Atlantic City Could Look Vastly Different in 2017

Who doesn't love a good game of Monopoly especially a real life one? Large swaths of the Atlantic Boardwalk are changing hands. Philadelphia developer Bart Blatstein is buying up practically everything that is for sale on the boardwalk. Miami based Bruce Kaye, the CEO of Fantsea Resorts, is also looking to expand his holdings in Atlantic City and is spending millions of dollars to upgrade his current properties.

Kaye is a charismatic entrepreneur that had a long storied career in real estate before he entered the timeshare industry. He previously co-owned the world renowned Fontainbleau Hotel and co-developed the million square feet Miami International Mall. Fantsea Resorts, currently owns three properties in the Atlantic City Area-the Flagship located in the inlet, Atlantic Palace on the boardwalk, and La Sammana in Brigantine. The properties are in high demand with 45,000 vacation owners for the approximately 900 studio, one bedroom and two bedroom units that all are equipped with kitchenettes. Most importantly for Atlantic City; he attracts tourists who stay the longest duration, about a week, and want to spend money in the region not just at the gaming tables.

The high demand for units is attributable to his ability to put out a good product at a fair price. Fantsea Resort rooms are larger than average hotel rooms and include mini-kitchens, making longer stays more affordable and easier for families. The Atlantic Palace includes a pool, hot tub, member's lounge, and gym. The Flagship, which is in the midst of major renovations, will feature a lobby bar, pool, hot tub, grill, children's play room, movie theater, gym that offers classes, full service spa and large outdoor deck over the ocean perfect for weddings and parties. Their restaurant, the Blue Water Grille, has the best views in Atlantic City.

One could be forgiven for thinking they were in the South of France as boats sail by at they eat their expertly cooked branzino or surf and turf. The Flagship property will get an even bigger boast when the boardwalk in front of the property is finally refurbished next year. This will be the first time the boardwalk is completely walkable for possibly the first time in 25 years.

Kaye is seeing such great demand in Atlantic City that he is negotiating with Revel Casino owner Glenn Straub to take over the 12 unfinished floors of the building and convert them to timeshares. Kaye has also expressed an interest in buying 25% of the equity of the Revel and running the casino for Straub. He believes he can complete a deal with Straub and made a competitive bid. The question is whether Straub, who is the opposite of a decider, can concentrate long enough to make a deal. Straub may also be unrealistic about current market prices in Atlantic City. The one disadvantage of a timeshare deal at the Revel would be the casino operator would not be able to fill those rooms with gamblers dropping money at the tables.

The timeshare industry has been rightfully criticized in the past for some shoddy practices. It appears to have cleaned its act. The industry has grown 7% annually since 2011 with $8.6 billion in sales for 2015. Kaye was honest about the industries past reputational problems by indicating that there were some bad apples in the business in the 70's and 80's, but pointed out the largest leaders- Marriott, Disney, Hyatt, Starwood, Wyndham; are part of the leisure industry today. Perhaps, most telling 50% of Fantsea's owners upgrade their original purchase indicating great satisfaction with the product. In addition, the company experiences very little defaults on purchases.

The gregarious mogul treats his employees, many of whom have been with him a long time, as extended family. He serves 3 meals a day to more than 500 employees at the Flagship. When his son declined to enter the business, he established an ESOP (Employee Stock Option Plan) to sell the company to his employees with the share price rising appreciably since inception.

While Kaye has been in Atlantic City for over 25 years, Blatstein is a new entrant into the Atlantic City market buying his first commercial property last year. He believes he is buying real estate at a rock bottom prices in Atlantic City, which still attracted more than 24 million people visitors last year despite the closing of 4 casinos in 2014. He said, "Property on the boardwalk in Atlantic City is going for $30 a square foot. In nearby Margate and Ventnor, it's going for $1000 square foot. When I go into an area, I buy critical mass. I welcome other developers to come in."

He has thrown out the idea that if Atlantic City could attract celebrities it would become "hot". So it would not be surprising if when the Showboat re-opens next summer, after a major overhaul this winter, there is a celebrity living there. Let's hope it's not Kanye and Kim Kardashian West. Or he could go the entirely opposite way in developing Atlantic City. He has proposed to New Jersey legislators that they declare Atlantic City an Opportunity Zone which does not levy state and local taxes on senior citizens. While Florida never has to feel threatened that Atlantic City will become more popular for the elderly, it certainly could become a viable alternative for many in the Northeast that want to stay more involved with their grandchildren and are fearful of the Zika virus. Blatstein, ever the showman, likes to do the big reveal so he is keeping details close to the vest for now.

