Branding

I’m still lowkey mad at Seth Godin for this.

Candid confessions from marketers reveal why your spend stalls. Spreadsheets lie, agencies push what's convenient, urgency is manufactured, and trust beats flash. Real growth comes from patient brand building.

Stop hemming and hawing. A clear purpose turns messy choices into reflex, rallies your team, justifies tough sacrifices, and keeps you advancing like a disciplined chess player while competitors scramble.

While working on a branding project a few weeks ago, I happened to wonder what colors were most frequently used in brand identities. I started poking around online, feeling sure someone had already done this research and neatly organized the results. However, I wasn’t really satisfied with what I fo…

Stop waving the same tired values as everyone else. Customers assume basics like quality and service. Ditch the defaults and uncover what truly sets you apart, something competitors won’t claim.

Drop the buzzwords and watch how primal Friend or Foe instincts shape every click. Build consistency, character, and reassurance, or keep losing silent prospects who never call back.

It's tempting to jam your corporate identity full of bells and whistles, but the strongest identities are still the simplest ones. When designing a logo, it's easy to go overboard. There are so many great elements you can work with (colors, textures, patterns, shapes, borders, typography, gradients,…

The basic elements of highly successful online videos are really just fundamental principles of human interaction, and you can apply to nearly any form of communication (especially marketing). While there's no way to guarantee that anything will "go viral," studying and applying those basic elements…

When designing a logo, it’s easy to go overboard. There are so many great elements you can work with (colors, textures, patterns, shapes, borders, typography, gradients, icons, etc.) that it’s tempting to include a little bit of everything to get your point across. In a massively oversaturated media…

As much as our work at Forty is about “touchy-feely” stuff (psychology, emotion, metaphor, experiences, etc.), I’m still a numbers guy at heart. That’s why I get so frustrated every time I hear someone recommending crowdsourced design services like [99designs](https://web.archive.org/web/20130115155…

We’re naturally attracted to people and brands that stand for something, and we’re suspicious of those that try to mold themselves around our preferences. Imagine this. You’re on a blind date. > You: “So, where do you want to go?” Date: “Wherever you want to go.” You: “Maybe dinner? What kind of foo…

Once you’ve sorted out your company’s roots (purpose, values, style, etc.), you’ll find yourself faced with the challenge of trying to hold all that information in your head when making a decision. One of the best tools for dealing with this situation is a metaphor: a concept that ties these element…

Screenwriter William Goldman once wrote of the movie industry that “Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out, it’s a guess…nobody, _nobody_–not now, not ever–knows the least $#\*%@# thing about what is or isn’…

Cereal is great. You throw some milk on it, and you’ve got a tasty and relatively nutritious breakfast. Theoretically, cereals–at least the basic, unadorned ones–should be relatively universal. There’s not much about them that predisposes them to any particular demographic or psychographic group. Ap…

Executives tend to be short-term thinkers. Their career has grown through easy-quantifiable successes, and they’re constantly pressured — by other short-term thinking executives — to base their actions around short-term metrics. It’s all about what happened last quarter, or last month, or even last…