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Would Customers Wear Your Colors?
Happy College Colors Day! If you are unaware of this special day, the Friday before the first full weekend of the college football season is designated as College Colors Day. People are encouraged to...
View ArticleBrand Love: It’s not What You Think
Marketers talk a great deal about developing relationships between their brands and customers. The underlying assumption is that we can equate brand relationships that people have with interpersonal...
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How to Achieve Brand Relevance
Have you ever caught yourself teaching or advocating what you believe is an important point only to realize you aren’t exactly sure yourself what it means? I’m not talking about speaking on points on...
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Avoiding Death and Taxes
It is said that in life two things are certain: Death and taxes. While that axiom plays out for people, businesses can shield themselves from both. Tax avoidance practices of American corporations was...
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Your Customers, Their Brand
Well, it has happened again. A marketing lesson taught about who owns brands. This time, the pupil was a corporate behemoth, Microsoft. The company first made a splash last week at the E3 show with its...
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A Social Media Marketing English Lesson
I am a marketing professor, not an English professor (as one can determine from reading my posts). But, I feel compelled to weigh in on a practice that makes me cringe when I see it occur. Some...
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Rebranding: Short-Term Pain for Long-Term Gain
It has been said that the only three certainties in life are birth, death, and taxes. Perhaps a fourth certainty should be on that list: Change. Whether you embrace it or detest it, change makes its...
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Personal versus Perfect: How Brands Walk the Social Media Line
Social media has dramatically changed how businesses communicate with their target markets. A reliance on one-way communication through mass media channels is now complemented by a more flexible,...
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What the Arctic Monkeys Taught Me about Branding
About a month ago, I treated my two oldest sons (24 and 17) to concert tickets to see one of their favorite alternative rock bands, the Arctic Monkeys. As the concert date approached, I realized this...
View ArticleMarketing Lessons from ‘Reading Rainbow’
Unless you own a time machine, one of the best ways to reconnect with the past is through feelings of nostalgia. The people, events, and culture of days gone by can be relived to conjure positive...
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Can McDonald’s be Saved?
What does a sports team do when performance fails to meet expectations? Often, the coach is replaced in an effort to energize the team and provide new direction. You cannot get rid of the entire team...
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Risk and Reward of a New Logo
Logos play a vital role in branding. The use of a symbol or other visual element can create an instant association with a brand. If you are unsure about the effect of logos on consumer behavior, I will...
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Authenticity: A Brand’s GPS
How do you know when you have found the passion that drives your brand? You know that passion is fueling purpose when you are able to observe consistent behaviors and actions in your work as well as...
View ArticleTwo Key Words for Personal Branding Success
“If this business were to be split up, I would be glad to take the brands, trademarks and goodwill and you could have all the bricks and mortar – and I would fare better than you.” – John Stuart,...
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The 4-D Personal Brand
Brands may have originated out of a need to identify the owner or maker of an object or product, but the role of brands in marketing today has expanded. Instead being a single-dimension concept, brands...
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The Dangers of Brands Swimming Downstream
A harsh reality about brands is that there is no brand in existence that is for everyone. Some people think your prices are too high. Others think your quality is unacceptable. Yet others believe your...
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A (Re)Brand is More Than a Name
When you hear the term ”rebranding,” chances are you associate it with a change in name, logo, colors, or tagline associated with a brand. If you make those associations, you are correct more times...
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Making Brand Taglines Great Again
Today, Americans will observe a distinguishing trait of our government: smooth transfer of power. Donald J. Trump will become just the 45th person to hold the position of President of the United...
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Do Brands Live in a Parallel Universe?
Image Credit – Flickr/Chris Bentley Hardly a week goes by that we do not see a brand succumb to foot-in-mouth disease. Size of company does not offer immunity from embarrassing one’s self. Two iconic...
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Why ESPN is on a Losing Streak
As a lifelong sports fan, the debut of ESPN as a 24-hour cable TV network in 1980 felt like a tiny slice of heaven on earth. I consumed sports any way I could up to that point—newspaper, radio, TV,...
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