He is also in talks with investor Carl Icahn to take over the currently closed Trump Plaza. Unfortunately, his 2015 lease/purchase of the pier near Caesar's, now called The Playground, did not include any parking, which has prevented its rebound. The Plaza acquisition would give him the much needed parking capacity. He has big plans for the property including a walkway which would connect the Tangers Outlet to the boardwalk. He pointed out that "shoppers currently have to use narrow alleyways to get to the outdoor mall from the boardwalk".

The Showboat's controversial neighbor to the right, Straub, has proven to be toxic to everyone-the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA), politicians, and fellow developers. He is no closer after 2 years of ownership to opening the property. Unfortunately, this is modus operandi. After he bought the Palm Beach Polo Golf and Country Club, the Palm Beach Post labeled him "The Man Wellington Loves to Hate" after home owners at the property complained about him.

On my last visit, there will signs of life at the Revel. There were about 15 male executives, possibly from the Connecticut casino operator that he has contracted with or the E sports fantasy company that is considering making the Revel their national headquarters, working in the office. Straub seems almost prisoner of the palace that he bought on the cheap. He is no longer living on his yacht, the Triumphant Lady, but in a makeshift bedroom smack in the middle of his offices. On the day we met to discuss his plans for the casino, he was rambling, for some reason, about bringing up 2800 horses from Florida to house at the currently closed Atlantic City racetrack. Although he bought a casino property, he clearly wants to be in any other business but gambling. One idea that he has thrown out is to house one of the leaders of the E sports fantasy industry in the Revel. He dreams of holding their competitions at Boardwalk Hall.

The cantankerous developer blames his problems on NJ politicians. He complains to anyone who will listen that "no one from the governor's office or the state legislature has come to see me." Meanwhile his neighbor on the boardwalk, Bart Blatstein, was able to partially open the Showboat in 5 weeks. Although he has threatened to leave Atlantic City, I suspect his bizarre threats are just a cry for attention since he has told me in several interviews, "I am stubborn and never give up." He also has no reason to sell. Straub said, "I bought for $89 million a building that was built for over $2 billion, the power plant next door for $50 million, and my carrying costs so far have been $24 million ($1 million for 24 months). That is a total of $150 million for a building that cost over $2 billion to build. I can afford to hold on."

Could 2017 be the year that Atlantic City finally rebounds? Those of us that are nostalgic about the ocean resort have been saying next year is the year for decades. Every time, Atlantic City takes two steps forward, such as luring new money to the city and electing a competent mayor, it takes three steps backward with the New Jersey legislature threatening to legalize gambling in North Jersey. The difference this time is that exceptionally talented real estate developers such as Blatstein don't stop until they succeed. It would help if the banks, which have been burned in the past in Atlantic City, started investing again.

AI Assistants: 3 Things Businesses Should Do Now To Be Competitive

Mike Gullaksen, Chief Operating Officer, iProspect

Personal digital assistants, like Siri and Cortana, are just two examples of AI systems going mainstream as users widely adopt voice-based queries and expect immediate search results pulled from both the web and on-device content. These personal assistants are also becoming more predominant in consumers’ homes – think Amazon Alexa. 

These personal assistants are helpful, entertaining and already a powerful connector between people and their digital lives. While they function a little differently, they all source every bit of data they can find to engage in unique, valuable conversations with their owners.

The astounding pace of technology guarantees that there will always be a new connector, a new privileged broker that draws humans and the digital realm ever closer together. But this shouldn’t be a threat to marketers. Instead, it’s a great opportunity.

Some industry experts hypothesize that the future of search and intent-based advertising could be up for grabs. It’s tempting to listen—with artificial intelligence, digital personal assistants, the internet of things, wearables and apps basking in the limelight. But let’s not forget that deep down, we’re all deeply involved with search. We depend on it. Imagine how much you would know about someone if they shared their last 100 searches with you. We never stop searching.

For marketers watching the AI race from the sidelines, now’s the time to start placing bets. Early adopters will win by taking advantage of this massive shift in discovery marketing, and will do so while the cost of entry is minimal for each engagement. 

So what can brands do today to prepare? Here are three things to prioritize:

1. Create conversational content.

Fifty percent of search is mobile, and 20% of that is voice search. And voice search is growing quickly. It will open up richer data sets around consumers’ needs and wants as they relate to a brand’s products and services. Questions will be the new keywords and provide brands with an even better research opportunity to drive product and service innovation and ultimately provide the best customer experience.

When Google releases voice search data through its analytics, use it to build out your database of content. In the meantime, leverage traditional sources of information such as the sales team or customer service team to help drive content creation in conversational or question-and-answer formats.  

2. Structure your data.

The foundations of digital personal assistants are built on questions that contain keywords and data. Conversations become more specific when the AI asks the consumer to refine or elaborate on the question, and the responses are derived from an existing database.

Brands need to make the right content and data available to answer the initial questions being asked by the consumer and then create content the personal assistant can leverage to refine the answer. Structured data will fill in details with things such as reviews, product attributes, real-time pricing and very important location-based information. 

