Chequebook journalism
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I visited the IA Centre for some much-needed advice on intellectual property, which was money well spent - Visorcat has now got European and US patents. The next cheque was less significant, for a small business club (I had started networking, a very important ingredient for business success!) but the following one was to the Intellectual Assets Centre, which has now merged with Scottish Enterprise. The results of that market research were very positive and spurred us on - 90% of the motorcyclists we surveyed in a questionnaire at the Scottish Motorcycle Show and at branches of Hein Gericke in Birmingham and Edinburgh said they wanted a device that would wash as well as wipe the visor while riding. The first few cheques were to a postgraduate student at the University of Glasgow who did some market research for us in 2009. Recently I found myself looking back through the cheque stubs, which is a bit like looking back through your purchase history on Amazon - it tells you a lot about yourself or your business, and in our case, how far we've come. Six years on, I am now only about two thirds of the way through that same Abbey chequebook! I have stopped explaining the rebrand (the Santander logo is the same as Abbey's anyway) and, like most businesses, we have fully embraced online banking, so we rarely use cheques - except for the monthly rent on our business premises. Of course, Santander had sent me a glossy new chequebook with the Santander logo, but I didn't want to start using that - it would be a complete waste of the perfectly good cheques in my Abbey chequebook. I found myself explaining to people that the cheques still worked, despite the rebrand.
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As an Abbey business customer, I had only just started a new chequebook, and I began to wonder when or if people might reject the cheques I was writing. In 2010, Abbey National plc was rebranded as Santander.