If you own a business and are determined to handle your own advertising and marketing, who’s to stop you? After all, it’s your business.

Why pay some over-priced, marketing person or graphic designer when you can buy off-the-shelf computer programs that will design your ads, brochures and flyers for you? Logos, too. Seriously, you can buy a program for less than a hundred bucks that has hundreds of cool logo templates.

At the fingertips of the do-it-yourself-and-save entrepreneur are programs that offer tons of colorful ad layouts complete with photographs. All one need do is type in a few words, plug in the logo they just made up in their nifty logo program and – voila’ – a professional-looking ad for a few hundred dollars and a couple of hours.

Of course, the DIY impulse is nothing new. Before mankind realized that one could perfect certain skills and make a living specializing in pot making, blacksmithing, carpentry and the like, everyone did everything for themselves. But when someone with an innate talent for a certain occupation spends their time honing their skills they’re likely to do a better job at, say, knife-making, than the average Joe. And when average Joe finds that his homemade knife is inferior to one made by a cutler, he may well decide that his time is better spent earning money to buy that better knife.

So it has gone through time, as people have focused their time and energies on this trade or that, mankind divided into countless specialties with some specialists rising above others due to the superior quality of their goods or services. In the Middle Ages tradesmen banded together in guilds as a way of defining the quality of their craft, and separate themselves from the do-it-yourselfers.

Then came professional societies, degrees, certifications, trade unions, associations and the like all seeking to qualify their members as experts with knowledge and skills beyond those of Mr. Average Joe. This is all well and good for medicine, the law, architecture and nuclear energy – activities that if done by some rank amateur could result in serious physical or financial harm. But nobody dies from amateur marketing…right? People…no, but businesses…yes.

The truth is businesses do die as a result of bad marketing. But is DIY marketing necessarily bad? Not necessarily. Let me tell you a short parable that a former big time ad agency creative director used to spin at new business meetings called…

“Fresh Eggs and Flying Lessons.”

Say you are driving down a winding country lane – miles from the city – and you spot a small, hand-lettered sign nailed to a fence post. “FrEsH EgGs,” reads the sign. Behind the fence is tidy little farmhouse with a few chicken coops in the back. You pull over, walk up to the porch and are greeted by a nice lady who sells you some eggs that were hatched only a few hours earlier. Fresh, indeed.

Some time later you’re driving down another country road and you’re reminded of the fresh eggs you bought and the delicious omelet they made so you keep eyes peeled. Before long you spy a large industrial hatchery with row upon row of long brick and steel buildings surrounded by a high cyclone fence topped with concertina wire. Bolted to the fence is a massive steel sign with crisp lettering that reads, “FRESH EGGS.” Hmmm… Kind of lacks the homely feel of the farmhouse. In fact it looks more like a chicken penitentiary so drive on by.

These two examples point to the value of a homemade sign effectively selling a product that many consumers prefer home-made.

Now, let’s shift gears. For the sake of argument let’s say you’ve always wanted to learn to fly and on one of your weekend jaunts you pass a small airport. The drone of airplane engine overhead causes you to look up and you see a yellow Stearman biplane, the kind often used to teach the rudiments of flying. Perhaps, you think, they offer flying lessons at this field and, sure enough, up ahead you spot a hand-lettered sign nailed to fence post that reads “FlYiNg LesSoNs.” The slap-dash nature of the sign doesn’t inspire much confidence but as you drive a little further you see – bolted to the steel fence – a massive sign with crisp lettering that reads, ‘FLYING LESSONS.” The professional presentation encourages you to contact the company.

What’s the lesson? The look, feel and content of marketing messages should match the product or service offering.

So you DIY’ers out there, if you’re having a garage sale, selling cookies for the PTA or washing cars for a high school fundraiser make up your own signs. Or if you’re a gifted designer, copywriter, or marketing whiz do it yourself and save.

Whether you have the talent, training and experience or you don’t, who’s to stop you from playing with all the cool software that’s available and creating your own funky logo, flyer or website? When you DIY, just keep one thing in mind. What you produce is not just a reflection of your design and writing skills, your homemade marketing also communicates the sophistication and professionalism of your business.

Marketing is one place where the book is indeed judged by its cover.

Word in the paper today is that Microsoft is considering a hostile takeover of Yahoo. Such is the power of Google that the behemoth behind the perennial third-place search engine is threatening to swallow the second place holder in an attempt to compete with numero uno.

Google has been the dominant search engine for so long that I had to pause a moment to return to a time when it was just one of the crowd. In those days Yahoo was for many the popular choice. That was, of course before the dot-boom-dot-bust investor rinsing cycle in the late 90’s. As a longtime toiler in the brand trade I remember being enchanted by the whimsical nature of this new name…Yahoo!

Yahoo…an exuberant shout of joy, of discovery, and/or achievement. I loved it in large part because it took a word that, for me anyway, had a somewhat negative connotation and made it…happy. Where I grew up a yahoo, or “yayhoo” as it was often pronounced, was the term for a rough-around-the-edges lad as in, “I don’t let my daughter go out with any old yayhoo, so you better get your butt offa my porch!”

Then along come a couple of whiz kids (who probably didn’t grow up in a Southern California melting-pot suburb where Hispanics and bikers elbowed hoards of relocated rednecks for breathing room) and they rescue this word from the slang gulag and give it a whole new value. I wonder what other names made the shortlist for their venture was before they settled on Yahoo…Lout, Bozo, Clod, Gomer?

In its day, say 3bg (that’s 1995 or three years before Google), the audacity behind the choice of a word like “yahoo” for a company that hoped to raise gazillions of dollars in venture capital was inspiring. So, what happened? How did Google become a household name and Yahoo become an entrée for the Great White from Redmond?

I have no special insight into the inner workings of any of the players, but from a consumer POV I can attest that Google did a better job of brand building by making themselves so darn…useful.

Arriving years after the search engine field started to burgeon – remember Lycos (’93), WebCrawler and Netscape (’94) Altavista and Yahoo (‘95) – Google was rather late to the party when they turned the key in 1998. According the Google website, the name is play on the word googol that refers to the numeral “1” followed by 100 zeros. Obscure, yes, but far superior to the name the founder’s gave first search engine…BackRub.

One thing Google understood early on was that Internet users cared a lot about what other Internet users were looking at, and so Google’s success has a lot to do with their sophisticated relevancy-ranking algorithms. This perception was apparently not shared by other search engines at the dawn of Google. According to Google’s website, when the founders were talking to potential buyers for their nascent technology, “…one portal CEO told them, “As long as we’re 80 percent as good as our competitors that’s good enough. Our users don’t really care about search.”

Since then, Google has continued to get it right and in the process increased the distance between themselves and those contending for second and third place. None the less, technology not withstanding, I would trace the start of Google’s dominance to that unrecorded moment when some web junkie first used the search engine’s name as a verb…”Dude, I just Googled your old lady and she’s hot, man.”

Ever since George Eastman trademarked Kodak people have realized the value of proprietary brand names and the consequent need to prevent them from slipping into common, and therefore generic, usage. Valuable brands like Xerox, Jello and Kleenex have fought valiantly to prevent the dilution of their brand value that comes from being synonymous with the product category – the fate of bicycle and heroin.

Yet Google, now an almost ubiquitous term for an online search, is still the dominant brand in its market space. Maybe the much touted “new age” is finally upon us.