Certainly for Google’s personal assistant this will be very similar to Google’s rich results or Knowledge Graph cards. Once in place, make sure your data is accurate and then distribute it to data aggregators. Most personal assistants will pull from their parent company, but there are examples such as Yelp currently powering local results for Amazon’s Alexa.

3. Prepare to invest in voice advertising.

It is speculated that a form of auction-based advertising will be established for voice search and personal assistants. Of course it will, as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others have always monetized content delivery. When the opportunity arises to pay to ensure your content is delivered first to personal assistants through voice search, it is critical you are ready with a foundational data set and content in the preferred formats of the assistants—think Amazon Skills for Alexa or SDK for Apple’s Siri. Time will tell how we will buy, but it will most likely be auction-based.  The first here may be Google Assistant using Google’s paid local ads that they recently launched because it provides answers to questions around business information like locations that google has sometimes relied on third parties for previously.

About the Author

As chief operating officer of iProspect, Mike Gullaksen creates operational excellence by aligning our people, processes and technology to create product innovation and support agency growth. Mike joined iProspect through the acquisition of Covario, where he held the position of CEO. Prior to Covario, Mike worked at iCrossing as SVP-search. He has built a reputation for creating award-winning digital marketing teams and developing proven digital strategies that drive business growth for Global 1,000 clients.

About iProspect

iProspect is the first truly global digital marketing agency, with 3,000-plus employees in 82 offices across 52 countries. A trusted partner with an in-depth understanding of consumer behavior, iProspect reshapes brand strategies to meet the fast-paced demands of the convergent world with a focus on exceeding the client's business objectives.

Our global reach, in-depth knowledge of diverse local markets and expertise produce award-winning, performance-based marketing strategies for leading brands such as General Motors, adidas, T-Mobile, Hilton Worldwide, Sunglass Hut, Lenovo and many others.

For more information, visit iProspect.com or follow us on Twitter @iProspect.

Advertising Week returns to NYC September 26 - 30, 2016! Our Huffington Post readers enjoy a 20% discount on Delegate and Super Delegate passes by clicking here.

Elon Musk Revolutionized Cars. His Brother Wants To Do The Same For Food.

NEW YORK ― Last month, Elon Musk laid out his “master plan” to transform Tesla into a clean energy giant. In a 1,483-word blog post, he outlined plans to meld his automobile company with SolarCity, the country’s largest solar installer, to create a one-stop shop for electric cars, batteries and solar-panel roofing.

He’s not the only Musk with a grand vision. For the last 14 years, Kimbal Musk, Elon’s younger brother, has been quietly waging his own battle against industrialized food. While Elon built a tech empire in California, the younger Musk moved to Colorado and founded The Kitchen, an ambitious family of restaurants committed to bringing sustainably grown, locally sourced, healthfully prepared food to the American heartland. His empire of eateries ― whose fare includes homemade kale chips, quinoa grown in Colorado and lamb sourced from Boulder’s Crego Livestock farm ― stretches from Boulder and Denver in Colorado, to Chicago. By the end of August, it will include a new location in Memphis, Tennessee.

The younger Musk sits on the board of Chipotle, whose fresh ingredients have forced McDonald’s to rethink the grub it sells. With his own restaurants ― he’ll have 11 by the end of the year ― he aims to do the same to the Applebee’s and TGI Friday’s of the world ― establishing a vast empire of farm-to-table restaurants across the parts of the country sometimes mocked as “flyover states.”

In his next move, he plans to take on agriculture, too.

On Tuesday, Musk announced the launch of Square Roots, a new company that will invest in startups growing fresh fruit and vegetables in cities. The so-called accelerator aims to provide mentorship and resources to bootstrapped urban farmers, who will operate out of Square Roots’ specially designed shipping containers equipped with hydroponic growing towers. The firm, formed under The Kitchen LLC umbrella, is slated to open its first location in Brooklyn sometime this fall.  

“The Kitchen’s mission is to strengthen communities by bringing local, real food to everyone,” Musk, 43, wrote in a Medium post published Tuesday. “Our goal [with Square Roots] is to enable a whole new generation of real food entrepreneurs, ready to build thriving, responsible businesses. The opportunities in front of them will be endless.”

The Kitchen

Leafy greens grow in one of the freight containers Square Roots plans to use at its "campuses."

Urban farming seems ready to take off. Roughly 800 million people worldwide raise vegetables, fruits or animals in cities and produce about 15 percent of the world’s food, according to a recent United Nations report. But people are increasingly concentrating in urban areas; an anticipated 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050. And all those people need to eat.

In developing countries, urban farmers grow food for subsistence. In the U.S., the urban agriculture landscape looks more like a movement than an industry. Cities like Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C., have started programs encouraging people to grow produce on vacant lots and rooftops. Michelle Obama, who made healthy eating and exercise a cornerstone of her legacy as First Lady, has touted community farming as a do-it-yourself answer in blighted urban communities where fresh produce is hard to find.

