Branding

10 questions with Rob Walker

[Rob Walker] argues in his new book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, that people are embracing brands like never before. Yes, we're tired of advertising, but we're attaching ourselves to brands in new ways that affect our cultural, political, and community activities.

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Starbucks: How Growth Destroyed Brand Value

Harvard professor John Quelch says Howard Schultz had a great concept, but too many stores and products changed the experience.

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Failing as a Brand Strategy

02 JUL 2008 from ClickZ | Read the full story»

If you've been using Twitter, you know the issue. The service's reliability has been challenged recently, to say the least. It ranges from minor inconveniences to outright total failure, and Twitter members have seen more than their share of "Twitter is stressing out a bit right now..." messages... The Fail Whale image, consistent with the user-driven norm of social applications, is now a brand of its own.

Hat tip: Biz Stone

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How Small Companies Build Big Brands

Establish your brand one market at a time. Focus on the online component of your strategy. So says Eileen Campbell, the CEO of Millward Brown Group, a leading market researcher. (Video )

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Obama's one-word equity

If any politician, let alone any company, has ever established "global ownership of one word in the public mind," it’s Obama’s seemingly permanent grip on "hope." Whatever your politics, you must agree that’s an amazing accomplishment — especially for a guy who five years ago was a state senator.

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A Practical Guide to Branding

Define your brand identity—your product's "personality"—before you spend a dime on advertising or marketing.

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Stairway to Brand Heaven & Hell

03 JUN 2008 from Logic + Emotion | Read the full story»

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brand timelines- planners love great visuals

Noah Brier just gave us a new world of Brand Tags and now Dear Jane Sample has come up with something many of us have always wanted to do, but could never get quite right, the simple art of the Brand Timeline.

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Can a Dead Brand Live Again?

After a brand is discontinued, what’s left is a name and the memories in consumers’ minds. To make money, maybe those memories — real or imagined — are all you need. (Subscription required)

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How to Build Brand Friendship

To create a truly powerful brand, you need to establish a sense of belonging, friendship, and dependability between product and customers.

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Sixth Sense

Getting at what really drives your brand’s growth. A discussion featuring Eric Plaskonos of Philips N.A., Sheryl Adkins-Green of Alberto Culver, Grant Harrison of Humana Inc., Delaine Hampton of Procter & Gamble and Zain Raj of Euro RSCG.

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harley says screw it

It's brave and gutsy, just like the brand.

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Bugaboo Day Trips

Bugaboo, the super hip baby-trolley brand, have come up with a series of City Day trips tailored for parents with their kids. Each day trip is designed in collaboration with local artists and can be downloaded as a PDF. The site features annotated trips in 22 Western cities such as Amsterdam, Los Angeles, London and Rome. The platform also accepts suggestions from parents on fun day-trips and hot spots in cities world-wide.

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Sierra Clorox

"One of the reasons green home cleaning products haven’t achieved much market penetration is if they came from an environmental brand, people had the sense they won’t work … And if it came from someone with a cleaning reputation the reaction was: They can’t be green."

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Brand Cuba

"The Cuban Revolution is and always has been a brand..."

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brand as friend and facilitator

This new world requires a lot from brands. 1. Are they trustworthy and good enough to be considered "friends" in the first place?

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GM Vice Chair Dismisses Global Warming, Blogs "Apology"

What good is a brand with a conscience if it’s employees lack one?

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The New Rules of E-Branding

Revamp your online brand and increase site traffic with these 6 guidelines.

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Fashion seeks patents to stop copycats

High-end fashion knock-offs are easy to find in any city. Now designers want to put a wrinkle into that copycat industry. Jeremy Hobson reports on possible patents for haute couture. (Audio)

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Howard Schultz Must Blog

05 FEB 2008 from Brand Autopsy | Read the full story»

As we know, Howard Schultz has returned as CEO at Starbucks. He's committed to fixing the "unintended consequences" caused by growing its store footprint at a rapid pace. Such unintended consequences have included losing the company's identity and the dilution of the unique customer experience Starbucks once delivered. Howard has also pledged to refocus the company on growing its relationships with customers.

