I then ask if people have telephones. Everyone raises their hands. I ask if people have ever had a problem with their phone company. Most people keep their hands up! You probably have same experience. Phone companies have bad reputations for customer service.

Good companies create good brands by creating trust.

Do you need a lot of money to create trust?

No way!

Yet hundreds of companies have blown through more than a billion dollars on TV ads during Super Bowl and other major events trying to build a brand image.

I attended a top-level seminar on branding and a venture capitalist on panel said a consumer company must spend $50 million dollars to build a brand identity today.

However, in my seminar on branding at Stanford, I asked participants - all brand managers at major companies, to name 10 search engines, 10 consumer web sites, 3 pet supplies sites and 10 business-to-business web sites.

No one could!

And these are very people who are in industry, and are exposed to millions of dollars of advertising to create brands!

What does this mean?

Buying your way to brand awareness does not work!

The net is littered with those failures: Dr. Koop, Priceline's grocery service and Boo.com stand out as highly publicized failures.

So, as a small company, you don't have to worry about not have a treasure chest full of cash to buy a reputation - because it doesn't work!

How do you create a great brand? That's where brand assets come in to play. Brand assets are your slogans, advertising, publicity, promotions, characters, spokes people, as well as your customer service and sales people! These tools help create a meaningful identity that creates an emotional bond with your audience that compels them to take action - and provides logic that justifies their choices.

The Internet has a treasure chest of tools to create brand awareness, brand identity and brand loyalty including your e-mail address, website name, signature file. You also need to transmit your own personality and identity to create trust.

When you build trust, you build a great brand. If you can do that, then you will build sales and create customers for life!

Then, reverse engineer it.

By reverse engineering, I mean try to figure out reasoning behind every decision. Why this envelope? Why this headline? Why this message to this recipient?

That's great thing about marketing - there are no secrets. If it works, it's out there getting in all our faces. If it doesn't, you won't see it... at least, not twice.

Try to get in habit of reverse engineering all marketing messages that hit you throughout day. Each of those messages cost someone money - they weren't taking potshots.

That's not to suggest that it's all good. Actually, you can learn as much from bad or inept marketing as from good stuff, so don't dismiss schlock too quickly.

If marketing is second language of Western world, then speaking it fluently is just a matter of developing some good listening skills. As with any language, there's a science behind art. Master underlying structure, and all power-packed headlines and spiffy taglines will follow.