Micro-Businesses: Speed Branding

Shorter attention spans are beginning to impact the architecture of service models in business. Micro-businesses are no longer limited to online players who serve micro-markets at the end of the "long tail." Traditional consulting firms are now discovering the benefits of micro-targeting clients who value an ultra-tailored, highly personalized, and instant turnaround service.

A full-page ad in today’s New York Times promotes such a service: BrandSpeed, a fast-track "product invention and brand positioning" service offered by Viverito & Associates in New York, marks the mainstream advent of "speed branding" – the business equivalent to "speed dating," if you will.

With overhead cut down to the absolute minimum as well as transaction costs and inefficiencies dramatically reduced, the consultancy promises to deliver new product concepts within just ten days. Focus and speed are crucial: BrandSpeed accepts only one client at a time, making sure that the core team of four partners (plus a hybrid network of contractors) is working on the same project with 100% of its attention. Moreover, BrandSpeed says it never charges more than $35,000 for full projects, thus warranting its solutions remain targeted and its agility intact.

The benefits for BrandSpeed's clients are clear: Taking the ideation process outside of corporate silos and into a no-nonsense, high intensity in-vitro incubus, companies gain the ability to try and err with controlled risk and can thus outfail competitors early in the product innovation process. Speed branding banks on the axiom that whoever fails fastest will come up with a successful new product sooner.

Ps. It looks like the fathers of "Speed branding" have not quite lived by their own rules: The Brandspeed.com web-site - if the domain is in fact theirs - is still under construction ;)