Here’s a question for you:  When was the last time someone in your legal department, or even the accounting department, came forward and said, “I have a great idea to grow the business?”  I’m guessing the answer is “never.”  Now, I’m not trying to beat up on lawyers and accountants — they have a critical role to play, namely keeping us all out of trouble — but they are not going to drive a business forward.  They can help us reduce costs.  They can keep us from getting sued.  They can improve our bottom line.  But they are not going to drive top-line growth.

As everyone has riden the economy down the power of the risk managers has grown.  If we want to ride things back up we’ve got to get focused on growth.  And growth is what we all should be about.  The time for cutting is over — we can’t cut our way to success!

The reality is that no one thing creates a brand leader.  Such status cannot be bought, but neither is it free.  Last month Trone updated our consumer study on brands and the economy, and the news was indeed grim .  Consumers have made serious changes in their shopping behaviors and for the most part, brands have suffered and will continue to do so.  However, there are brands that consumers are going to stick with, even when money is tight.  Kraft was mentioned by an astonishing 13% of all respondents (N = 1,638) to the open-ended question, “What 3 brands won’t you give up, no matter what?”  To be sure, Kraft spends money on it’s brands, and it’s been around a long time.  But how do you explain brands like Fisher Price making the top 20?

Brand leaders follow several key strategies:
1) They invest in their brands – note to marketers, this isn’t code for “advertising.”  Rather, they seek to understand their consumer and work to meet their needs.  This is not about “selling” products.  It’s about giving your customer what they want. 

2) They know who they are.  A favorite quote of mine is “A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money.”  Brand leaders know who they are and what they stand for.   Brand leaders not only delight their consumers, they also don’t confuse them.  Whether through product, price, distribution or promotion, they stay true to themselves. 

 In today’s economic climate it’s all to tempting to abandon your core brand principles, or to stop communicating with your consumers.  But brand leaders, the brands with staying power, know who they are, what their consumers want and nuture those relationships, even in times like these.

What would you do if all your data was suddenly gone? I know many people would have a nervous breakdown including me. Over the weekend a hacker was able to exploit a UK web host’s servers and erase as many as 100,000 websites’ data. Many of those customers had no backup solution in place and thus may never have the ability to recover their data due to the finality of UNIX’s “rm -rf” command.

Some 50 percent of Vaserv’s customers signed up for unmanaged service, which doesn’t include data backup, Foster said. It remains unclear of those website owners will ever be able to retrieve their lost data, he said. As a result, at least half the websites that were hosted on the site remain offline.

Which leads me to ask, “what kind of backup solutions are in place for both your computers and your web servers (if you have any)?”

Personally, I have a two-tiered backup solution for all my computers.

1. All my Macs have time machine enabled and back up to an external drive. This is a local backup solution and would be the fastest to recover data if something was lost. Time machine makes it very easy to “undelete” something that was accidentally removed from the system. However, if my house burned down, my data would most likely be unrecoverable.
2. I use an online backup solution. My service of choice is Mozy, which offers unlimited backup storage space for about $5 a month per computer. They also have a free 2gb backup solution. Mozy works with both Mac and PC. This is a secondary backup solution for me and is my “safety net” in case anything were to happen to my local backups.

My web server is another matter. Like the folks in the article above, my web host doesn’t back up my data. So I’ve set up an automated process whereby all my databases are compressed and emailed to me every night. Periodically I’ll go through and delete the really old ones to conserve space on my Gmail account. This doesn’t include the filesystem. I know that this isn’t ideal and I really should upgrade my account to include automated backups.

How do you ensure that your data isn’t lost? Do you even have a backup strategy? Tell me in the comments below!

Billboards saying things such as “Just say no to Bailout Banks. Bank responsibly,” “Did your bank take a bailout? We didn’t,” and my personal favorite that was placed next to the local zoo “Don’t feed the animals” with the word animals crossed out and “big banks” scribbled in.

And while big banks are crying foul saying that TARP money was important and helped a lot of people out, this little bank is growing rapidly. To the tune of $5 million in new deposits since the launch of the campaign. In their own little way, consumers are saying enough is enough with the poor me mentality of big banks.

After all, if we’ve learned anything from the automobile manufacturer Ford lately, it’s that stability is still part of the American dream.

Here is a video about the work. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SNCuQ04ang.

Some of the back and forth about the campaign:
http://www2.snl.com/Interactivex/article.aspx?CdId=A-9218440-12642
http://www.bizpress.net/display.php?id=9849