I AM SURE YOU have invested much time and hard-earned money to create the product or service you currently offer your customers. The last two columns focused on establishing clear communication with your customer base with some practical considerations … putting together an effective ad to talk to your customers, and then deciding the best media options for getting your brand message across to them.

We will now examine a few more ideas to further build your brand and grow your business. They can be simple measures that will not necessarily take any significant financial investment, but will involve a committed and determined investment of your time.

Excel at delivering your brand promise

This can be achieved in two ways: a memorable in-store experience and superior service. The customer has seen your advertising messages and on that basis has walked into your store with certain expectations. This is the moment of truth. Will your ‘brand promise’ deliver against those expectations? Now is the chance to go that extra mile to make sure your customer leaves absolutely satisfied with your brand offer, and with full intentions of returning again in the future.

Going that extra mile could mean: carrying Mrs Jones’ groceries out to her car because she is getting on a bit and does not have the strength she once had.

Taking the time to carefully answer all the questions regarding your customer’s new purchase and then, as a freebie, including that little ‘extra’ something as an appreciation of their patronage. The little extra something could be as simple as a discount voucher of some kind valid for a future date, thus ensuring their return should they wish to use it.

Another extra could be personally delivering a box of chocolates or some flowers to the home of an irate customer to reinforce the fact that you are genuinely sorry for an inconvenience caused.

Actions like these cost very little in monetary terms and have huge potential to win customers for life.

Make sure your brand consistently offers the best possible quality. Sometimes one has to ‘invest’ in the brand at the expense of short term profitability in order to build a sustainable quality brand for the long term. If the widget you sell needs an extra wheel because customers are asking for it … do it; make the investment. It may cost a little extra but will pay for itself many times over in the long run.

If your product or service offers consistent quality and the shopping experience matches that level, then over time the price becomes less of an issue – it is offset by the positives in dealing with you and your brand. Your customer will feel… ‘I am prepared to pay the few extra dollars because I know I will be completely satisfied with my purchase and they make me feel special in the way they treat me ’

A happy customer is a returning customer

Ask your customer what they think and feel about your brand .This is effectively the beginning of building your own customer research information pool. It will often uncover barriers to entry or purchase, or confirm positives for continued purchase. This will help you to refine and improve your overall offer. It all goes toward understanding who your customer is and what is important to them. Apart from the fact that you will gain valuable information to help grow your business, your customer will think well of you for taking the time to talk to them, thus earning their respect and ultimately their trust. You will recall from an earlier columns that one of the key building blocks for any brand is TRUST.

Actively market your brand ’internally’

It is vital that your vision for the business and the brand positioning strategy is shared with your staff. Once involved they will readily understand where you want to take the business and be able to effectively translate that learned knowledge into the type and quality of service that your customers deserve.

Brand building is as much to do with common sense and the way we treat people as it is to do with obeying a few basic rules. Brand building:

• gives you differentiation in the market place
• is a great vehicle to communicate and build promotions
• builds a goodwill factor into your balance sheet [ultimately that translates to a dollar value]
• encourages customer recall and self selection
• allows a higher price to be charged over time
• helps to build customer loyalty
• helps you add associated products to your offer and piggy back on your brand recognition.
• will build a strong image for your business

Decide your plan, stay with your plan, execute your plan well and remember….

‘That some achieve great success is proof that others can do it as well’ Abraham Lincoln

Our other young achiever is 15 year-old Stacey Bentley, a striking young woman, just starting Year 12 at Beerwah State High and a national paint horse champion in her spare time. Stacey is off to Fort Worth Texas soon to compete in the international paint horse championships as part of an Australian team. What’s also impressive is that Stacey is fundraising for the many thousands of dollars she needs to make the trip.

Following some suggestions from readers we have a couple of new columns in this edition -Mind Your Business offers advice for small business owners and it’s written by a very experienced marketing and ad man – Eddy Oddy. We also have an Auto Guide column which is prepared for us by a couple of professional motoring journalists Yvonne and David Williams.

