In the past year or so, I’ve blogged on the changing role of big design firms in the overall market of brand identity development, specifically logos.

About the Business

As I see the market, international crowdsourcing is making huge inroads into the former “design firm” business fortress. Today, there are over a dozen viable crowdsource sites with the current leader being 99designs.com. For the last several months, we have been tracking the number of active logo contests being run on these sites and it is a shocking 1,500 to 1,800 individual logo contests per week! That’s over 75,000 new logos per year being created via international crowdsourcing…business that used to be handled by design firms! Here’s just a couple of great new logos from logo contests that we have run for clients. You can see more in our portfolio.

The number of contests is not the only impact that international crowdsourcing is creating. Of the logo contest sites, the top dozen all have Alexa ratings under 100,000. That means that in the entire Internet, these sites rank in the top 100,000 websites in the world! To put that into perspective, Landor (landor.com), the big design firm that claims to have "pioneered modern logo design" ranks 140,000! In  fact, if you Google search for "logo design", none of the old school design companies show on the first few pages. That's because the paradigm is shifting!

So Whats Happening Now?

The internet is ablaze with design opportunities for interested companies/owners/entrepreneurs to get new logos at pricing starting from $29. There are so many options that it is difficult to sort through them because what you really want is a great logo. So here are your options if you think about it in a quadrant analysis:

• Low cost / High quality – this is interesting.  If I can really get high quality at low cost, it would shatter all of the myths which have heretofore been held as truth! Could this be a new paradigm? With a well managed logo contest, you can chose between hundreds of submissions from dozens of designers. This is exactly what Al Gore was thinking about when he invented the internet!

• Go to the big design firms and pay a lot....ok, High cost / High quality - OK, that seems to be what you buy when you work with a big firm…I guess (note...it did not work out so well for Tropicana and the Gap!)e

• Low cost / Low quality – I really don’t want to be here either…but at least I didn’t spend a lot. No one will lose a job over a $200 logo project gone bad but then...time is money and you still don't have a presentable logo. This is what happens a lot with small design firms that try to develop logos with one or two designers.

• Go to the big design firms and pay a lot....ok, High cost / Low quality – no one wants to be here. That's what happened with Tropicana and the Gap!

If you are ready for a new logo and you want it to be a great logo...let YBR Design manage a logo contest for your company!

Accessing this New Information

Under the rules in the proposed regulations, beginning on March 23, 2012, all health insurance issuers and group health plans will provide the Summary of Benefits and Coverage (SBC) and the uniform glossary to consumers.

• Information when shopping for coverage: Often, health plans only provide marketing material on the plan or policy before its purchased, giving consumers a selective understanding of what they are buying. Now, consumers will have the critical information on their choices upfront, before they buy coverage, allowing them to make a more informed decision.

An issuer or health plan will automatically provide a Summary of Benefits and Coverage to a consumer prior to enrolling in coverage and 30 days prior to reissuance or renewal of their health coverage so they are informed about the coverage they have.

• Information when coverage changes: People enrolled in a health plan must be notified of any significant changes to the terms of coverage reflected in the Summary of Benefits and Coverage at least 60 days prior to the effective date of the change.

• Information on demand: A shopper or person enrolled in coverage can request a copy of the Summary of Benefits and Coverage and must receive it within seven days. The uniform glossary will also be made available upon request, as well as in a link provided in the coverage label by the plan or insurance company. The Departments will also post a copy on www.HealthCare.gov and www.dol.gov/ebsa/healthreform/.

Stay tuned for more information….

The Wizard

New Requirements - summary of benefits and coverage (SBC)

Originally scheduled to be issued March 23, 2011, the new ERISA benefit disclosure requirements were recently issued (download SBC template) and expanded under PPACA by the addition of a four-page summary (issued to be four double-sided pages or eight-pages total) of benefits and coverage to be provided to both applicants and enrollees prior to enrollment or re-enrollment. New SBC provisions apply to all plans regardless of grandfather status. The plan sponsor is responsible for distribution of the SBC.

