(PIZZA) PIE IN THE FACE
Remember last year’s Super Bowl Oreo tweet during the blackout? This year’s entry for Twitter brand brilliance was during another major contest — the Grammy Awards. Australian superstar rapper Iggy Azalea earlier that day sent out a tweet to her 4.2 million fans decrying that a Papa John’s [...]
WHO OWNS YOUR HEART?
Ah, Valentine’s Day. Romance is in the air. And hearts are everywhere. On cards and gift boxes, in tweets and other social media, in emails, on restaurant tables, in print ads, banner ads and as candy and jewelry. But before you rush out to add [...]
SUPER BOWL BRANDMANIA
As we head into Super Bowl LXIX weekend, I thought the following might be of interest. Digiday posted a fun article entitled 5 Super Bowl Myths Debunked (http://digiday.com/brands/5-super-bowl-myths-debunked). Here’s what’s interesting from a brander’s perspective: (1) Super Bowl ads have higher recall than ads in [...]
BRANDS AND BRAINS
When you think of your favorite brands, what is the first word you associate with them? According to psychology Professor Paul Bloom of Yale, the word we all associate with our favorite brands, even if subconsciously, is “pleasure.” We all seek pleasure in our lives. [...]
BRAND INNOVATION AND EXTENSION: LESSONS ON HOW TO MAKE IT WORK
There are a number of ways to grow a brand from its core product or service (for brevity’s sake, throughout this blog, I refer to both as “products”). Two prevalent forms are licensing the brand and brand extension. In licensing, the brand owner gives permission [...]
FACEBOOK, BRANDS AND PROMOTION – A WHOLE NEW SET OF CHALLENGES
I recently searched the phrase “social media marketing challenges” on Google® and Bing® and got back a low of 44 million hits (Bing®) and 99 million hits (Google®). These results are not at all surprising given the constantly changing social media environment, the diversity of [...]
THE SECRET(S) OF CHOOSING A GREAT BRAND NAME
There are many ways to describe what makes a great brand. Being a sailor, I often think in terms of sailing imagery. In that context, imagine the marketplace as a dense fog, filled with names, logos, messages, information, content, and massive overload. A deep, dense, [...]
THE FICKLE FINGER OF FANDOM
During my early professional years, a major studio retained me to police counterfeit merchandise featuring IP from its mega-hit space themed film and television series. Research showed that most of illicit merchandise, much of it hand-made, was created, and traded, by fans of the property, [...]
MILLENNIALS AND BRANDS — SOME NEW INSIGHTS
One of my favorite sources of information regarding the relationship between social media and branding is Digiday (Digiday.com). In a recent post with the title “Millennial media-consumption habits explained, in 5 charts,” the author presented a summary of findings from two recent studies, comScore, Noise|The Intelligence Group’s [...]
BRANDS AND TRADEMARKS: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
I’ve always been fascinated by the disconnect experienced by so many branding professionals and legal professionals over the term “trademark.” Many branders and marketers believe that trademark is a verb, as in “can you trademark ….” Many legal professionals believe that a brand is no different [...]
BRANDS, CONSUMERS AND TWITTER: WHAT TWEETING BRANDS NEED TO KNOW
Twitter and Isobar UK have published a new research study that examines “unconscious cues” that drive brand perception on Twitter. Given the growing importance of Twitter to brand marketers, this study needs to be read by all brand marketers. The study created fictional brands to [...]
THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN BRANDING
Brands are stories, and like all other stories, they have to be communicated. A story unheard is not a story. A story not understood is not a story. And clearly, a story not believed turns into something altogether different. The brand as a story has to be [...]