Brown Couch Consulting

Brown Couch Consulting is pleased to announce a new client: Dr. Rebecca Caplan, a chiropractor in Brookline.  Dr. Caplan has more than 20 years of experience; she  practices a wide variety of chiropractic techniques including Palmer Diversified Technique, Sacro Occipital Technique, Applied Kinesiology, and Activator Methods.  We are pleased to be charged with helping Dr. Caplan gain more visibility on the web.

I’ve been working with the acupuncture clinic of Brookline on their website and one of the most important changes we had made to their site is replacing the logo, which was a background image with a text based logo.

The old logo was not only all image based, but was also hidden in the background.  It was invisible to the search engines since background images don’t get ALT tags and the valuable words acupuncture, clinic and Brookline were losing one turn on each page.  We’ve kept the lotus flower but turned the rest of the logo into text.  You can see it for yourself at www.acupunctureclinicforwomen.com.  This also gave us a chance to update the business tagline to Natural Healing Endorses Wellbeing.  The new headline area now takes better advantage of the space at the top and helps with the business’ SEO efforts.

One of our former clients – Day Spa Magi has been transferred to new ownership.  It’s always a little unnerving and exciting at the same time when this happens to a business.  It’s unnerving because it’s change.  It’s exciting because you don’t know what’s coming and in which ways it will be different. 

We’re not involved with Magi any more, but it can still be fun to exercise our thinking caps and come up with a list of things a spa should do to reinvent itself.  So, here it goes: 

1. New Name – New Image with a new brand.  Choose different colors, update the entry room, basically, give a different look to your business.
2. Same People?  This is a tough one because your customers, those who come regularly, are used to their specific hairdresser, cosmetologist, etc.  And since you want to retain the customers as much as possible, it’s best to keep those members of the staff who are performing well.   And of course, weed out those which are not.  Try to balance this off with some new faces and some new services.
3. Offer an introductory coupon – you’ll need to entice past customers and new customer to come and try something new – i.e. your services, so offer a 20% off your first treatment coupon to get them in the door.  
4. Fix the website!  Of course, with every new brand, there must be a new website.   I would also recommend this for spas which are also not going through an ownership change – every 3-5 years, redesign your site.  It will keep your business looking fresh to potential customers.

And, as I am left with a $38 Magi gift certificate burning a hole in my pocket, I anxiously await the opening of the new spa, even if just to see whether I can still get a manicure with my certificate.

We’re proud to announce that the Acupuncture Clinic of Brookline has become a client of Brown Couch Consulting.  We’re helping the clinic gain more visibility in the natural and herbal healing market in and around Brookline.  They already have a website, but we’ve been making improvements in the SEO realm that are necessary to help the clinic to be more visible on the web and Google Maps in particular.

I’ve written about Gretje Ferguson before – she’s a photographer in Boston taking amazing images of everyone from her children and grandchildren to business professionals and authors.  And now, Gretje’s site has a new look – thanks to her ever expanding list of offerings, we’ve split the menu into 2 and came up with a clean, fresh new look.

Take a look:

I’m always fascinated by co-marketing.  I just opened a brand new jar of Stonyfield yogurt to discover an ad on the foil seal for a new book called Anticancer: A New Way of Life, David Servan-Schreiber.  Here is how this works: Stonyfield goes out and buys (or maybe even gets) 1,000 copies of this book that is very much akin to their phylosophy.  They create a giveaway for the book, thereby getting information from thousands of their customers, which, in market research dollars is far more valuable than the cost of the book.  The book publishers benefit because their book just got publicity from a company whose customers are most likely to read it, pass it to their friends and tell others about it.  The customer benefit because they get exposure to a resource they most likely would not have found on their own, a book which advocates organic foods for health benefits, and more specifically, as a weapon against the disease we are all aware and worried about.  It’s brilliant.

Now if I could find a company that did store design for Brookline and Boston area businesses, I could team up with them for a physical and virtual makeover package!

I’ve been trying to find a bulk solution to our tea needs – we drink lots of tea – and the tea bags are starting to add up as unnecessary waste.  So I found this retailer in a simple Google search: http://www.starwest-botanicals.com/category/loose-organic-tea-tea-blends/.   I challenge you to find a red tea on the site in under 2 minutes.

Instead of Sort by SKU, how about sort by Type?  Red tea, Green Tea, White Tea, Caffeine-Free, Decaffeinated, Black…  There is no reason that categories can’t overlap, but I can tell you as a customer, I am not going to sift through 3 pages of teas just to find the rosehip and Rooibos teas that we drink most.  And it’s a shame because it obviously looks like they have put a lot of time into the site and it’s nicely designed.

In further searching, check this out: http://www.herbco.com/c-3-bulk-teas.aspx.  Nicely categorized.  At the end of this search for bulk tea, which took about 40 minutes longer than it ever should have, I settled for Frontier Natural Products Coop.   They had organic and fair trade teas, both positive and categories which were easy to navigate.  Hopefully, the tea will be decent and the teabags we don’t use will save the world.  Well, maybe not, but at least it’s a small step in the right direction.

One of my biggest and busiest clients, IBEX Tours, has launched a new tour to Belize: Chocolate, Nature and Culture.  I considered convincing them to rename the tour Chocolate: Light, Dark and Delicious.  I’ve been working feverishly to organize the information before the travel program gets mention in the Rutgers Magazine.   Needless to say, as I have been working long hours, and I ate through my stash of chocolate made at the Cotton Tree Lodge, the destination of the tour to Belize.  How fitting!  If you come across a Cotton Tree chocolate bar, sample it.  It’s unique taste, with an almost creamy finish and low sugar content win my vote for the best chocolate.  If only I could figure out a way to get another bar.

As I write this post, I lament the end of a bag of granola I had purchased in Vermont on vacation.   Silly you! You might say.  Why not just order online for them again?  It’s so easy for us to assume that any retailer would have an online store, or at least a website that would tell us how to get the product you want.  That’s not the case here.  I bought this bag at a farmer’s market and the gentleman who sold it to me said that they don’t have a website because “they are afraid that people will buy”.  After a hearty laugh, I realized that his sense for his business is right on.  How much would they have to make if people could buy their product online?  How would their business and their life change?  Did they want that change?

I’ll probably never know the answers to these questions, though I am very glad to have met the seller. He gave me a fresh reminder of how important it is for a business owner to know the limits of their business and the limit to which they are willing to take it.