Certain brands have woven authenticity into their products, delivery and message. These brands have a distinctive look and feel about them that says, “This is the original,” or “This is the genuine article.” Over time, they have carved out a place at the apex of their category. A couple times a week we enjoy John [...]
Tag Archives: Brand identity
Brand Proliferation Can Hurt Sales
Having spent decades in the sales profession and as successful brand builders, we can tell you that there is a limit to the number of product offerings your company can sell. There is a tendency by production divisions to measure their success by how many different items they produce within a certain category. This usually [...]
Company Branding Should Convey your Message
Michael Caine played a Cockney womanizer in the popular 1966 movie, Alfie. Burt Bacharach’s theme, by the same name, asked the rhetorical question that conveyed the message of the movie. Your company branding starts with a succinct message that communicates what it’s all about and how your company distinguishes itself from your competition. Considering the [...]
Retail Packaging Must Serve Many Masters
Your retail packaging must play by the established rules for labeling, dimensions, weight, units-per-pack, packs-per-box and so on. Your product must make it through the entire distribution system without getting crushed, marred, broken, misplaced, or misidentified. If your package can actually make it to the retail shelf or floor, only then do you have the [...]
Branding Yourself Requires Consistent Messaging
Today, branding yourself, “self branding,” or “personal branding” can be achieved by business professional and the average person through skillful and repeated use of social media. Ten years ago, to brand yourself, you needed to write a book, be a politician, appear on TV, or be in the news or sports. While those avenues are [...]
Branding Services Abound – Know What You are Looking For
They say the folks who made the most money during the gold rush were selling shovels. The branding “gold rush” of today is no different. If this was written twenty years ago it would be called Marketing Services Abound. As we advance into the twenty-first century, we continue to see the definition blur between marketing [...]
How to Talk to Your Logo Maker
Thousands of logo makers would love to design a logo for your company, product or service. Most have artistic talent, imagination and experience at making logos for other companies. Many people who have never made a successful logo think they can do it themselves. It’s fun and it feels like an extension of their ego. [...]
Building a Brand – 11 Essential Building Blocks
Today there is a lot of talk about building a brand. It seems like brands pop up over night, especially on the web. Most brands, however, take years to become established. Some companies even buy up defunct brands because they may still have some brand equity that may be harder to build than acquire. Gaining [...]
HBS Branding Blog by David Aaker
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Killing Giants: A Relevance Interpretation
Killing Giants is a provocative book written by Stephen Denny in which he outlines 10 strategies that have worked when small firms took on the giants in their industry - firms with marketing scale, distribution clout, buying power and strong brands. In looking at these strategies, it appeared to me that nearly all had a relevance interpretation. They were re […]
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Lincoln Attempts to "Reinvent the Wheel"
Lincoln, has an incredible heritage, nearly a century old, as a premium brand. It had a long run with prestige owners and classic designs. But no longer. For several decades, Lincoln has been perceived as a boring car for very old people who are into cushy rides and waxing nostalgic. The brand is now attempting a break-out reinvigoration to again become a to […]
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A CEO Style to Admire
Tom Aaker, a friend and relative, is a CEO with an exemplary professional style very different from that of Steve Jobs whose style I recently wrote about, and a personal lifestyle that rivals that of Richard Branson of Virgin or Larry Ellison of Oracle. The combination has worked as he has advanced at Standard Chartered, a British banking company operating m […]
Brand Week News And Features
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What People Will Really Pay for a Game When They Can Pay What They Want
Ever wish you could buy 1,000 liters of boar sperm? How about a condom for every resident of El Paso, Texas? If so, you might want to create the next popular card game. Each of those purchases would set you back $70,000—which is the approximate net profit that the makers of Cards Against Humanity recorded from "pay-what-you-want" sales of a special […]
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Brazilian Fast-Food Chain Puts Burgers in Edible Wrappers
Brazilian fast-food chain Bob's has come up with edible packaging for its burgers, just to make the point that people love its food so much that they can't even wait to unwrap it before digging in. That's kind of cheating, isn't it? Making the wrappers tasty enough that no one threw them out rigs the game a little too much, don't you […]
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A Cappella Singing Is Harder in Backseat of a Speeding BMW
Ho ho ... hum. Guess how "Jingle Bells" sounds when sung by an a cappella choir riding in the backseat of a wildly speeding and skidding BMW driven by a professional race-car driver. If you said "Pretty bad," you'd be right! In Switzerland, the automaker buckled four caroling members of the Zurich Acapella Group into a BMW M135i driv […]