Kimbal Musk envisions a network of his companies in major cities across the U.S., particularly in the South and Midwest, where industrial farming and fast-food chains have the strongest grip on mainstream diets. 

The Kitchen, for its part, has been dipping its toes in these waters for some time now. The company’s nonprofit arm, The Kitchen Community, operates about 300 “learning gardens” in more than 50 towns and cities, where an estimated 150,000 schoolchildren tend crops and, ideally, forge deeper connections with their food. Even skeptics who debate urban farms’ environmental benefits and potential to produce enough calories to feed whole cities agree that they imbue people with a greater appreciation for food.

“We want our communities to know what real food is. We want kids in communities to know real food, and we want them to have a choice between real food and industrial food,” Kimbal Musk told The Huffington Post in an interview last month, on the day after his brother released Tesla’s updated “master plan.” “Right now, for many of them, it’s industrial food, fast food or nothing. We want to bring education back so kids know they have options.”

Around the world, a growing number of tech-minded startups are tinkering with agriculture. A supermarket in Berlin installed a small indoor farm earlier this year, growing fresh greens in the middle of the store. In Japan ― where the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster piqued paranoia about irradiated produce ― the world’s largest operating indoor farm yields 10,000 heads of lettuce per day in an abandoned Sony factory. And in the U.S., there are companies like Aerofarms, which is growing kale, arugula and other leafy greens out of an old paintball arena in a run-down neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey.

The Kitchen

A beet burger served at one of The Kitchen's Next Door locations. 

Square Roots marks Musk’s entrance into this emerging industry. Conceived of as a startup accelerator ― Silicon Valley-ese for a firm that provides space and resources to entrepreneurs ― the company injects The Kitchen’s restaurant line with a dose of the tech-industry mindset the Musks are known for. (Kimbal Musk serves on the boards of Tesla and SpaceX ― Elon is CEO of both ― and is his brother’s trustee for the two companies.)

Both Musks, who are originally from South Africa, have a storied history in tech. They cofounded Zip2, a startup that helped newspapers build online city guides, in 1995. They sold the company to Compaq for $300 million in 1999. Elon Musk used that money to found the online payments startup PayPal and invest in Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX.

The younger Musk used his payout to indulge his passion for cooking. He moved to New York and began taking classes at International Culinary Center, where he studied French cooking. His has said his philosophy on food began to take shape after the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when he volunteered to feed the firefighters pulling bodies from the gnarled rubble of the World Trade Center. Musk said he had an epiphany while driving an ATV loaded with a cooler of poached salmon to the gymnasium of a school near ground zero.

“You see these giant piles of still-molten metal in front of you and you see these firefighters coming out of the most traumatic environment you can possibly imagine to sit down in these gymnasiums and eat what we cooked for them,” Musk told HuffPost last month. “That sense of community that I felt was just profound to me. It was an absolute epiphany, but it was actually like a blow to the head. It was so intense. I left that experience saying, ‘I just have to open a restaurant.’”

He spent the next year roadtripping across the U.S. with his (now former) wife, and eventually settled in Boulder. There, seemingly by fate, he met Hugo Matheson, an English chef. As Steven Levy wrote in a deeply reported 2015 profile of Musk in Backchannel:

A week after arriving, Musk’s dog slipped off the leash and nuzzled a man enjoying coffee at a local shop. This was Hugo Matheson, himself a recent arrival from England, who was about to take a job as executive chef in a local restaurant. Matheson invited Musk and his wife to a dinner, one that Musk would never forget. The fare was simple and honest: grilled fish with eggplant, the skin charred to a crisp but the inside moist and buttery. The meal was topped off by a straightforward panna cotta.

“It was completely different than what I learned in New York, where you’d spend six hours preparing and cooking something,” says Musk. “Hugo probably started thirty minutes before we ate. It was a more casual, simple way of cooking, with incredible-quality ingredients and a very simple but intense technique for cooking.” Musk begged Matheson for a job in his restaurant, and for the next year he worked there as a line cook — ten dollars an hour — absorbing that attitude and technique.

In March 2004, Matheson and the Musks [Kimbal and his wife] opened their own restaurant in that style. The name reflected its lack of pretention: The Kitchen.

The pair opened another restaurant, The Kitchen Upstairs, which applied the same culinary philosophy to a cocktail lounge concept. But a year later, Musk grew restless. Restaurants don’t quite scale the way software companies do, and it made him feel listless and frustrated. He left Matheson to the run the shop and took a job as chief executive of a social networking startup, OneRiot.

It was familiar ground for him, and he toiled away there for five years as they attempted to carve out a niche in the social mapping space. He lost interest, but stayed on out of loyalty to the company’s investors. He missed the food scene.  