Two outspoken Christian priests, are launching separate books this month. Catholic rebel Father Peter Kennedy and Anglican cleric and academic, Ray Baraclough each challenge religious orthodoxy. Peter was sacked from St Mary’s in South Brisbane in 2009 for supposedly breaking with Catholic liturgy. In Peter’s book supporters have written about the man, Catholic doctrine and the dire future of the Church.

Ray Baraclough faces the difficult question of why so many believe God is responsible for earthquakes, epilepsy and global warming. Why is a loving God so cruel?
We have reviewed both books in this edition, and I will chair a community conversation with both authors in Maleny on March 17 (see p.32-33).

My email inbox gets busier each month and I am sorry if an item you expected to see didn’t make it this time. Let me urge anyone with a personal, business or community story to let us know as early as possible in the month. Our deadline is always the 25th of the month for stories, and we’ll always do our best to fit you in. After that date is usually impossible.

Enjoy the March edition and if you feel like commenting on a story, please go to our website which, I am delighted to say, is now attracting more and more attention from readers around the world.
( www.hinterlandtimes.com.au ).

Michael Berry

“To be recognised by the Sunshine Coast Regional Council, and to be named as young citizen of the year is an honour.

“I suppose that for the next year I can set an example for other young people to start standing up and taking roles in our community. My role will be continuing to be a voice for young people and the Indigenous community of the traditional Gubbi Gubbi people. I will be involved in cultural discussion papers, sitting on the cultural board of the Noosa Biosphere, and be a voice there for the things I hear from other young people, for what needs to be happening here on the Sunshine Coast.

“I’m employed by an organisation called Interactive Community Planning where I develop programs, projects, events around employment and training, self determination and identity. I coordinate a young women’s business program at Nambour High School. I just connect with the young girls there and build a relationship with them and create a space and find comfort with that.
“As a young person I have faced a lot of hardships and obstacles and have been in some very dark places. I was in a head-on car collision in 2007 and doctors thought I would die, and certainly never walk again. That period of my life revealed what is important; that we have only one life and one time, and the time is now to start trying to create a future for my children and build a better community.

“I was brought up in contemporary times in a modern day Australia. So, I am walking in two worlds, having to have respect and stay connected to my traditional aboriginal heritage, but knowing that I live in modern times where things are very different.”

Don's View

There are many things to celebrate on Australia Day, but perhaps the most important is that it marks the end of the silly season.

Virginity is a gift from God

IT IS THE time politicians and the media dust themselves off and start on the serious business of the year. Or at least they would have if Tony Abbott had not told the Women’s Weekly that he would advise had not told the Women’s Weekly that he would advise his daughters to sit on it until they were married.

Actually if he had put it as straightforwardly as that there probably wouldn’t have been much of a fuss. Some might have derided him as a bit old fashioned (or, as his 18 year old daughter Frances put it, “a lame, gay, churchy loser”) but a lot of traditional parents might have shrugged in mute agreement.

However, Abbott being Abbott, he had to take it further. After all, the Weekly was doing an extensive piece on his favourite subject – himself – and indeed on his favourite aspects of it – ethics and beliefs, creed and credo. So Abbott felt constrained to add that virginity was a gift from God to a woman, and the most precious gift she could give to a man.

By way of later explanation he insisted that he wasn’t preaching – this was simply the advice that he would give to his own three daughters, although given that two of them had already reached adulthood it could still be seen as a touch patronising. But no one really believed him. The worst fears of the moderates, both inside and outside the Liberal Party, were confirmed: Captain Catholic was back in charge. The Mad Monk just couldn’t help himself; he was incapable of drawing the line between public policy and private morals. And in Australia, this was always going to be a bummer.

Actually Abbott received more support than he probably expected; talk back radio ended up slightly in his favour thanks to a blitz by women of a certain age (and possibly also a certain religion). And the most severe critics tended to be the usual suspects: feminists such as Catherine Lumby and Eva Cox, who were generally seen as political fringe-dwellers at best.