Also included is the need to provide a uniform glossary of common health coverage terms.  The glossary may be found on the Internet at the Department of Labor website (download glossary here).  The SBC template (as it exists in its proposed state at this time) includes instructions, samples, and a guide for providing coverage examples to illustrate benefits provided under the plan for common benefits scenarios. According to the newly published proposed regulations, group health plans with multiple coverage options would need to have an SBC for each option.

Stay tuned for additional updates…

The Wizard

Happy Employees

It’s important for all employers to consult with your legal advisors and/or benefits consultant to understand the new benefit communications requirements and timing will affect your employee benefit guide or benefit booklet. There are some new benefit guide requirements. Among them are:

1. Notice of grandfathered health plan status – Grandfathered plans must notify their participants that their plan is a grandfathered health plan, as provided under the PPACA. In addition, these plans must include a statement describing the health plan benefits and contact information for questions or complaints, as part of any plan materials provided to participants. Under the Act’s “grandfather rules” not all provisions apply to all plans. A grandfathered plan is a group health plan that was in existence on March 23, 2010, and complies with certain notice requirements. However, grandfathered status is lost if the employer “enters into a new policy, certificate or contract of insurance” after March 23, 2010. (Special rules apply to collectively bargained plans.) Grandfathered status can also be lost if your plan:
• eliminates substantially all benefits to diagnose or treat a specific illness;
• increases certain cost sharing requirements by a specified amount;
• decreases the employer contribution percentage by a specified amount; or
• creates new annual limits on benefits.
Please consult with your legal advisors and/or benefits consultant to understand the new benefit communications requirements and timing and how they will affect your employee benefit guide or benefit booklet.

2. Notice of key plan design changes – Employees need to be notified of benefit changes that take effect January 1, 2011. Those changes include:

Annual and lifetime benefit limits – Model language has been provided in the new regulations and can be found on the Department of Labor website (www.dol.gov/ebsa/lifetimelimitsmodelnotice.doc). The following model language can be used to satisfy the notice requirement:

Annual and Lifetime Benefit Limits

Revised eligibility for dependent coverage of adult children – Model language has also been provided in the new regulations and can be found on the Department of Labor website (www.dol.gov/ebsa/dependentsmodelnotice.doc). The following model language can be used to satisfy the notice requirement:

Revised Eligibility for Dependent Coverage of Adult Children

Primary care physician designation and OB/GYN self-referral – The Department of Labor (DOL) has issued model notices to assist employers with developing their employee communications pertaining to these changes. The model notices are located on the DOL’s website at (www.dol.gov/ebsa/patientprotectionmodelnotice.doc). The new requirements, when applicable, need to ensure that individuals enrolled in a plan or health insurance coverage know of their rights to (1) choose a primary care provider or a pediatrician when a plan or issuer requires designation of a primary care physician; or (2) obtain obstetrical or gynecological care without prior authorization. The following model language can be used to satisfy the notice requirement:

Primary care physician designation and OB/GYN self-referral

Notice of automatic enrollment—Beginning sometime after January 1, 2011, pending further regulatory guidance, employers with more than 200 full-time employees will be required to automatically enroll all new full-time employees and continue enrollment for existing employees in the employer-sponsored medical coverage, unless the employee affirmatively elects to waive coverage. Please consult with your legal advisors and/or benefits consultant to understand the new benefit communications requirements and timing and how they will affect your employee benefit guide or benefit booklet.

Summary of medical benefits – Beginning March 23, 2012, employers will need to create a summary of their medical benefit plan, sometimes called a “uniform explanation of coverage.” The summary must include specific content and definitions, be no longer than 4-pages, and be written in language that is “linguistically” and “culturally” appropriate and in a font size that can’t be smaller than 12-point. Model language is forthcoming. Please consult with your legal advisors and/or benefits consultant to understand the new benefit communications requirements and timing and how they will affect your employee benefit guide or benefit booklet.

Summary of plan care management programs—Beginning March 23, 2012, employers will need to notify participants of all care management programs available under the employer’s self-insured and fully insured health plans. Model language is forthcoming. Please consult with your legal advisors and/or benefits consultant to understand the new benefit communications requirements and timing and how that will affect your employee benefit guide or benefit booklet.

