Inc.com: Whether it’s quality, selection, product knowledge, or customer service, small retailers can leverage a stronger brand identity to take on big-box competitors. For far too many large corporate retailers, their primary strategy is to build sales through low prices, to leverage their sheer size into economies of scale that drive down their costs and allow them to offer the lowest possible prices. Their entire business model is built on volume, and the primary tool of choice in their toolkit is price promotion. Sales, circulars, coupons, special events — however the promotion is structured — the offering is built around price.
Building brand equity for your store is a critical element in maintaining pricing integrity, protecting margins, and assuring long-term profitability. Building brand equity requires clarity of purpose. When customers think of you, they will focus on the one thing at which you excel. Focusing yourself and all of your people like a laser beam on that one thing, whether it be quality, selection, product knowledge or customer service, and building everything you do around that core mission, is the key to building retail brand equity.
Building Brand Equity [Inc.com]
Categories
Blogtrepreneur: So, how do you go about choosing and investing wisely in 
Youngentrepreneur: BusinessWeek put out a list this week of their top European Young Entrepreneurs for 2007. They looked at business owners who were under 25 years old, were making an impact, and were inspiring others to do so as well. Most of the featured entrepreneurs are in technology related businesses and are breaking from the traditional past of their deeply routed cultures.
Reveries: Timothy Ferris used to work 14-hour days and make $40,000. Today, at 29, he says he works four hours a week and makes $40,000 a month, reports Michelle Archer in USA Today (6/11/07).