Lessons from Branding in The Dive Industry by Jon Roberts This article is not just for dive professionals, but also managers from other industries can learn from experience picked up in this field. We will look at projecting your business out there on to center stage using the diver training organisation PADI, and Hammerhead in order to give you a helping hand. Also we will be looking at the near future of general internet marketing and solutions to effective eBusiness. “Business must be the solution, not the problem.” Dennis Weaver. Actor from McCloud Get Branded    The most powerful symbol in recreational diving is to my experience the PADI logo. My advertising budget on my dive center was slightly below the cost of a good meal, so I had to be inventive to say the least. My shop is in the middle of about ten other dive centers in a small dead end street. I was told that getting people past the first five dive centers would be impossible, and we would have to go and pay agents up to thirty percent in order to get business. This was something I did not plan to do, or could afford but luckily PADI spend close on to US$20M every year promoting your business.    The one thing that people like is a good logo. Generally you associate the most common logos with quality, just like your customers do. Logos can sell a lifestyle, an experience and hopefully instant public recognition. So I stuck the biggest PADI logo I could get on the front windows of my shop, and it worked. At least 5% of my customers are now walk-ins, they stroll up and down my street and usually head straight for the logo, it’s like a magnet to them – PADI means diving! You very often hear “I  want my PADI,” not “I want to be a diver,” right?    The same can apply to your website. A website reflects what your premises look like, and how professional your operation is without even a visit. Don’t believe me? Ok, what is the demographic of the average diver according to the leading dive industry organisation DEMA? 45 years old, earn US$75000, own their own homes which happen to be the ‘Baby Boomer,’ the ones with the most disposable income you like, and also the most active divers. They also happen to like using the internet, and seek out knowledge primarily from it. Time to target this market. The Content Management System, or 'CMS.'    If there is one thing websites should have been when they first appeared is CMS. That is a Content Management System, or in non-tech language, a site you can update yourself. Today there are a hundreds of solutions available, popular ones being Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress. Not tailor-made for the dive industry, and requiring a lot of work to get results you want, but at least it is a start, the start we should have had twenty years ago I believe. The Hammerhead CMS was created by PADI Pros, we started designing and creating the system with only one thing in mind, other PADI Pros. There is nothing on the system made for other industries, and it was designed to be as easy to update as Facebook. Unlike other software it will never have a new version, it is created using technology that you can add to, evolve and adapt for change. It’s totally ‘Plug’n’Play. As new technologies emerge, it will simply bolt them on. The features and benefits include so far: Booking & Scheduling module.    One of the world’s fastest photo up-loaders which automatically re-sizes for the web. Changeable content and photos. Keeps your site looking fresh. Dive site mapping. Helps keep customers interested and assists with SEO. Newsletter creation. Assists in customer retention and is linked to customer database. eLearning links. Links direct to PADI.Com in order to generate extra income. Calendar.  Control your business, inform your visitors. Complete CMS control. Update all your content, photos, dive sites, newsletters, customer database, dive courses, eLearning and calendar in minutes. For free! Beautiful themed websites available, with the ability to swop out to new designs later on. Built in analytics suite. You can get market intelligence on what is working on your site. Built in powerful automatic and semi-automatic SEO suite as standard. Get search engine recognition in weeks not months and get the return on investment to make this a steal. Supported by Microsoft. Hosting on the ultra-secure Azure platform you’re your data safely encrypted using the latest technology.  Rapid deployment. Get a website on the net launched within 30 days, complete with all the main PADI courses. Just add local information.  Manage who can change what sections, and issue passwords and log-ins.    Of course, even after 3 years of development, taking thousands of hours from a dedicated team of professionals the work must carry on. New technologies will be added to the Hammerhead CMS, the more we develop it, the more our customers succeed. The more they succeed, the longer they will hopefully stay with us. In the next final article we will look at what your website is doing for you now, and the future of the internet.