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G.M.’s Global Strategy: A Brand for Every Place

G.M.’s international strategy isn’t about focusing on a single brand. Instead, it wants its consumers to be able to choose from a fleet of them. (Subscription required)

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Tribe Management

Brand management was top down, internally focused, political and money based. It involved an MBA managing the brand, the ads, the shelf space, etc. The MBA argued with product development and manufacturing to get decent stuff, and with the CFO to get more cash to spend on ads. Tribe management is a whole different way of looking at the world.

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Brand Sliders

An innovative tool offers sliding-scale answers to brand-strategy questions. By Martin Bishop.

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Customers Have Conversations with Brands that Have Good REPUTATIONS

Fast answer -- which one are you more likely to cut some slack Apple or Microsoft? When you pick up the phone to call the customer care number, what is your state of mind if you know that someone from Apple is on the other end of the phone? Now try Microsoft. Try any wireless operator. That’s what I thought.

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Just Say No

"The marketplace is so crowded that the consumer simply needs to exercise a little brand bigotry to make shopping comprehensible."

-Rob Walker , columnist, Fast Company magazine

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no boundaries for acne

It appears that Acne’s secret is to leverage the cult of cool across a variety of different creative disciplines and areas.

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nike plus resolutions

R/GA's Nike+ site, although created in 2005, has been much heralded this year as the gold standard in "Brand Utility."

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Alive on Arrival

Retail arrives as a brand-building medium. Do you have a plan? By Chris Hoyt.

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GE's Judy Hu: 'We're Reinventing a Brand and a Company'

Jeff Immelt, chairman and chief executive of General Electric, is remaking one of the world's best-known companies into an eco-minded innovator. Judy Hu has to communicate his vision to the world. Hu is global executive director for advertising and branding for the Connecticut-based conglomerate and overseer of its award-winning "Imagination at Work" and "Ecomagination" ad campaigns. "Jeff decided that we could no longer drive growth through acquisition," says Hu, who spoke at the recent 2007 Wharton Marketing Conference. "We had to focus on R&D and creating new products and services. Our story is about a new vision for GE."

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Fresh & Bumpy

It may be a bit too harsh to accuse Tesco of arrogance, exactly, but it does sound like some very serious mistakes have been made with its Fresh & Easy venture. Given the allure of Tesco's original promise -- a store that fills a gaping void in the American grocery landscape, my hope is that they will correct their course quickly (and certainly before they land here in New England, where the locals have a history of turning back unwelcome invasions).

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branding in a "want it now" world

Can people stand watching a campaign evolve over time or do you have to have a quick hit?

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That doesn't make sense

Ben has a post about a beer made by an order of monks in Belgium. These monks, who have taken vows of silence, only sell the beer by appointment, don't label the bottles, and severely limit the supply they create. As you can imagine for a beer that some call the best in the world, it has quite a cult following.

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The Sensory Potential

How the five senses create intuition... and build trust and loyalty. By Dori Molitor.

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Rebrand Awards: An Inside Peek

There were instances of companies that had revamped, or at least attempt to revamp, not just their look, logos, and taglines, but also their organization's focus, target audiences, training programs, models of customer interaction, and the entire culture of their organizations. Materials submitted included photographs, pictures, sketches, promotional material, apparel, and videos. Fascinating and mind-boggling.

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The Era of Bottom-Up Brands

05 NOV 2007 from the Wall Street Journal | Read the full story»

While brands remain vital online, the old top-down model of building them (think of a new magazine launch) is increasingly irrelevant to the Web. Instead, Google's dominance allows and even encourages brands to be built from the bottom up, with their overall identity far less important than the little slices of themselves returned by Web searches and their position in search rankings. (Subscription required)

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'Brand America' has gone toxic

When it comes to the image of American brands overseas, commentator Benjamin Barber says that there's a lot of repair work to be done.