“If you’ve ever done something you love and go do something you like,” Musk mused, “it’s like chewing on sawdust.”

Fred Prouser / Reuters

Elon Musk (L) and his brother Kimbal Musk (R), co-founder of The Kitchen Community, appear on a panel with interviewer Jeff Skoll, chairman of Participant Media and the Skoll Foundation.

A near-death experience shook him from his funk. On Valentine’s Day 2010, he broke his neck tubing down a ski slope on a family vacation in Jackson Hole. He was paralyzed for three days, and braved a risky surgery to install a section of metal spine in his neck. He spent two months healing. He enlisted his friend Tobias Peggs ― who is now the co-founder and chief executive of Square Roots ― to take over OneRiot so he could return to The Kitchen.

Musk came back with a clearer, more focused mission for his company: to build communities through food. They launched a new concept, Next Door, to bring The Kitchen’s fresh food to the masses with pub-like restaurants that serve burgers and other classic American fare. That has now grown to five locations in Colorado. Another Next Door is scheduled to open in Memphis next January. Musk wants to keep expanding the chain throughout the country, targeting the shopping malls where casual-dining eateries like TGI Friday’s and Chili’s reign supreme.

“People still have to sit down at TGI Friday’s because that’s all they’ve got,” Musk said. “We’re hoping to come in and provide a solution to landlords that’ll complete the picture, where you’ll have a Next Door, a Chipotle and a Whole Foods right next to each other. Or a Next Door, a Chipotle and a Walmart that has a ton of fresh food in it.”

In many ways, he sees Next Door as his version of Tesla’s Model 3, the auto company’s $35,000 electric car that made history when it notched nearly half a million pre-orders earlier this year. When Elon Musk first outlined his long-term plan for Tesla a decade ago, he envisioned whetting the public’s palate for an electric car with a flashy luxury sedan, the Model S, before rolling out a model for the masses. In following through with that plan, he effectively revived the long-dead electric car, and prompted virtually every major automaker to scramble to create competitors.

“People wanted the electric car for at least two decades, then Tesla came along and showed them how it’s done,” Kimbal Musk said. “The Kitchen is doing that for real food.”

If Elon Musk is building a clean energy empire, then Kimbal Musk is building the sustainable food empire to match.

Asked on Monday whether The Kitchen would consider buying one of the startups that go through Square Roots’ accelerator program, the younger Musk said the firm is “always looking for new ways to expand its impact and further its mission.” In other words: Maybe!

Of course, there are barriers to overhauling the restaurant industry with a chain of farm-to-table restaurants. TGI Friday’s has 1,100 restaurants and Applebee’s has 2,033, to name a few.

And Tesla, too, continues to come up against hurdles, facing two federal probes and repeatedly missing delivery targets. But as investors have learned time and time again, it’s rarely smart to bet against a Musk.

“There are some restaurants already doing this, and the idea is catching on faster than I would have thought,” Dickson Despommier, an emeritus professor of microbiology at Columbia University who hosts a podcast on indoor farming, told HuffPost. “But the Musks of the world, thank God, they’re able to cobble together enough money to make a difference.”

Why B Corps Should Be The Norm, Not The Exception

I chose to work at 100km Foods (a B Corp company) because I place a high value on my work aligning with my personal ethics. What we do in our professional lives impacts both our climate and communities, just as much as the choices we make in our personal lives. As such, we have the capacity to make a positive difference in our working lives when we choose to work for B Corp companies.

As a young person, I have more incentive than most to care about issues of climate and social justice. The threat of human induced climate change and rising inequality are affecting myself and my peers, right here and now, and it may only get worse. We can't afford to wait for top down changes, and if I can work for a B Corp that is already making a difference, I have agency to create change by doing my job well. This matters to me deeply, and it will matter to those generations that come after me.

Not only that, one of our B Corp highlights offers paid time off to employees to do community work, which is a great opportunity to encourage outreach and participation. Paul and Grace (the founders and co-owners of 100km Foods) also encourage us to attend and sponsor different conferences and events, such as those held by The Stop Community and Food Centre here in Toronto, an amazing organization that we work with closely.

B Corp companies, beyond striving to be a force for social and environmental change, also have a mandate to provide a living wage and good working conditions (like insurance benefits) for their employees. This is another significant reason why I chose work for a B Corp: no one should have to sacrifice a living wage in order to work for a company whose values they believe in.

The food & agricultural sector, which is the industry we work in at 100km Foods, has come to the forefront of public consciousness in recent years, for a number of reasons. Consumers and farmers have been impacted as food prices fluctuate in accordance with oil prices, as climate change affects yields, and as new trade deals are negotiated. The future of food is changing drastically, but these changes are creating the chance so desperately needed to do better.

