When I was young, I had a really pessimistic view of marketing. I thought advertising was about emotional blackmail and manipulation, branding was conceptual mumbo-jumbo, design was pointless visual fluff, and public relations was just a way to hide your faults and deceive your customers. Taken toge…
Brands live in minds, not infrastructure. Sell your true vibe, not generic “quality.” Lean into what you are—authentic culture beats wishful rebrands and earns loyalty faster than polished spin.
With campaign season in full swing, I’ve had some recent chats with my colleagues about the universally weak and uninspired nature of campaign signs. It seems like political marketing is about nothing more than putting your name on a solid color background (usually blue or red), and maybe adding som…
The web design and development industry can be difficult for businesses to navigate, with options ranging from your cousin looking for iTunes cash to multi-million-dollar agencies like [Avenue A | Razorfish](https://web.archive.org/web/20060820095208/http://www.avenuea-razorfish.com/). This guide wi…
The world’s biggest branding crisis isn’t accounting scandals, poor customer service, or ugly logos—it’s executives’ paralyzing fear that they’re going to do something wrong. Imagine that you’ve just been chosen as the new CEO for a Fortune 500 company. The numbers you see each morning are comparabl…
Misconceptions about the purpose of a corporate identity system often cause companies to limp along with a sub-standard business image. Find out how you can avoid these common mistakes in your own organization. (Update: Many thanks to Antonio Mariscal, who took the time to translate [a Spanish versi…
Compelling stock photos, catchy slogans, and memorable marketing copy have just a fraction of the branding power of a single human being. Think of all the great ad campaigns you’ve seen in your lifetime. Now think of all the great people you’ve known. Family. Friends. Teachers. Classmates. Coworkers…
In an effort to improve public perception (which leads to increased tourism and investment), some states might consider investing in an attractive new name. We’ve seen numerous examples of well-established companies changing names in an attempt to reinvent their reputations. We’ve also seen an incre…
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…
[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 …