Notice of eligibility for health insurance exchange – Beginning March 23, 2012, employers will need to notify all employees of the availability of the new state insurance exchanges, the eligibility criteria for subsidies to purchase insurance through the exchange, and the effect of purchasing coverage through an exchange using employer contributions. States will begin creating their exchanges in 2013 in order to be in compliance with the individual mandate for all Americans to have minimum essential health insurance coverage by January 1, 2014.

For all of these benefit communication changes and others which may now be under review by either government administrators or courts claiming jurisdiction over one or more of the sections of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, please consult with your legal advisors and/or benefits consultant to understand the new benefit communications requirements and timing and how they will affect your employee benefit guide or benefit booklet.

If you or your company needs support in the development of an employee benefit booklet or benefit guide for your company or a client company, please give YBR Design an opportunity to submit a proposal.

- The Wizard

]]> http://www.ybrdesign.com/employee-notification-requirements-with-patient-protection-and-affordable-care-act-ppaca/feed/ 0 http://www.ybrdesign.com/benefits-communication-its-that-time-of-the-year/ http://www.ybrdesign.com/benefits-communication-its-that-time-of-the-year/#comments Wed, 10 Aug 2011 18:40:41 +0000 YBR Design http://www.ybrdesign.com/?p=1733 With annual enrollment benefit enrollments underway or just around the corner, now is the time to begin to execute employee benefits campaign. You want this year’s communication to be the best ever…why? Here are some sobering facts:

According to recent research studies conducted by major benefits insurers,

• 36% of all employees say that if it’s their choice, they’ll be working somewhere else next year.1

• 54% of employees would change jobs for better benefits, despite lower pay.2

• Only 29% of employees gave their employer benefits communication a positive rating.3 Even amongst HR benefit professionals; fewer than 19% think employees have a good benefit understanding.4

 

And here are some happier thoughts on the topic:

• 90% of employees who said that they received effective benefit communication say that their employer values their work and 88% say they are satisfied with their job.3

The bottom line in this research is that high quality benefits education is a low-cost and high-impact way to affect employee satisfaction in all companies.

YBR Design develops and designs outstanding employee benefit booklets for our client to help them educate their employees about the valuable benefits they are provided. This program has a low cost but a high-perceived value. Once a client company begins giving their employees and employee candidates a well-designed employee benefit booklet, there is no way to go back to the old hand packed folders or stapled black & white copies of summary plan designs that were used before. This program is strong glue that you can apply to your employee relationships to retain existing employees for years to come.

YBR Design, specializes in the creation of high quality, custom-branded, employee benefit booklets. If you’d like to discuss how YBR Design can help create an employee benefit booklet program for your company, please contact us today. We look forward to providing you with a proposal for this years employee benefit booklets.

The Wizard

1. GfK Custom Research Study of Employee Benefits Trends 2010.
2. Aflac survey published in 2011 Employee Benefit News article.
3. Harris Interactive online survey during December 2009.
4. Harvard Business Review online survey of HR decision makers 2010

]]> http://www.ybrdesign.com/benefits-communication-its-that-time-of-the-year/feed/ 0 http://www.ybrdesign.com/brand-identity-a-changing-paradigm/ http://www.ybrdesign.com/brand-identity-a-changing-paradigm/#comments Wed, 13 Jul 2011 21:08:31 +0000 YBR Design http://www.ybrdesign.com/?p=1697 Current Logo Development Paradigm – Big Design and Small Local Design

About Big Design

As a brand management, consumer marketing and design management executive with a 30+ year career, I have hired many large design firms to create logos for the companies and or brands that I have managed. Back then, because I needed a “guaranteed” design solutions, I bought into the old design paradigm flaunted around by the big design companies, “If you want great design you have to pay a lot.” That old paradigm led me to many big design invoices but usually good (or at least acceptable) results. During that time I worked with some of the top design firms including Primo Angeli, Chase Design, Group 4 and even ran a $250,000 project with Landor. Of course, while most Fortune 500 companies have the money to spend on expensive NY, San Francisco and Chicago design firms, in recent times, that old formula (pay a lot, get a lot) did not work recently for major clients like Tropicana, Gap and others. Even though they paid, they suffered lost sales and marketplace humiliation for buying off target design solutions.