That's why it feels even more important that we do the work we do as a local food distributor. We pick up produce from farms in and around the Greater Toronto Area, which gives farmers the opportunity to set fair prices, and we sell it wholesale to restaurants. We make it as easy and convenient as possible for chefs to source local food for their menus, and we offer a dependable market for farmers who do not have the infrastructure or marketing capacity to distribute their produce wholesale. In the span of a day or two, the food that was ordered through our website is picked in the field, packed, picked up by our team, and delivered directly to restaurants. By doing the work we do, we're fostering growth in local economies while also building sustainability within the food industry.

B Corps such as ours should become the norm, not the exception. The economy is not separate from climate and wider society, and the days where businesses only answer to their shareholders are numbered. Businesses can, and should, choose to go above and beyond the standards of old to become a significant force for positive social and environmental change.

The B Corp Life is a new blog series geared towards exploring what it's like to work at a benefit corporation. Why do b corps matter, and what does the future hold for them? Let us know at PurposePlusProfit@huffingtonpost.com or by tweeting with #TheBCorpLife.

Top Branding and Marketing Strategies for New Businesses

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Marketing and branding are not always cheap for small businesses. While it is very essential given the very early stage of a business, branding and marketing a new business is an effort that has to compete with several other efforts in the startup. Nonetheless, there's no other way around running an effective marketing strategy for your business.

Whatever says a new business cannot take advantage of the exceptional possibilities that effective branding and marketing can attract to business? While you do not have to go overboard with your spending like an already established business would, there are strategies that you can implement with effective results.

Let's look at the top branding and marketing strategies you can use to stimulate the growth of your new business.

Design with Your Audience in Mind

Your first step in branding, and indeed marketing your business is to create a logo. This is where you have the first opportunity to captivate the minds of your audience and quickly win your way into their hearts. A good looking logo that is able to captivate your audience will earn the trust of your customers better.

While larger companies with bigger branding budgets can afford to create different reiterations of their logo and not worry about the cost, for a small business it's very important that you get it right on the very first attempt.

A good way to make this happen without having to break the bank is to partner with a designer who has great work portfolio. Another alternative is to use cheap freelance service like Fiverr to outsource your design tasks to highly talented graphic designers who are ready to work on the cheap.
To highlight the methods that will be most effective in helping you get a well-branded company logo that won't cost you a fortune, try the following:

•Partner with a designer: the idea is to offer them your services in exchange for theirs. And if the deal is huge such that it involves the total branding of your business, including your website design -- then offering them part of your business in exchange might be considered.
•Run a Contest: Running a contest is still one of the most effective ways to attract high-quality talents without having to spend so much.

Win on Social Media

The ultimate aim of branding and marketing your business is to attract customers. With social media expanding every day and users increasingly interacting with businesses and brands via various social media channels, there's never a better time to take advantage of this huge opportunity than now.
An effective social media strategy can help to optimize almost every other aspects of your marketing efforts. According to Jeff King, founder of a digital marketing company, having an effective social media strategy will bridge the successful customer acquisition barrier that many small businesses face. "Not only does the inclusiveness that social media cultivates encourage small business growth, it's also very cost effective to acquire customers," he says.
While social media may be cost effective, it may require some form of expertise which you can achieve through study and practice.

Own Your Online Presence

The power of using the internet to reach new customers cannot be overlooked.
Many business owners only consider an internet marketing strategy as an afterthought and do not put much consideration into developing their marketing skills. This is why so many small businesses begin and end their internet marketing strategy with owning a website.

The following strategies should be considered in owning your online presence:

•Get on Google places: Google places and local listings makes it easy for your business to be found on the internet through local listings. This is free advertisement for small business owners.
•Get a blog: Business blogging is now an effective customer retention and acquisition strategy. Does your new business have a blog? If not, you should reconsider your strategy.
•Search Engine Optimization: Ranking high on the top pages of Google for your best selling keywords can help you attract ready-to-buy customers for almost free. All that may be required is your effort. There are many ways to fail with a SEO campaign but with a consistent approach, your business can be wildly successful.

How Becoming A B Corp Helped Us Find Purpose In Marketing

I’ve always struggled with the ethics of my chosen profession. Even while poring over copies of Advertising Age in college, my attraction to brilliant campaigns was tempered by the nagging sense that marketers’ influence on our thoughts and values isn’t always good. After all, a marketer’s job is to creatively convince people to do or consume things that they sometimes don’t even want or need.

That nagging feeling led me to spend the first 15 years of my career in health behavior change and nonprofit marketing. Later, my business partner and I founded RoundPeg to create brands and campaigns for organizations committed to social good. But I always had a sense that marketing’s potential for good wasn’t fully realized.

Ultimately it was RoundPeg’s joining the B Corp community that revealed a new approach to marketing that realizes that potential – and solves my professional ethical dilemma – for good.

