Written by Bob Meyer, Editor of BarterNews

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"Brand Building" Through Corporate Barter

Today, many new products are becoming obsolete even before they reach the consumer. And no one cares to wait around in the hopes that time will cure such marketing failures.

But as American business moves forward, what is probably the oldest form of commerce in the world—barter—has become a widely accepted solution to vexing financial and marketing challenges.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the "brand building" arena, where smart marketing people know they have to make every dollar count and maximize the marketplace exposure of their lucrative core brands.

Barter, more specifically corporate barter, can be an important weapon in the marketing executive's arsenal.

Almost everyone knows what barter is in its simplest terms: the exchange of products or services for other products or services. However, corporate barter is somewhat different. It's a process by which a manufacturer or provider of services can take unwanted products or underutilized capacity and turn it into valuable trade credits, by selling to a corporate barter company.

Corporate barter offers a great value to businesses...an attractive alternative to the "pennies on the dollar" that liquidators offer for their unwanted goods. (A list of barter companies worldwide is found on the BarterNews.com web site, under "Barter Contacts.")

What does the company do with the trade credits? It uses them to acquire things normally purchased with cash. In most cases these trade credits are equal to the regular wholesale price of goods, helping conserve cash.

Virtually every corporation has products or services that seemed like great idea when they were conceived, but failed to pay out quickly in the real-world marketplace. And the trouble is that most companies can't afford the cost of owning products of offering services that "aren't quite right,
right now."

That's a luxury that is growing increasingly scarce—and expensive—as marketers seek to expand the reach and sales of their most important items. Corporate barter is a solution for clearing out what's not working, while allowing a company's top-notch marketing and sales people to concentrate on what is working.

Instead of reverting to discounting and incentives on lines with good profit margins, and diverting time and attention from the core business, corporate barter can help...by stanching the hemorrhaging and cleaning out the non-profitable products before they put a further drain on a company's cash flow.

To be continued next week:
Using Corporate Barter To Build Your Company Brand In This New Era.

Don't...Miss The Next Big Exciting Issue of Barternews...

Put your company's sales message in the next issue of BarterNews. Closing for advertising is February 1, 2004. For information on advertising rates, ad specs, etc. click here.

American West Airlines has "sold out" available advertising on every traytable of its 138 airplanes. An ad, which covers the entire flat surface of the tray table (on which meals are served), goes for $2,500 to $3,500 a month.

Trade Exchange Owners...Start The New Year Off With A Bang By Building Rapport & Empathy With Your Client Base!!

The most powerful marketing tool in the barter industry is all ready for your use...no work is needed! Click here

There are almost 1,000 organizations worldwide that welcome volunteers, where you can trade your time and skills to help others in exchange for room and board. For professionals with special expertise—technical, financial or medical—there are numerous opportunities.

The Financial Services Corps, which can be reached at (212) 771-1400, sends qualified executives to help advise public or private sector agencies, primarily in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union on capital-markets development and central and commercial banking.

Retired businesspeople may want to check out the International Executive Service Corps at (202) 326-0280 or www.iesc.org, which sends volunteers to work as consultants in developing countries. And those in the health profession can contact Health Volunteers Overseas at (202) 296-0928 or www.hvousa.org.

Many groups require no special skills such as Global Volunteers at (800) 487-1074 or www.GlobalVolunteers.org, which takes interested workers to developing regions of Europe to help on projects ranging from natural-resource development to teaching English.

Caribbean Volunteer Expeditions at (607) 962-7846 or www.cvexp.org, teams up with local museums and national parks on historic-preservation projects. Volunteers—who don't have to be architects—help measure drawings and document building surveys.

Check Out The 29 Informative Articles Listed In Our "Trade Exchange" Section

Learn how to use barter to reward and motivate your employees, or to assist your most valued customers. See why your company's team of professional advisors should include a barter expert. And check out the ten ways barter can help you build greater assets, plus much, much more!

To read any one or all of these interesting articles see "Barter Categories" listed on the horizontal navigational bar at the top of our web site, and then click "Trade Exchange" on the drop-down menu.

"Barter, as practiced today by corporations, is probably the smartest, most cost-effective form of corporate networking there is. Corporations understand that, as a form of networking, barter can get you what you need for what you don't want. And that's as close to something for nothing as you're ever going to find in this life."

—Harvey Mackay, author and recent recipient of the Horatio Alger
Award To Distinguished Americans

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The Barter Marketplace archives click here.

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Here & There...

• Home ownership in the U.S. is now 68%. National real estate wealth in 2003 grew by $340 billion.

• Robert J. Coen, well-known ad forecaster, expects ad spending in the U.S. to grow 6.9% in 2004 reaching $266.4 billion. World-wide ad spending should rise 5.8% to $498.3 billion in 2004.

• Entrepreneurship, once driven by people in their 20s, is now being taken on by Americans over 55, reports international outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas in Chicago. Older entrepreneurs now represent 28.5 percent of all self-employed in this country.

• Futurist Faith Popcorn says the advertising business today is on its way to extinction. She contends that in three to five years you will see consumers rejecting advertising, which will cause agencies to scramble as they try to make a living. Right now, they are opening trend departments, public-relations arms, and viral-marketing departments. It's about trying to reinvent themselves—but they are a bit late to the game.

• Have you signed up to receive a summary via e-mail of the Tuesday Report every week? If not, go to the top of this issue (right hand corner) and sign up!

• Roughly 40 million Americans, about 14.5% of the population, moved every year, according to Census data. While many move just down the block, eight million people either moved across state lines or international boundaries.

• The average vacancy rate for the U.S. industrial real-estate market continued to rise in 2003, hitting its highest level in 23 years. A weak economy curtailed companies' needs for warehouse space for the distribution of goods as well as their need for research-and-development industrial space.

• Last year 11,168 apartment units were acquired by buyers who had plans to convert them to condos, up from 5,865 in 2002 and 3,910 in 2001.

• Employment reports come out every month as economists pour over reams of historical data with sophisticated computer models and big staffs. But incredibly, they only survey big businesses even though "small business" in America constitutes 50% of the GNP!

• Clear Channel is by far the largest player in the radio industry with about 1,200 stations in more than 300 markets. They represent 9% of the market and 18% of industry revenue. Clear Channel's radio division reported $3.7 billion of revenue in 2002, which represented 44% of the company's $8.42 billion total revenue.

• Business magazines have been hurt by the advertising downturn, best illustrated by Forbes magazine, a powerhouse in the business magazine category. According to Publishers Information Bureau, the magazine logged 2,773 ad pages between January and November 2003...down from 6,000 advertising pages in all of 2000.

• A year-end briefing by PricewaterhouseCoopers put the 2003 occupancy rate for the lodging industry at 59.6%, up from 2002's 59.3%. Both years were some of the worst in 35 years, says Bjorn Hanson, who heads the firm's hospitality group. Occupancy is expected to rise to 61.2% this year, with average daily room rates expected to rise less than 2%.

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