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I’m a big fan of YouTube. I’ve always been impressed by the deluge of quality content put out by amateur video producers. As fun as it is, though, I never really thought about the business applications of YouTube until recently. We all loved show-and-tell in Kindergarten. We got to see what cool new toys everyone
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The negative aspects of your brand are just as important as the positive ones. Marketing missteps and managerial mistakes in the past should be embraced as learning opportunities, not errors. No company can ever be perfect, and forcing a squeaky-clean image of perfection on your brand can actually kill it – no one is perfect
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Finally, a metric for measuring the comparative equity in a brand name across markets, industries, and products. For years, people have talked about brand value and brand equity in difficult to define terms. Brand value was one of three things: 1) the current financial worth of a brand entity, 2) the future financial worth of
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I never really liked the way McCarthy’s four Ps of marketing (product, price, place, and promotion) were presented. It was all too theoretical and dry. Beyond that, no one seemed to care about the customer – as a customer myself, this always upset me. This morning, I got an email about a new marketing theory
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A colleague of mine forwaded me a very thoughtful article about Social Applications from the MIT Sloan Management Review. I have been trying to explain to people for a very long time the power of social networking sites, blogs, and user-contributed media. Apparently, people are starting to catch on. Here’s a great example of the
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A friend of mine recently brought a partnership between Mercy Corps and Wal-Mart to my attention. She was concerned about the partnership because the missions of both organizations seem fundamentally misaligned. Here are my comments on this specific partnership: Partnerships only works when the brands involved are marching towards the same goal. While Mercy Corps’
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An individual’s brand can be just as important as a corporate one. Most corporations start with an idea of what they want their brand to be and build off of that. The issue is that goals and reality rarely coincide in the market. We end up instead with out-of-touch executives and ineffective corporate hierarchies. My
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The fact of the matter is that there is no consistent standard with which to measure brand equity. By brand equity, I mean the power of a brand, not it’s market value. If my terms have been confusing to anyone, I apologize. Brand equity, as Rodger’s article put it so well, is like a mysterious
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The question is whether your brand is a clearly structured asset to the company, or a confusing jumble of antiquated internal corporate practices. In many cases, a company’s brand develops over time by pure accident and can, over time, become more of a liability than an asset. Compare this with a clearly defined and managed