branding
The corporate name game
Remember the Boston Garden? Candlestick Park? The Meadowlands? Names like that are a thing of the past; now it’s Fleet Center and USAirways Arena and 3Com Park and here in Houston, Minute Maid Park (formerly Enron Field!) and the Toyota Center (with a Tundra parking garage - I was thinking there should be a Prius [...]
Skanking up a staid old image
In the last few weeks, I’ve done two Burberry-related things.
One, I watched that most excellent of actresses, Helen Mirren, in a most excellent of movies, The Queen, and got to see a depiction of royals traipsing about their country "place" in Balmoral, Scotland, in gear that looked like it came straight out of Burberry: never [...]
Cherry M&Ms? Green is the color of love? Has M&M Mars lost its mind?
If I were going to be marooned on a desert island, or stuck on top of Mt. Washington for the winter, and I could only take one candy with me, it would probably be M&Ms - melts in your mouth, not in your hand - hands down.
So I’ve watched their product tweaks and brand [...]
B2B Online’s Best of 2007
Well, now that we’re one-quarter of the way through 2008, I’ve finally gotten around to blogging about B2B Online’s Best Marketers, Brands, and Creative for 2007.
While the bias is definitely (and not surprisingly) toward the mega-enterprise that everybody’s heard of (who are, of course, working with budgets that most of us never hear of), while [...]
Jordan’s Furniture Does it Again
While I seldom succumb to it, I’m a big admirer of sports-related marketing, which does an amazing job of branding, merchandising, and tie-ins - at least in this neck of the woods. (Most days I get a cup of tea at Dunkin Donuts, where I ALWAYS resist buying the official red and blue sprinkled donut [...]
The wrong name can make you… crazy?
Weston Hospital, a mental hospital in Weston, West Virginia, closed in 1994. Since then the enormous Gothic revival structure has sat vacant. Now, it’s re-opened as an historic site, and with its old name: the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum.
From an AP story about it:
To some, the title acknowledges history by readopting one of the many names [...]
Peeps: The Harley Davidson of the Candy World
Well, it’s almost-sorta-kinda Spring, and a marketing person’s fancy turns, quite naturally, to Peeps, the delightful marshmallow chick whose arrival heralds the end of snow season. (Or should.)
I was thinking about Peeps because it’s one of those product brands that has taken on a life of its own, making the Peep a cultural icon. People [...]
Neat-o-rama on Logos
There’s a wonderful post over on Neat-O-Rama on the evolution of high tech logos.
Pretty much across the board, the watchword is simplify, as you can see from how Adobe’s logo has changed over the years.
Ditto for Microsoft:
And Apple:
Even though my husband bought one of the Apple’s pretty early on, I have no recall of that [...]
Sis-boom-bah! Rah-rah-rah! Go University of Phoenix
Those of you (mis)fortunate enough to live in a part of the country that is not - as Boston currently is - in SUPER BOWL, ALL THE TIME, EVERYTIME mode. Or who don’t give a rap about the where-what-how of this blessed event, may not know that the game - excuse me - THE GAME [...]
Starbucks-for-a-Buck. What’s that all about?
For openers, I have to admit that I rarely drink anyone’s coffee, let alone Starbucks’ coffee, which I really don’t like the taste of. (Some people I know claim that one of the reasons that Starbucks junks up its coffees with the latte-sugar-whatever stuff is to disguise that taste.)
As for coffee, sometimes I have a [...]
