Posts Tagged ‘ branding ’

I spent part of last Saturday night helping out a friend. Whether you call it a portfolio or personal branding, every professional needs their own website. The problem is that most don’t believe they have the technical chops to create one. Fortunately, there’s WordPress and other even simpler tools. Here’s what a colleague John...
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Whether you’re an individual, brand, or company, it’s good to know when people are talking about you. It’s even better to know what they’re saying. The last thing you want is to find out that there’s a firestorm of negativity about your latest post, product, or brand when a forest of media microphones are...
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How do you brand yourself for career success? The answer in 24 slides: | View | Upload your own (I saw this first on ReadWriteWeb.)
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Here’s a response I posted this morning on a Seeking Alpha story on Apple’s brand that seemed to imply it was all about marketing: “All Day Breakfast” hit the nail on the head. What people who don’t really understand branding don’t understand is that the best branding, the longest-lived branding, and the most financially...
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Seth Godin posted an article on really bad branding a couple of days ago, pointing out some company names that don’t differentiate companies very well: Jewelry Central is a really bad brand name. So are Party Land, Computer World, Modem Village, House of Socks and Toupee Town. It’s a bad brand name because Central...
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A colleague of mine just bought a Honda. He needed to pick it up tout de suite but the Honda sales rep wanted to slow him down. Apparently the car needed to be detailed yet. When my buddy declined the detail in favor of getting the car sooner, the rep said he couldn’t do...
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Mike Wagner has a great post (and follow-up) on how poor service, breaking promises, and essentially not living up to their brand cost a hotel $30,000 … all for a missing toothbrush. Here’s the story: He was in town to deliver a seminar, had forgotten his toothbrush, tried to take the hotel up on...
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Seth Godin fingered this post at The Messaging Times about buzz. Key point: it starts with the people who want the buzz to spread. It starts with the people who are building/creating/growing/nurturing the product/process/market/widget. Buzz starts in the hive. No buzz in the hive – no buzz on the street. You gotta drink your...
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Remember that … totally innovative never-been-done-before six-figure customer support, training, and marketing initiative for a multi-ten-figure product line with extremely high gross margin … project that I was pitching a week or so ago? It’s a go. Just completed it via conference call a few minutes ago. I am pumped! Now, of course, the...
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Text Link Ads just informed me that (yay!) they’ve sold another ad for me. (You can see ‘em down near the bottom of the right column under, appropriately, text link ads.) This is cool, because it pays the hosting bills and because I make more from TLA than I ever did from Google AdWords....
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I think I just saw one of the worst company names in history. OK, after ACME. A truck passed me today on my usual lunch hour walk. On the side, in hand-lettered type, was the name of the company: Alternative Cartage, Inc. I can just imagine how this plays in marketing. “Um, yes, we’re...
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Now this is how to respond to your competition: (Doesn’t change the fact that I think iPhone is going to rock, but it’s funny, well-done, and … it’s got me listening.) iphone, ophone, microsoft, apple, marketing, youtube, john koetsier, pr
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Advertising this good deserves recognition: This is marketing from people who have read the Cluetrain. This is marketing from people who give a damn. This is marketing from people who are having fun. If all advertising was this good you wouldn’t need to skip commercials. ad, advertising, kodak, kodak moment, guts, marketing, john...
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I had no idea that chocolate was only for men. But then again, I’ve never been to Russia: In case that’s not quite clear enough, there’s a warning on the back: My niece just came back from Russia – visiting with her dance troupe. Amazingly, she attended a session in Catherine the Great’s private...
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I popped into the local Toyota dealership a couple of days ago … I’m looking for a car, and since our company is going through a lean transformation (essentially, we trying to grow a culture based on the Toyota Production System) I thought I’d check out the products of that process. Unfortunately, while all...
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