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Brand Managers' High-wire Act: Going Global and Staying Local

For marketers, the Internet changes everything -- and nothing at all. For example, it enables companies to instantly reach consumers in different countries and economically tailor messages to them based on demographics, buying habits and other information. Yet it doesn't free these companies from the constant challenge of building distinct, durable brands.

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A Move to Let Logos Carry More of the Message

The new logo for the New Museum of Contemporary Art will be featured in a campaign to promote the institution’s move to a new home in downtown Manhattan. (Subscription required)

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Your Brand Is Not My Friend

I mean when you think of it, it’s kind of creepy. Facebook is the 21st century diner or malt shop. It’s where teens and young adults go to hang out. And the last thing they want is some salesperson coming up in their face and trying to have a “conversation” with them while they’re figuring out when they’re going to the movies. They don’t want to talk to you. They want to talk to their friends.

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The Pursuit of Happiness in a Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Hoping to revive a flagging brand, Kraft Foods is boosting its marketing budget and looking to transform the brand. (Subscription required)

Via NYT > Media and Advertising

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It's Not About You

"It's not about how good you look talking about your own brand. It's about how you make other people look good talking about your brand."

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More fractal experiences... how everything matters

Good experiences -- the drivers of good brands -- are fractal, and everything matters.

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How Brand China Can Succeed

[A] series of recent setbacks threaten China's new and improving image. As a result, China looks like a country that loves the world's markets but does not play by the world's rules.

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Jim Stengel

"Businesses and brands that are breaking records are those that inspire trust and affection and loyalty by being authentic, by not being arrogant, and by being empathetic to those they serve."

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forget lovemarks, it's all about trustmarks

We are starting to see a "brand vacuum" emerge, a fault line between what brands say they do and what they actually do. The rapid rise of the Internet is making it hard for brands to manage and control this ever widening chasm.

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How far will a brand stretch?

So how far will a brand stretch? While there are no hard and fast rules, a basic guideline is to determine how closely aligned the extension is from current perceptions. Wal-Mart has built its brand on 'cheap.' The likelihood of successfully extending upwards towards "more affluent tastes" is dubious unless it disconnects the Wal-Mart name using a sub-brand.

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Branding at the Core

Five steps to unlock your brand’s identity and unleash business growth. By Karen Strauss.

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The opposite

One of the hardest things to do is invent a brand with no opposite. You don't have an anchor to play against.

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Charm Offensive

According to "Charm Offensive," by Joshua Kurlantzick, public opinion polls consistently confirm "positive public opinion for China and deteriorating public opinion toward the United States in important developing countries,"...

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A brand is worth...

BusinessWeek has come out with its annual list of the top 100 brands and Coca-Cola is tops again. Reporter Burt Helm tells us how brands are valued for the rankings and what it takes to make or break a brand.

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Copywriting Advice You Can't Afford to Miss

If you find yourself with the dreaded job of copywriting for your business or company, I feel your pain. And so does Jeff Sexton, master Persuasion Architect for Future Now. Today's Grok features the first of a six-article series on effective copywriting, and it will knock your socks off. Jeff doesn't just theorize about good copywriting, he shows you how to do it.

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Suit maker finds a good fit in U.S.

18 JUL 2007 from APM's Marketplace | Read the full story»

Hickey Freeman has been making men's suits for more than a century. The American company refuses to outsource production, but it still has had to make unconventional changes. Daniel Weiss reports. (Audio)

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Building a Brand Around a Personality

'Famous' Wally Amos talks about how he made a name for his products.

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The Green Team

For Ann Hand of BP, brand identity means making the retail experience "a little better."

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Leadership: How Obama Does It

It was widely reported that the Barack Obama for President campaign raised an astonishing $32.5 Million in the second quarter. I am not surprised and here's a little story as to one of the reasons why. A month or two ago, my friend Dave answered the phone of a colleague. Since the colleague was not around, Dave asked if he could take a message. What was that message? "Tell him Senator Obama called to say thank you."