Our Chance to B Better
It was a no-brainer for RoundPeg to become a certified B Corp in 2012 and incorporate as a Benefit Corporation in 2013. We already operated responsibly and helped clients promote social causes and sustainable behaviors. We figured certification would strengthen our commitment to people, planet and community and we could learn from other good businesses. It did all of those things. But we never anticipated how significantly being part of the B Corp community would influence and inspire us.

Conversations with colleagues at other B Corps told us that the number of companies pledging to use business as a force for good is growing more rapidly than consumer attitudes and knowledge are changing. For this movement to survive and thrive, we need to make buying responsibly the norm.

It became clear that marketing – the practice that has encouraged society’s excess – is the exact tool needed to make the good choice the easy choice for mainstream consumers.

Marketing’s Opportunity
While marketing isn’t the only force to blame for wasteful consumption, its significant contribution can’t be ignored.

Most consumers don’t test the marketing claims of every company, so when a company says they’re doing good, we assume they’re telling the truth. While scandals of goodwashing and worse increase skepticism, consumers are often at the mercy of marketers and remain powerless to distinguish between genuinely good and apparently good companies and products.

As consumers, we’re so far removed from where and how our stuff is made that we're often blind to the effects of our choices. For decades marketers have exploited that. Tapping into our values, they’ve positioned superfluities as necessities, made the case for shoddy products and convinced consumers that obtaining the latest version of everything is essential to creating the best version of oneself.

But time is revealing the negative consequences of decades of conspicuous consumption and consumers are generally paying more attention to what they buy, who makes it, where it’s from and what’s it’s made of. Sometimes they even question whether it’s needed at all.

The rise of socially responsible business like B Corps and Benefit Corporations presents an opportunity for marketers to reverse the damage done by our predecessors by using marketing as a force for good.

Purposeful Marketing: A New Approach
Through Purposeful marketing, we can show consumers that every purchasing decision they make is a chance to be the change the world needs. We can equip them with the information they need to make better choices and invite them to be our partners in change.

While B Corp and other certifications provide context and ensure accountability, mainstream consumers with busy lives aren’t likely to take the time to distinguish the good, the bad and the ugly. Many don’t know that what these certifications mean or even that they exist.

Purposeful marketing champions the companies that are truly doing good to help consumers cut through the fray of false claims. Inspired by our fellow B Corps, RoundPeg applies Purposeful marketing principles to help good brands:

· engage customers by connecting their company Purpose with customer values,
· cultivate long-term, meaningful customer relationships that amplify social impact and profitability
· create meaningful customer experiences
· build loyal communities of influence
· empower customers to be brand ambassadors for social impact

Time for Change
Until the majority of the marketplace demands change, conscious consumerism is at risk of becoming a fad. As marketers and as B Corps, we must encourage consumers to demand that brands act as part of the solution to social problems and invite our customers to be part of the solution.

Our experience as a B Corp taught us that businesses with good built-in do everything else differently, so it’s natural that we should rethink marketing as well. We can’t expect consumers to change the way they think, act and purchase without making changes ourselves. That’s why RoundPeg’s sole focus now is using marketing to help Purposeful brands make buying responsibly the norm.

We urge the visionaries behind purposeful companies – and our marketing agency colleagues – to join us in seizing the opportunity to use marketing for good. When we lead with Purpose, we don’t have to manufacture justifications to win customer loyalty because the shared Purpose itself creates the bond. The more consumers insist on purchasing with Purpose, the closer we’ll get to a world where companies that don’t do good don’t stand a chance.

The B Corp Life is a new blog series geared towards exploring what it’s like to work at a benefit corporation. Why do b corps matter, and what does the future hold for them? Let us know at PurposePlusProfit@huffingtonpost.com or by tweeting with #TheBCorpLife.

Why Investors Should Care About Natural Capital

This article has been submitted as part of the Natural Capital Coalition's series of blogs on natural capital by Adams Koshy, environment, carbon and finance analyst, eftec

We are all investors in one sense or another: through our pension; our mortgage; or even just setting aside a little money in a savings account. In one way or another, we have all gone through the thought process involved in making an investment decision.

To elaborate this, let me take the case of Joe, who's decided to invest some money, and wants to understand how environmental factors could affect the safety of and returns on his investment.

Joe is your average 40-something, and has never considered himself an environmentalist. But like many of us, he recognises that individuals and businesses depend on the environment around us.

Working at a power plant, he's already seen first-hand how much the plant depends on access to reliable water supply, and how its performance is affected by air pollution, waste management and so on. Ever the pragmatist, he realises that all companies must, to varying degrees, have impacts and dependencies on the environment, - whether directly through operations, or indirectly through the supply chain, labour force or other influences. But how do these relationships influence the 'investability' of a company?