Kevin Rudd sensibly laid low and said nothing, and his deputy Julia Gillard restrained herself to the terse observation that Australian women could make their own choices and did not want to be lectured by Tony Abbott. Even this was too much for the Liberals’ normally sensible legal affairs spokesmen George Brandis who said Gillard had no right to talk about families because she didn’t have one herself. The quick response was that Gillard was not talking about families but about Tony Abbott, and that Brandis would presumably also disqualify the Pope and all celibate clergy from the debate; indeed, perhaps he should disqualify himself from discussing women and children since he did not have a womb.

But the real argument centred around Abbott’s hypocrisy, which he at least acknowledged; after all he could hardly deny it. Rather sheepishly he admitted that when his daughters said to him: “But daddy, you did all those things yourself,” he had replied: “Well, yes, I did.” And indeed he had, and more.

But the more serious underlying complaint was about the idea that a woman’s virginity, and therefore presumably her entire sex life, could be regarded as no more than a gift to a man. The issue died a natural death in the media, but the memory of that piece of unbridled misogyny will linger on.

The earth is flat after all…

This generation’s answer to Screaming Lord Sutch, Gibbering Lord Monckton, is so obviously loony that under normal circumstances Australians would treat his ravings with the contempt they deserve. But alas, these are not normal times; the anti-science brigade is not only on the march, but is making the running on the whole issue of climate change.

They have been helped along by some very powerful financial backers and some influential allies in the media, but what has given them a real lift is the revelation that some of the advocates for the case for global warming have been shown to be over- enthusiastic and in some cases just plain wrong. These flaws, according to the sceptics, show that the wholescientific edifice painstakingly erected over a decade is shonky; scientists are not to be trusted, and it is likely that the earth is flat after all, just as reasonable people have always suspected.

Of course they show nothing of the kind; 99 percent of the science, supported by 99 percent of qualified scientists, remains intact. By any rational standard the case for man-made global warming is beyond argument, even if all the details cannot be quantified. But in political terms, we are just about back to square one.

It is to be hoped that people of good will from all parties can restore some sanity to the debate. The fact that Tony Abbott and even Barnaby Joyce have shunned numerous invitations to associate themselves and their parties with Monckton’s outrageous demagoguery is a hopeful start.

No whale war with Japan

Let’s be clear about it: Australia is not going to declare war on Japan over whaling.

This is probably just as well for everyone concerned, including the whales; it was the last war with Japan which gave us the problem in the first place.

Shortly after the Japanese surrendered Douglas Macarthur, the American supremo overseeing the allied occupation, was faced with a major food shortage and suggested that whale meat might be a useful supplement. The Japanese, forbidden by the terms of surrender from keeping a navy or any other kind of defence force, jumped at the chance to get back on the high seas and the rest, as they say, is history.

In 2008 Australia sent the Oceanic Viking to collect evidence of Japanese activities for its potential court case, and the Viking duly returned with videos of Japanese killing whales. But this was never in dispute. What the videos don’t and can’t show is the Japanese not doing scientific research on the remains. And even if they somehow managed to prove this negative, it is not clear that it would be a matter for the International Court of Justice: the moratorium is simply an agreement between the members of the IWC. Japan could easily claim that it is not a legally enforceable contract, and that therefore Japan is not bound by it.

As always, litigation would be a morass, and the government is sensible to steer clear of it for as long as possible. But time is running out; if there is no progress in the next few months, Rudd will have to take the risk, if only to maintain his own political credibility. It may not help the whales much, but they are not the only creatures endangered in the current brawl.

The recent tourist season on the Sunshine Coast provides a snapshot of what a resident population of over 500,000 people may look and feel like. The influx of hundreds of thousands of tourists vividly demonstrates the impacts on the liveability and natural values of the Sunshine Coast region already under acute stress from rapidly expanding urbanisation.

In this special HT feature, Narelle McCarthy, Manager of the Sunshine Coast Environment Council looks at the practicalities and the politics of uncontrolled growth.

THE SUNSHINE Coast region is experiencing declining health in its waterways and biodiversity, traffic congestion due to lack of public transport and car dependency, loss of open space, high visitation of our coastal and hinterland recreational areas, depletion of natural resources and shortfalls in health and social services.

