The metrics of success and failure from business to business are very personal. The definition of success is as subjective as an oil painting of happiness. What you consider success will largely impact whether or not your business succeeds.

Numerous studies have looked at small-business failure rates over the past 30 years. The good news is that statistics are largely meaningless contortions bent to the will of whatever, whichever and whomsoever reports them. We have all heard that the bulk of new businesses fail, and while that is almost certainly true, there is no singular “why” factor.

Just 26% of those businesses closed in year one, 19% closed in the second year, with 59% closing in the first three to five years; 47% of those closed were franchises. Now if you take those statistics and you start really looking at the macro-economics of Rajkovic, Iceland in the 1980’s you will learn nothing, absolutely nothing. You will not account for the businesses that closed for lack of proper funding or knowledge. Nor will you accurately be able to form a picture of what happens to a solvent corporation as the result of embezzlement, auditing, divorce, un-insurable acts of God, or alien attack.

What you can do, is assume that all of the businesses that remained open, and the one’s that closed, could have grown their market share faster had they more effectively advertised their products and services. Market your identity as distinctly as possible and engage in a tailored strategy that suits your client well.

This article doesn’t have the word-count to positively plum the depths of strategic branding, or definitively dissect the proportionality of superior design. But remember, people do judge books by their covers and tigers by their stripes.

"Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does." - Stuart Henderson Britt