Your business has a personality, whether you are aware of it or not. Your customers' understanding of who you are, and what you do, as a business, may be very different from the vision you have of yourself.

To communicate your marketing message effectively, you must first clearly and honestly identify your business personality. To do this, you have to define three deceptively simple-seeming concepts:

1. Who you are

2. What you do

3. Why you do it better than the competition

You hear what you see

We experience our lives through our senses. We see, hear, touch and smell. People experience the Internet through a computer monitor, and as a result the Web has become a profoundly visual venue.

People believe what they see is the most important element in delivering a message, but I would argue that what you hear outweighs what you see. Companies spend millions of dollars on attractive logos and pithy corporate names, and I have no argument with developing a proper logo or a great name. But successful company names and logos have an element inherent in their design that goes beyond how they look. It is how they sound.