Tipping points have been reached with cracks in our social, economic and environmental foundations. As a region identified as being particularly vulnerable to climate change, these compounding impacts

are set to irrevocably destroy the quality of life and essential ecological integrity so valued by the Sunshine Coast community.

The population figures cited in the South-east Queensland Regional Plan predict a 2.1% annual population growth rate – a plan blindly seeking to accommodate growth greater than any third world country, and one that is currently the highest in the developed world. It directs an additional 98,500 homes for about 250, 000 people in the next 20-30 years on the Sunshine Coast.

The projections include up to 37 000 homes to be provided by ‘infill’. While higher density through infill has the potential to reduce car dependence, improve access to public transport, and restrict urban sprawl, this concept only goes so far.

Densification will alter the current feel to one of a more urbanised, high rise aesthetic, eroding essential backyard biodiversity and habitat.

The SE Queensland Regional Plan ignores carrying capacity which recognises the economic ability of the region to support the maintenance of our human, social, built and natural capital. Nor does it address the risks of climate change, such as sea level rise, which is likely to be 1.2m or higher by 2100.

A recurring community sentiment has been borne out time and again – “We do not want to be another Gold Coast”

Such a future is clearly at odds with the sustainability platform which gave Mayor Bob Abbot his landslide electoral victory in March 2008. That community mandate translated into the vision now embodied in our Corporate Plan – “To become Australia’s most sustainable region, vibrant, green and diverse.”

Alarmingly, the core elements of Council’s plan to restrain overpopulation with its associated excessive development, and to protect environmental and liveability values, are rejected in the SEQ Regional Plan and subsequent legislation in favour of short-sighted, vested interests.

Research reveals that more than 60% of Queenslanders want government to take steps to limit south-east Queensland’s population growth – a growth that has been aided and abetted by the lack of federal and state action on a sustainable population policy.

It was in their submission to the Draft SEQ Regional Plan in April 2009 that the Council conveyed to the state government that the Sunshine Coast community opposed

arbitrary dwelling and population targets. Indeed, its planning scheme requires significant community consultation at the local level to co-create and define future communities.

The clear nexus between the development lobby and the state government has revealed pro development and pro growth is at odds with the Sunshine Coast council vision. But as a creature of the state, how would the council resist such regulatory directives?

The greenfield developments of Caloundra South and Palmview were fast tracked under the guise of addressing housing affordability for around 65, 000 people. With the addition of the Maroochydore town centre, 80,000 people are to be accommodated without any analysis of sustainable carrying capacity in these developments alone. At 50,000 residents, Caloundra South represents a city the size of Gladstone. Other slated developments take the region on a population trajectory exceeding half a million people by 2031. Initiatives undertaken to reduce the ecological footprint will be negated by this burgeoning population.

The new urban sites mentioned have now been declared master-planned areas by the Minister for Infrastructure and Planning, Stirling Hinchliffe. Such declarations lock in development rights over a 20-30 year planning horizon, denying future generations the choice in how the region

should or shouldn’t develop. Despite council’s development brinkmanship with the

state, an unprecedented level of population growth will proceed, and council’s intent on retaining its rather tenuous planning powers through its structure plans for these sites is really only a salve on a somewhat angry wound.

Nevertheless, it is critical that council’s sustainability principles and development constraints are upheld. These constraints recognise emerging global challenges, notably climate change, peak oil, emissions trading, water and food security and ecological rehabilitation.

Closer to home, water and sewerage systems, affordable housing, public transport including CAMCOS, open space recreation opportunities , renewable energy and efficiencies, community services and facilities, diversified employment supporting a ‘green economy’ and enhanced biodiversity are significant local constraints.

Bob Abbot’s reassuring position in promoting the region’s values and triple bottom line, and publicly promising to

“draw a line in the sand”, must continue to be supported and driven by the community at all levels.

Excessive population will impact on the entire region, not just the areas of infill and greenfield development. What level of change is acceptable? High rise, more motorways, crowded beaches, reduced access to expensive water? Are desalination plants and a region stripped of its biodiversity an acceptable result of continually trying to absorb more and more people?