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The Financial Impact of a Strong Brand Reputation

It’s no secret that a strong brand reputation has a halo effect within the consumer marketplace and financial marketplace. What’s new is the ability to more precisely measure a brand’s reputation in order to predict how changes in brand’s reputation will impact the company’s stock price.

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Ad Legend Dan Weiden on Authentic Branding

My reporting for the article Who Do You Love? led me to Dan Weiden, co-founder of Weiden + Kennedy, one of the world's largest independently owned ad agencies.

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Your Brand is Everything

Joe Calloway, author of Work Like You're Showing Off, was kind enough to provide us with this essay about the importance of branding.

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Give 'em Something to Talk About

Your product may be good, but will it spark a conversation?

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Apple's Lesson for Sony's Stores: Just Connect

27 MAY 2007 from the New York Times | Read the full story»

Retail is supposed to be hard. Apple has made it seem ridiculously easy. And yet it must be harder than it appears, or why hasn’t the Windows side of the personal computer business figured it out? (Subscription required)

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Brands Must Have an Online Presence

In the U.S., almost 65% of the population is online. Bottom line: consumers want and expect brands to have an online presence, whether or not they choose to buy items that are seldom purchased on the Internet.

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The Beauty of One Page Designs

Back in the early 90s when companies were beginning to jump on the web and create websites for themselves, many times people scoffed at the idea of having just a brochure site.

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can gateway make a comeback?

Gateway is gingerly coming back, stating that it's going to place more emphasis on its consumer business, recognizing laptops are style statements for consumers and promising to work with the world’s best design houses to create new product.

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Brands are for Cows

11 MAY 2007 from MediaPost Publications | Read the full story»

Hmmm, brands. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. First of all, I am not entirely certain that I love brands at all. I mean, I LIKE them, but love seems a wee over the top to describe my relationships with MP3 players, dishwasher soap or ice cream sandwiches. More often than not I have mixed feelings about my brands.
Hat tip: Learned on Women http://learned.typepad.com/learned_on_women/

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4 ways for brands to be entertaining

"People don't love brands. This is an elemental economic truth. If they did, firms wouldn't have to pay for advertising." This comment was made in reference to the latest attempt to create branded entertainment venue for its community.

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Investor Danny Rimer Says Joost's Advantage is in the Experience

In light of Joost's $45 million investment announcement, there is lots of discussion about what the video services advantage will be over competitors. Or for that matter, simply the broad distribution of content already out there.

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brands and retailers need to sell experiences

Brands moved into retail experiences because they liked the idea of control and they saw an opportunity to immerse consumers in the brand. Today, the concept appears to have evolved into two strains.

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What Makes a Brand Authentic?

In an increasingly shiny, fabricated world of spun messages and concocted experiences--where nearly everything we encounter is created for consumption--elevating a brand above the fray requires an uncommon mix of creativity and discipline.

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New job, new T-shirt

It's a damming indictment of the talent management policies of corporate American that more than half admit that their top strategy for wowing new employees is to give them a branded mug or T-shirt.

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Working Purposefully

I’ve been struggling with the age-old dilemma of doing something that satisfies the soul OR doing something that pays the rent.

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Five Key Characteristics of Web Brands

The Web brand is useful, clear, simple, interactive, and most importantly, customer-centric.

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how to encourage participation

Hitwise recently presented some interesting stats on participation levels on Web 2.0 sites, his research found that only .16% of all YouTube visits were to upload video and only 0.2% of Flickr visits were to upload photographs.

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Google beats Microsoft, Coke in brand stakes

Google has knocked Microsoft off the top spot and been named the most powerful global brand of 2007.

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Can a Company Be Run as a Democracy?

Running a firm democratically sounds like a recipe for anarchy, but executives who adopted the system insist that it works.

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influx interview-staples

The office supplies retailer, Staples has set out to developing a program to bring design innovation to its own brand of products.

