Short, practical perspectives on market stance, differentiation, and brand strategy — focused on what actually moves the needle for founder‑led service firms.
Having recently been consulted for a corporate naming project, I thought I’d post my personal guidelines on how to dodge the most common naming landmines. Over the years, I’ve put together a mental checklist that I’ve used when working on naming projects, and this seemed like a good time to put the …
The LA Times is feeling the effects of the population’s media consumption moving away from print, but their $10 million solution leaves much to be desired. Large companies tend to get so wrapped up in their own momentum that they fail to notice that the rest of the world has changed direction. The m…
There are golden fields ready for the harvest, if you can bring yourself to stop fighting your peers for table scraps in oversaturated markets.
XHTML, CSS, DOM, XML, XSLT, XMLHttpRequest, and JavaScript were just programmers’ techno-babble…until they were collectively christened “Ajax.” On February 18, 2005, Jesse James Garrett (founder of [Adaptive Path](https://web.archive.org/web/20060328061204/http://www.adaptivepath.com/), wrote a brie…
_(I wrote this back in 2005 but I preach the same principle today.)_ The brands we respect, the brands we’re drawn to, the brands we’re compelled to follow are those that are willing to let go of their fear and do what they know is right for them. I recently worked on a corporate identity project fo…
If you run a website, you may have noticed that your Google rankings dancing around over the past few weeks. Is this the end of the world as we know it? Google wields enormous power over the economy. When a Google developer tweaks a formula, thousands of businesses can be affected. In their most rec…
[Eris Free](https://web.archive.org/web/20060328061101/http://erisfree.com/updates/79/branding-blogging-and-business-oh-my), [Paul Scrivens](https://web.archive.org/web/20060328061101/http://9rules.com/whitespace/web_business/money_integrity.php), and [Molly Holzschlag](https://web.archive.org/web/2…
There’s no shortage of advice available regarding the best ways to generate buzz for your hot and exciting new product, but what are you supposed to do if your product isn’t really buzzworthy? Let’s say you’ve made a new line of those plastic clips that you put on a bag of potato chips to keep them …
The recent “I’d Hit It” ad campaign from McDonald’s illustrates the perils of trying to tap into hip subcultures from the outside. Andrew Teman of “World Champion” [originally pointed out the ad](https://web.archive.org/web/20060328061049/http://andrewteman.typepad.com/worldchamp/2005/01/mcdonalds_w…