The platform on which the council was elected remains no less valid today than it was in March 2008, so we need state and federal governments that fully examine the carrying capacity of our region and its inherent community values. Meaningful sustainability indicators must be incorporated to determine an ecologically sustainable future together with the political will to implement them.

A suite of data now demonstrates a region under extreme pressure. Currently, all the indicators defined in the Queensland Government’s own State of the Region report are in decline. The science and

the practicalities of inadequate infrastructure alone dictate a much more conservative approach. The growth rate must be slowed and strenuously addressed as a fundamental cause of ecological and sustainability collapse.

The Sunshine Coast Environment Council calls for a sustainable population strategy that stabilises population, works with federal and other state jurisdictions on national policy and ensures all urban centres can provide a clean, healthy and sustainable lifestyle.

Population growth does not equal economic growth. Statistically, those societies which adopt population policies and family planning are economically better off. Wealthier nations, in economic and social terms, are generally those with stable populations.

To live sustainably we must reduce our consumption patterns and our trajectory of exponential growth. We cannot continue with unfettered population growth without dramatic consequences to the ecological services on which we rely.

A constantly increasing population is NOT sustainable and is avoidable. Population growth is for the benefit of few people, but reduces the liveability of most.

As a passionate, engaged community concerned for the survival of the natural world, this message must be actively communicated to those who continue to shape our future.

Terry Ryder

Has anyone out there ever met Jan Jarratt? How about Rachel Nolan? Christine Smith? Stuart Copeland? Andrew McNamara? Desley Scott? Bonny Barry? Peta-Kaye Croft?
Has anyone even heard of them? I ask, because all these people, and others, will receive a lifetime pension of at least $63,500 a year for doing nothing, compliments of the Queensland taxpayer.
They get this windfall for having served in State Parliament for eight years. Now that the State Government has called an election, any of the MPs who have eight years service don’t need to worry too much about losing. They can live off the public purse for as long as they remain breathing.
Given that we’re going to financially support these parasites for life, we really should have met them – or at least heard of them. They must have done something pretty damn special to deserve such generosity (in addition to their salaries).
Meanwhile, over at another of our many branches of government, Queensland mayors recently won their second pay rise in a matter of months after complaining of being over-worked and under-paid. Last year they wangled 20% pay rises and from January they got another 5%. Some are now paid $150,000 a year.
The curious thing is that council elections were held only last year. All the people now serving as mayors absolutely begged us to put them in the job. Now they’re claiming they don’t get paid enough. Presumably they knew the pay rates before they harassed us into electing them.
This reminds me of a Maleny politician whose first act as a councillor was to vote for a pay rise, claiming over-work/under-pay. This was before actually doing any of the work for which the councillor was elected.
Meanwhile, at yet another bloated level of government, Kevin Rudd pushed through bonus payments for his senior advisors (who earn $250,000 a year) in the same week that he demanded workers show wage restraint because of the downturn.
The theme here, once again, is waste. One of the many reasons we pay increasingly large sums in rates, taxes, duties, levies, charges, fees, tolls, excises and dues is because politicians are far more generous to themselves than they are to us.

• Anna Bligh, the only Premier with a private jet, used it to fly to Townsville to watch a footie match at a cost of $11,000 – when a return ticket with Virgin Blue would have cost $168. She also used the jet to fly to Sydney for a State of Origin match.
• Queensland Rail organized a 60-guest Riverfire function costing $30,000 then scrapped it (at a cost of $24,500 because of the late cancellation).
• A Gold Coast councillor cost ratepayers $15,000 for a trip to Dubai with her husband to hand out pamphlets at a conference.
• A Tasmanian politician spent $63,836 on a trip to the US, accompanied by his wife.
• In Victoria, where public transport is in a dire state, the Transport Minister outlaid $23 million to have her offices refurbished.
• A toxic water study for the Queensland Government, expected to cost $107,000, ended up costing $2.6 million – sparking a CMC inquiry into where the money went.
Many of us are familiar with the British television series Yes Minister. Most people thought it was a comedy. It was, in fact, a documentary.

Terry Ryder