The answer to this lies in how these factors affect the performance of the investment: namely through the security of these investments (risks) and their future performance (returns). The reason being that when you invest in a company, you do not invest in its current form, but your perception of a company's future value. The current profit or loss (for example) only provides a snapshot of the state of the company, and a potential indication of the future.

This gives rise to two potential sources of uncertainty for investors.

Firstly, the gap between what a company's management knows of their impacts and dependencies on the environment, and how much of that information is presented to the investors (aka information asymmetry); for example, through CSR/sustainability reports and the extensive Environmental, Social Governance (ESG) tools now available. However, these sources are restricted by the inadequacy of environmental information possessed and/or reported by some companies.

Secondly, macro-level risks for the future, such as the risk of potential regulation that could come into force, or environmental changes that could occur due to external stresses; e.g. a higher price of water due to water scarcity. This too has been compiled in innovative ESG tools. However, this information may be compiled externally, and so is often isolated from the company's decision -makers.

As stewards of your investment, it is the responsibility of the company's management (and its corporate governance) to ensure that the natural environment they depend on is appropriately accounted for and managed, such that both of these uncertainties are minimised.

The Natural Capital Protocol adds key insights into the established reporting and ESG tools. It shines a light on these (fundamental) management decisions, by presenting a clear and adaptable framework for companies to identify, measure and value their impacts and dependencies on the natural environment (or 'natural capital').

The Protocol's four principles offer a checklist to illustrate whether a business' natural capital analysis has a logical process, and allows scrutiny to ensure that financially material issues are acknowledged and dealt with. Although the Protocol is not a reporting, but rather a decision- making framework, this information should then be reflected not only in the operational strategy, but also in the external reporting of the business. Such that consistent, material information is provided to reduce the gap in knowledge between investors and company management, and to ensure that action is taken and strategies implemented to mitigate future risks.

This additional reporting should satisfy Joe's curiosity, but means more for larger, institutional investors (like pension funds). For these investors especially, the Protocol could help them distinguish between different investments, exclude companies that could pose a risk, identify new opportunities for informed investment, and provide the basis to engage with, and challenge, companies that do not adhere to the Protocol.

To highlight the practical application of this, take the recent work led by the Natural Capital Declaration, on the impact to company performance (and their bonds) from risks to their water supply. One of the sectors considered was power: as the case of Joe has already highlighted, they depend on a steady water supply. Unfortunately, due to a variety of factors, some power companies are predicted to be at risk from global water shortage. For example, the state-owned South African company Eskom is at risk of financial deterioration from higher water costs (due to the shortage); and as they are already have large loans (i.e. are highly leveraged), it restricts their ability to invest in new water sources. Therefore, investors need to be aware of whether a company is at risk from these environmental stressors and how they are controlling these risks, in order to make a more informed investment decision. Identifying those that are accounting for and taking action against these risks, and excluding those that do not.

Let me be the first to accept that these insights hinge on companies reporting information under the Protocol. However, the greatest driver of investment returns are informational advantages that shrink the inherent uncertainty. Better information on environmental risk and opportunity has already proved its value as a component of investors' tool box, through companies' fundamental dependencies on the environment. As more companies begin to utilise the Natural Capital Protocol, its positive effect in investment selection and management decisions will develop. So eventually, investors like you, me and Joe can better incorporate relevant environmental information into our investment decisions.

Disclaimer: Articles in this series are submitted by people who work in organizations who are part of the Natural Capital Coalition, or people who are involved in the natural capital space more generally, the views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of The Natural Capital Coalition, other Coalition organizations, or the organization that employs the author.

The content of this article is not intended as investment advice. The above link to Eskom is only an illustrative example, where Eskom is not a listed company, as a state-owned entity. Use your discretion in using examples presented here for your own investment purpose.

Adams Koshy is a natural environment, carbon and finance analyst with eftec (economics for the environment consultancy), based in London. eftec have been part of the technical author team of the Natural Capital Protocol, and work on natural capital for businesses, governments and civil society, at local, national and international levels. eftec also shared its environmental valuation expertise to the Natural Capital Declaration work on the 'Corporate Bond Water Credit Risk Tool'.

Follow eftec on Twitter: @eftecUK

On 13th July 2016, The Natural Capital Coalition launched a standardized framework for business to identify, measure and value their impacts and dependencies on natural capital. This ' Natural Capital Protocol' has been developed through a unique collaborative process; a World Business Council for Sustainable Development consortium led on the technical development and an IUCN consortium led on business engagement and piloting. The Protocol is supported by practically focused 'Sector Guides' on Apparel and Food & Beverage produced by Trucost on behalf of Coalition.

Keep up to date with the Natural Capital Coalition on Twitter: @NatCapCoalition

Keep up to date with our series on natural capital here.

www.naturalcapitalcoalition.org