Is the United States ready for a high-end urban hotel that rents rooms by the hour?

Grace Hahn, a 24-year-old School of Visual Arts student, is convinced the customers are out there. Besides finding financial backing, her biggest challenge was finding the right images to legitimize and glamorize an idea with a tradition of sleaze and scandal.

Hahn went with understatement in her project for a class on creating and branding new businesses taught by Leslie Singer, the president and chief creative officer at G2 Branding and Design.

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"I didn't need nude models to get at the point," says Hahn, one of 18 students in Singer's class. "I want my imagery to let the customers imagine the experience for themselves. I tried to make my point by kicking it back a notch." The print advertisement features a bed with rumpled sheets and the tagline "An intimate experience."

Hahn struggled for several months to pick the images and tone to tell her hotel's story. Often, a small business will run into problems when the owners don't take that time early on to understand and build their individualized brand, says Seth Godin, author of the upcoming marketing book Meatball Sundae, along with nine other marketing and branding guides. "Small businesses become bigger when their marketing strikes a chord. They fail when they struggle to stay average."

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Businesses that have an established brand typically spend less on marketing and advertising. "Every element that you use to interact with the consumer is part of your brand and your story," says Godin, who sold his business, Yoyodyne, to Yahoo! in 1998. "If you build your brand right, you won't need to allocate more funds for marketing."

Singer of G2, who works with Absolut Vodka and the hotel chain Ramada Worldwide on branding, says spending at least several months letting ideas for a brand percolate is important for new business owners. "It takes trial and error and going back and fine-tuning to get it right," says Singer.

Students in Singer's class had a built-in group to help test their ideas. "It's hard to work on the creative process all alone in your office," says Singer. "You need a team to create a brand." With every derivation of a logo, design or color scheme, Singer adds, business owners should seek out a group that will say whether the plan strikes the right chord.

Without help from a team, SVA student Niv Levy, a 34-year-old photographer and former adventure-tour guide, says he never would have found the right image for his business, an online video and tour company. Starting with the name "Travel School" and a picture of a small girl with a backpack, Levy wanted to use a Web site to combine tourism and video documentaries and a program to allow contestants to win free trips.

His professors and classmates helped him see that his initial image and name were too vague. "It didn't tell my story," he says. After several derivations, he settled on "MeTakeYou.com," but his search for the right images was frustrating.

Singer encouraged her class to work with a broad range of possibilities: pictures, colors and concepts. Levy brought part of his collection of photographs from his native Israel and from tours around the world for one brainstorming session.

Mixed in was an image of Levy and several Tibetan men and women seated against a wall. "I usually don't take these kinds of photos, but my professors convinced me that this tells the story of my company and my idea," says Levy. The print advertisement now uses that image and leaves one silhouette open: "This could be you," it reads.

Avoiding vague themes, logos or brands is critical. Travel School may not be memorable, but MeTakeYou is. Singer says every business owner in even the most staid fields should find a way to be distinctly different form all competitors. "Every company, whether it's large or mom-and-pop, has an absolutely critical responsibility to delineate themselves from everybody else," says Singer.

While ideas in Singer's class are merely potential businesses right now, some of the students will be pitching the ideas to venture capital firms and major corporations in the coming months. Hahn is particularly eager to bring her hotel to fruition. "People want a place where they can go to have privacy or intimacy for a short time," says Hahn. "They don't want to have to feel sleazy."

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