To see Alison’s People on the Move listing in the St. Louis Business Journal, visit http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/potmsearch/detail/submission/402031?ana=fbk

Ingredients

• 2 cups of sugar
• 2 cups of shortening (1 cup of margarine, 1 cup of shortening)
• 2 cups of pumpkin
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons of vanilla

Cream the above ingredients together in your mixer

• 5 cups of flour
• 1 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice
• 2 teaspoons of baking soda
• 2 teaspoons of cinnamon
• 4 teaspoons of baking powder
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon of cloves

Sift the above ingredients together, then slowly add to the first batch of ingredients.

Directions

Drop the batter onto a greased cookie sheet using a teaspoon. Bake for 12-15 minutes at 350.

For the frosting:

Heat 1/4 cup of margarine and 5 teaspoons of milk until a few bubbles appear around the edges of the pan. Add 1 teaspoon of vanilla and 1 box of powdered sugar. We recommend keeping the frosting warm while icing the cookies to make it easier to work with.

Enjoy!

That’s the question posed in “Branding With Your Eyes Closed,” an article published in Advertising Age by global brand strategist, Jonathan Salem Baskin. If you close your eyes and describe your brand, you’ll most likely describe it in very specific words—characteristics, details of your services and products, differentiating words that set you apart from your competitors. How you describe your brand is then put into action with marketing materials, ad campaigns, and other visuals. When we go through a branding process with a client, we ask to visualize a lot—visualize your logo, website, and brochures. You’ll find that conversations about branding revolve around the visuals we create to tell the story about your brand. The author goes on to describe that brands were initially conceived through graphic arts because that’s how you got the message to the public. When you take the visuals away; however, describing connections to your products or services without showing your logo or brochure requires “some verbal gymnastics.” For some, describing your brand may, unexpectedly, sound generic.

With your eyes closed, you’d have to give consumers meaningful content that enables them to share with others reasons why your product is excellent rather than describing how great of a marketer/salesperson you are.

With your eyes closed, describing actions becomes easy. You’d find yourself focusing on behaviors that evidenced what you hoped your consumers think or imagine, and you could build your branding on an ongoing series of real-time actions instead of inert positions of words and images. When you close your eyes, you may think, “how does my brand matter to my customers rather than how I promised my brand to them.”

The author then concludes that any brand image would be an outcome of these behaviors, not their direct purpose.

At Werremeyer, branding has become a way of life, and how we operate day-to-day. While branding is a process, and we believe that visuals are a major factor of a successful brand, these articles really put what a brand means to your customer in context.