different. You just don’t know if you are dealing with a BNI chapter.

This saves us from the risk of being viewed negatively by being mistakenly affiliated with other groups which don’t adhere to our standards and our philosophy of doing business. Because this new branding stands up and sends the message that BNI is an established, reputabel network of business professionals with chapters in every populated continent across the globe which generates billions in referrals for members each year, by using the new BNI branding effectively, we’re telling people that you are part of the world’s largest global network that has been around for decades.

I think the time will come that instead of being met by questioning looks when someone is trying to explain what BNI is to somebody that they’d like to invite to visit their group, they will be met with familiarity, interest and specific questions. That is what building a brand is all about. I have seen that happen in the last several decades, where people would say, “BNI- what is that?” to “Yeah, I have heard of BNI.” Our goal is to have every small business person know what BNI is and what it’s about. And that has to begin with a clear visual look being used all around the world, and the benefit to you is that it will make it easier for you as a member to invite people in when they have at least a general understanding or some recognition of what the brand and organization is.

We believe this will make it much easier for members to have strong chapters and to have a professional look in their chapters. We just need to get everybody using the same visual look.

Priscilla:
That’s great. I think many of us don’t even understand how important having the brand is to our businesses. So this is a good example that you guys are leading with.

Ivan:
The brand is about many different things. It’s certianly about the trademarks. It’s certianly about the visual look that we are talking about. It’s really about the PR. One of the things I think we’ve really done well on is that you can go anywhere in the world and Google business networking, and BNI will pop up on the first page, generally number one or number two. I did it yesterday in the United States. There wee 14,000,000 and BNI was number one.

It’s just amazing to me. We have really done the brand thing effectively in many ways. Where we have not done it well is in having a consistent visual look. That has to change if we are going to continue to be the global leader and have a professional standard of materials. You know, I ask that members give some consideration to this as you draft materials. Again, if you are a BNI member or leadership team, connect with your local Executive Director or local BNI Director before the materials so we can have a consistent standard all around the world.

It really does make a difference. I mean, imagine that you are in a business and you have people who are working with you. You have a logo, and they just start creating their own logo and visual look. That would be very frustrating. Well, it’s a little frustrating for us, but we think that we can get by that. We have great BNI members all around the world who have the best in mind for the organization, and we ask that you help us to maintain that visual look because it benefits all of us.

Priscilla:
That’s great. I think we’ll do it. If you’ll just provide the logo, we’ll use it.

Ivan:
Great. And again, it’s more than the logo because we have the logo. It’s the graphic of the globe that goes with the logo. It’s the height and space. It’s the font, the color, the Burgandy pms 506. I mean, It’s so much more complex that just the logo, I’ve learned, over the last year or two. So the BNI Standards material, which is one of the links, will help you understand it a little better. I appreciate members’ cooperation and participation in this. I think this will help cement our continued leadership as the world’s largest networking organization.

Priscilla:
That’s great.Thank you so much for explaining that.

Ivan:
Thank you, Priscilla.

Priscilla:
I think that’s it for this week. I would just like to remind the listeners that this podcast has been brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. Thank you so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we hope you’ll join us next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.