The fact is, the correlation between cost and design quality has never been proven and these high-profile design flops show that even when you pay for big design to do their magic, you can still get very bad design!

Small Local Options

Freelancers and small local design firms are at the other end of the design spectrum. Generally, these local players are significantly less expensive that the “big” guys, but the problem is, when a company hires a freelance designer to do a brand identity project you only get a few designs to review. Why is that so? Well, very simply, each person has a limited imagination, limited design style and frankly, a limited amount of time to get the design work done. So as much as a marketer would like to hire a local designer and wish that they would produce a world-class design, it’s a high-risk effort for all the reasons mentioned above.

Asking a small design firm to come up with a broad range of design options is not going to work.

 

A New Crowdsourced Design Paradigm Emerges

If able to choose, everyone would want HIGH quality and LOW cost!

Thanks to online design contest companies like 99designs, crowdSPRING, DesignCrowd, LogoMyWay, MycroBurst, LogoTournament and others, the brand identity design paradigm is rapidly changing. It is a given that marketers and entrepreneurs need and

demand great logo design; and now, for the first time, they can feel a lot better about getting it for a low cost! At YBR Design, we put that concept into a little decision quadrant.

While it’s clear that no one wants low quality design, hopefully, you’ll agree that it’s a lot smarter for clients to get high quality design for a low cost! Utilizing the resources of global design crowdsourcing sites and for a fraction of what the big design firms charge, YBR Design manages a client logo contest professionally, getting the client a huge number of viable logo options from many, many talented designers from around the world. The result is a logo that would have cost the client company tens of thousands of dollars somewhere else.

The Rationale In Support of Clients Wanting Professional Design Contest Management

1. Most logo contest holders are not trained in design and yet, developing a new logo design is very serious business. The client will live with their new logo for a long time so getting a great design is very important. Even with the added cost of professional contest management, clients get a great value for their investment in a new logo.

2. Great design starts with an outstanding design brief. This is even more important when designers from all over the globe are working for you and English is not their primary language. YBR Design knows how to create successful briefs for each client contest.

3. Crowdsource designers are true creative talent and are easily offended. If contest holders grade them too harshly, don’t respond, allow some other designer to steal their idea, make too sharp of a remark or if they simply feel that you are not being fair to them, they’ll pull their designs and leave the contest. There is an art to managing these talented folks. YBR Design knows how to manage designers to achieve great results for the benefit of our clients.

4. Time is money and logo contests must be managed closely for optimum results. If the client runs their own contest, and wants to arrive at the finish with a great logo, they will need to review, grade and respond to each of the designers for every one of their submissions. This takes many hours and requires an understanding of how to direct designers as they seek design solutions. Designers can sense a lack of knowledge and experience and if the contest holder attempts to feign design knowledge, they will know! For our clients, YBR Design becomes the contest holder, creates the actual contest where the designers will make their submissions, are graded and receive feedback. We guide each designer towards a possible winning concept.

5. Design is an evolving process and it takes experience and a keen design eye to seek out and identify an idea that may be the seed for a clients’ new brand identity. A client who is not trained or experienced in design may walk right past a great idea. When YBR Design manages contests, we work with each designer to understand their idea and then help them mold it and perfect it to be the best that it can be.

6. There are over 1,500 logo contests running simultaneously around the world via the many different logo contest websites at anytime. Breaking through contest clutter to get the top designers is no easy task! YBR Design has managed many contests, and has worked with and knows many of the top designers. At the contest initiation, we send out personal invitations to over 130 top designers from around the globe to come and visit our client’s logo contest. This tool enables us to break through the contest clutter, attract top talent and achieve great brand identity results. In fact, in our last five logo contests, we’ve averaged over 725 design submissions by an average of 75 designers per contest who are competing for an average contest prize of only $ 420.00 per contest. These are exceptionally robust events that have provided our clients with an embarrassing wealth of exceptional brand identity work.