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The Easy Bravado of Brand Imagery vs. the Challenge of Focused Consumer Messaging

If, as good info-gathering marketers, we were to evaluate another brand's marketing efforts solely on their  big-picture imagery in glossy magazines, for instance, we'd probably miss the point - for luxury brands (and on down the line, I'd guess). 

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coors to develop popsicle

In a battle for attention, it’s almost impossible to get through to consumers and communicate the one thing that you stand for. However, Coors appears to have struck gold in their ability to communicate that Coors Light “owns” cold.

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Brand Building in the Digital Age: A Dizzying Array of Choices

In an era of YouTube.com, 300 digital channels, TiVo and DVRs, and videos watched on people's iPods, the one thing that viewers need more than ever is guidance -- as do the companies seeking ways to best deliver content or sell their products.

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brand as educators-howies

David Hieatt used to work at Weiden and Kennedy, became a consultant for non-profits and then established his own clothing company, Howies.

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Work for a Company that Cares

The Center for Companies that Care strives to make businesses more conscious of the human toll of their decisions and recognizes companies that have put in the extra effort for their employees.

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Job Titles 2.0: Brilliant, Bullshit, or Both?

"Titles such as bonbon dipper and rubber attacher have been bounced recently," according to Inc.com writer Scott Westcott.

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Laurel Delaney: Building a Global Brand: Start by Educating Your Customers

Guzov Ofsink LLC , a New York-based international law firm, takes the personality of each new marketplace into account when building the company’s global brand. “To establish our brand overseas, we selectively market by going to conferences domestically and overseas where we will be able to target particular audiences,” she says.

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The Digital Horizon: The Question

What do people want from a Web site? In our new tech column, we tell you why there's no easy answer on thriving in the ever-shifting digital landscape.

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brands and online video- 7 new rules

Here are 7 new rules for brands wanting to play in the new landscape of online video, it's a follow up to the previous post on big brands experimenting with online video.

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Open Wide

The traditional business organization meets democracy. This may hurt a bit.

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the different side of sears

The financial revolution is having a profound impact of our lives and its powerful reach extends into the brand world and is even redefining brand experiences.

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The Big Four Get Bigger

Fee, fie, foe, fum.... Here they come!

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Quote-unquote

The more you think about business as being a community service, the more successful you become.

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Give Consumers What They Want: More Local/Regional Connections

Your brand, no matter how large, has to start figuring out how to participate in this cultural change.  Connect with the neighborhood outside the doors of your office building to begin.

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Branded Content: From Class to Kitsch (and Back Again)

13 MAR 2007 from Marketing Profs: Daily Fix | Read the full story»

Remember the days of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, where Marlin Perkins would show us the cruel world of the African savannah from the relative safely of his helicopter, always in his immaculately clean, pressed and pleated khakis, while his assistant, Jim, would be wrestling with the python on the ground? Poor Jim.

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Job seekers give thumbs-down to lazy employers

For all the talk about the importance of employer brands and the difficulty in attracting talented staff, the depressing reality is that a quarter of job seekers believe that they have been badly treated by a prospective employer.

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Information on demand: the new enterprise goal

Dr. Ambuj Goyal is one of IBM’s heavy hitters. A 25-year IBM veteran who joined the company as a researcher at the T. J. Watson Research Center, Goyal did early work in scalable databases that laid the technology groundwork for DB2, then led the research effort to create the Deep Blue chess computer. In 1996, Goyal was elevated to be vice president, servers and software, and director, computer sciences, where he set IBM’s long-term research direction and oversaw the work of 1,500 researchers worldwide.

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Rob Walker's Q&A With Jeff Staple

Staple Design is one of those bubbling companies that you can't stop hearing about. Rob Walker interviewed Jeff Staple on his blog recently because, "Staple seems a bit ahead of the pack in terms of building a real business. If I had to bet on one brand-underground entitity that’s really going to 'make it big,' not just as a brand but as a business as well, it would quite likely be Staple."

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New Tool for Finding the Best and Brightest Employees

A weekly look at the latest products and services designed to help you run a better business.

