2007
-
Negative Space
Dec 10
Charmin built clean, upscale public bathrooms in Times Square and won more mindshare than any billboard. Notes on a Marketing News article about advertising in communication’s negative space, and why guerrilla marketing is the same idea.
-
Design
Dec 6
A logo is the most recognizable part of your brand, and building one takes more than a designer and an afternoon. Four steps: decide its message, know where it’ll be used, design it carefully, then test it.
-
Animation
Dec 5
An animated brand stands on its own; an inert one needs its parent company propping it up. Mountain Dew never mentions PepsiCo. Try finding a ThinkPad without “IBM” or “Lenovo” stamped all over it.
-
Avatars
Dec 4
A brand is a complex machine with three parts: the product, its reputation and its avatar. Starbucks shows all three, and how it took more than 30 years to make them look simple.
-
Branding
Dec 3
Asking for a Coke is easier than describing a cola to the waiter. That’s why branding matters: a brand eliminates confusion, promises quality, and turns a commodity into something customers recognize and trust.
-
Mirror, Mirror …
Dec 1
Every so often a brand needs an honest look in the mirror. If the image you project doesn’t match the business your customers actually see, change one of them (new company or old) before you invest more in a faulty messenger.
-
Who are you?
Nov 30
The next step in building a brand is self-evaluation. A quick exercise: in ten words, describe who your company is — not what it does. That description is your first brand.
-
Segmentation
Nov 28
Demographics tell you who buys and geography tells you where. Psychographics tell you why — and that’s how a ski jacket for people who never ski becomes a product nobody else is selling.
-
The Perfect Customer
Nov 27
The perfect customer is an unpaid advertising force: the person who sends friends, family and strangers your way for nothing, like the man who has eaten a Big Mac almost every day since 1972. Stop flooding channels and target that customer instead.
-
How well is your Internet working?
Oct 1
If clients can find you, the Internet is working in your favor — or so most people assume. Search my name and you get loan officers, lawyers and a death row inmate. Here are the free tools I use to fix that.
-
Vocabulary
Aug 16
People keep asking what the tag line on my new business card, “Who is your perfect customer?”, actually means. A rock climber, a kayaker and an outdoors ad that misses them both explain why it matters.