7. Selecting from so many great designs requires discernment. With significant marketing and branding experience, we can steer clients toward designs, which will distinguish them within their marketplace. At contest end, we will gather the top 10-15 submissions and present the options with rationale to the client for review and final selection.

8. At the end of each contest YBR Design manages the designer file transfer for our clients, verifying that we have the correct type of design files, the font files and the color standards so that the new logo can be managed with design software and used for all of the after development design activities such as collateral, websites and advertising. We also create a brand standards guide so the client can confidently share their new logo with any local printer or embroidery supplier and they will know how the new logo works, which are the correct colors and which fonts to use.

9. Having a great logo helps build brands. When an entrepreneur goes to sell their company, a well-developed brand will carry all of the goodwill value above the assets. In this very real sense, good branding doesn’t cost…it pays.

YBR Design would like to work with your company to maximize your new brand identity and take advantage of global crowdsourcing for your company.  We would like to engage you in initial discussions regarding how we may work together to achieve the many benefits that are spelled out in this document. For your further consideration, we invite you to contact YBR Design top assist you in your next brand identity project.

The Wizard

]]> http://www.ybrdesign.com/brand-identity-a-changing-paradigm/feed/ 0 http://www.ybrdesign.com/using-employee-benefits-booklets-as-a-recruiting-tool/ http://www.ybrdesign.com/using-employee-benefits-booklets-as-a-recruiting-tool/#comments Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:03:52 +0000 YBR Design http://www.ybrdesign.com/?p=1526

Replacing Employees Costs Time, Money and Lost Productivity. It's Cheaper and Easier to Retain Them.

Human Resource professionals are responsible for recruiting and retaining great talent for their company. Well-designed employee benefit booklets, are a great tool for differentiating your company from your competitors in the eyes of your existing and prospective employees!

According to recent research studies conducted by major benefits insurers,

• 54% of employees would change jobs for better benefits, despite lower pay.

Wow! Now that’s a number. Over half of your employees would leave their jobs to get better benefits?  That’s really amazing since in another survey, Only 29% of employees gave their employer benefits communication a positive rating. That means that over 70% of employees are not receiving adequate benefits communications. Imagine that over half of your employees are considering leaving and yet, they really do not even understand the benefits that your company provides for them.

How sad it will be when they leave, without really knowing what they were comparing when your competitor HR manager recruited them using a well designed employee benefit booklet. What is even sadder; nationally, even amongst HR benefit professionals; fewer than 19% think employees have a good benefit understanding; over 80% know their employees do not have a good understanding of their benefits! So in this area of benefits communication, you know that the information you provide to employees is inadequate.

And yet, 90% of employees who said that they received effective benefit communication say that their employer values their work and 88% say they are satisfied with their job. In short, those receiving effective benefit communication are very likely to stay and continue contributing to your company. The bottom line in this research is that high quality benefits education is a low-cost and high-impact way to affect employee satisfaction in all companies. By providing your employees with effective benefit communications support, you will create a strong allegiance and curb turnover.

In my career, I’ve worked for some awesome companies like Coca-Cola, Ralston Purina and Lennox International. Fortunately, they understood the importance of benefits and communication of benefits. As a brand marketer for over 30 years, I have also interviewed with some smaller companies and I can tell you from personal experience, it’s not impressive when the HR person sheepishly hands over a benefit package consisting of a hand packed office supply store folder or stapled black & white copies of summary plan designs. I remember thinking to myself “these must be lousy benefits.”

If you are in this situation right now with your recruiting and retention, let’s discuss how YBR Design can assist you in the creation of high quality, custom-branded, employee benefit booklet for your company. Our employee benefit booklets are low cost but have a very high perceived value to your employees and can be strong glue that you can apply to either recruit new employees or retain existing employees. YBR Design, specializes in the creation of employee benefit booklets. We would like for you to take a look at our website services in this area (please click here). If you’d like to discuss how YBR Design can help create an employee benefit booklet program for your company, please contact us today (please click here).

~ The Wizard

 

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