On the train home each evening, I gaze over the seats. What do I see? A sea of gaming. Solitaire. Scrabble. Everyone needs a little break. We live in an overwhelmingly intricate world. Every direct step we take gets deflected or postponed. We yearn to take slam-dunk actions, but direct hits are rare. Each score [...]

Tags: Brand, FarmVille, Virtual Reality.

Richard Cobden was a legendary 19th century British businessman. A passionate believer in free trade, he was a pragmatist as well. Cobden once shot through a frequent blind spot in human reasoning with the words: “For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility gap.” When something silly is taken for true, challenge those who believe [...]

Tags: Brand, Business, Intelligent Trust.

In his book The Fifties, David Halberstam describes a marketing stampede of 1955. It happened in tandem with the newly debuted quiz show The $64,000 Question. In just five weeks after its first airing, it had become “the top-rated show on television. Studies showed that approximately 47.5 million people were watching.” Revlon was the program’s [...]

Tags: Brand, Revlon.

Recently we gave an interview to a trade publication named Home Textiles Today. The most penetrating concept the author Jennifer Marks walked away with was: “Today’s consumer is his or her own brand.” Let’s unpack that idea. In the brand origination and remediation trade, we talk a lot about discovering brand DNA. Find that DNA. [...]

Tags: Brand DNA.

It’s possible for a business to buy a passive RFID tag today for as little as a nickel. That’s the prerequisite for tracking a package or a container as it treks its merry way across town or around the globe. Radio frequency identification and tracking technology were undreamt of just a few years ago. Today [...]

Tags: Branding.

Not strained, forced muscle; but strength that’s supple, agile, free-flowing: that’s the tone of a healthy brand. Great brands have a core clarity to them: • For me, Apple marries easy use with beauty in design. • The essence of Harley-Davidson is freedom – outfitting confident individuals to assert their true independence.  All the products [...]

Tags: Apple, Brand, Business, Harley-Davidson, Levi's.

Just how far can you trust your brand? Can your brand truly be trusted in the hands of others? How much discretion do you give a brand . . . unchaperoned and in public space? To answer these questions, observe what happens to a healthy brand in the hands of passionate enthusiasts. How do you [...]

Tags: Branding, Brooks Brothers, Business, Peter Drucker.

  1. Brand differentiation is built on subtleties, not exaggerations. Do you know – i.e., know with gut intuition, not with marketing jargon – the subtleties that differentiate your brand versus competitors? Have you traced the genealogy of your brand over the years and how it may have been transformed? Are you still true to [...]

Tags: Brand Curation, Brand DNA, Rate Your Considerations.

Jim Malackowski, Chairman of Ocean Tomo, is a friend and colleague of mine. He’s an intellectual property expert. The Ocean Tomo website shows a chart that compares the components of market value for the S&P between 1975 and 2010. Over this period, tangible assets have shrunk from an incredible 83% to just 20%. One assumes [...]

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Social media are redefining brand identities in a profound way. These media are another important step in the democratization of the media business. An October article in The Economist described “the sale and analysis of real-time social-media data” with the development of such “outsource” firms as DataSift and Gnip. No doubt the volume of social [...]

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