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How to Avoid A Reputation Gap

Our ticket to fame or blame, our reputation is how we’re perceived. And just as a reputation can make or break a company, it can make or break a career.

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Get off the Marketing Train

I recently heard one of those “What is this world coming to?” stories. A friend’s husband commutes to work in NYC by train and has trouble finding a place to stand, and forget about sitting. Turns out that commuters on his rush hour train mark their territory by reserving their little patch of floor to stand on. And God help anyone who takes their space.

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Job satisfaction keeps falling

Americans are growing increasingly unhappy with their jobs and the problem is getting worse, with the newest entrants to the workforce the most disillusioned and disengaged they have ever been.

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Hello, Smart Personal Brander

What can lousy customer service teach us about personal branding? Quite a bit it turns out.

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Interpersonal Narrative: How Hitachi Is Humanizing Its Technology

As life is made richer by stories, so should marketing. Go ahead and try tapping the narratives at work all around your brand. There are likely thousands being shaped as you read this - so listen for them.

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The Power of Social Influence

An article in the current issue of The Harvard Business Review validates a nasty little secret: the best products aren’t necessarily the most successful. The piece, which discusses a Columbia University study, concludes that a product’s success is determined more by social influence than its inherent qualities.

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the latest lessons from flickr and youtube on brand relationships

Community-based brands of the future, the ones that rely on user-generated content and the ones that demand more involvement for the consumer, will need to develop a new type of brand "contract" and make it clear from the get-go.

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starbucks uses youtube to start a conversation

The brand is using the new medium to explain itself to the public, engage in dialog and conversation and introduce the people behind the brand. (Video )

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Ripe for parody

If someone was going to make fun of your company, how would they do it? (And if there’s no answer, is that a sign you’re lacking a defined point of view?)

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Are You a "One-Night Brand"?

If you run a brand and in the past 12 months have used words like "love" of "customer loyalty," I would like to challenge you to consider whether your actions reflect those of someone truly committed to building a lasting relationship, of they are the moves of someone looking for a quick score.

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2007 Trends : Brand Abstinence

2007 will see the rise of brand abstinence. A mix of ethical consumerism and brand disappointment will fuel a growth in apathy held by some consumers when it comes to new product purchases.

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Happy New Year

We wish you a new year filled with prosperity and growth, both personal and professional.

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Happy Holidays!

We're observing the Christmas holiday today and will return to posting tomorrow, Boxing day. We wish you a day filled with joy and peace.

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How to Keep Your School From Being Brand X

12 DEC 2006 from the Wall Street Journal | Read the full story»

The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, has long taught about the power and importance of branding. So officials there were dismayed to learn that some M.B.A. students were hard pressed to identify exactly what makes the Haas brand special. (Subscription required)

Hat tip: Reveries Magazine

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Rebounding Brands

These brands went through the PR ringer and survived to thrive again.

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drivers of brand change- ahip

There are probably dozens of different drivers for the change, but we've broken them down to a manageable list of four that we are calling "AHIP", as in "does your brand get AHIP?"

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how to make brand communication interesting

Brands can be interesting if they do great TV spots, but they can be really interesting if they find an idea that they can do something more and use media to make it happen.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Brands

A new word-of-mouth research firm is attempting to demystify chatter about brands in the offline world. (Subscription required!)

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Happy Thanksgiving

We hope that you all have a day rich with community and contentment. The wire service will resume tomorrow.

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new forms of brand creation

Dissatisfied with the brand offerings from corporations, consumers are coming together to create their own brands and products. These consumers are looking for something different; it can be a radical new product, a personalized limited edition item and/or to be more engaged in the process of production.

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Advertisements Revisited

"Ready. Fire! Aim." is one of Tom’s favorite mantras. In that spirit, we've been experimenting with advertising here at the TP Wire Service. We've also considered and researched it for our parent site, tompeters.com. The results have underwhelmed us. We're removing the ads from the TP Wire Service RSS feeds today and will be removing the ads from the TP Wire Service home page in the near future. Tompeters.com will remain a