Reading Time: 3 minutes Leveraging a story that everyone knows is powerful – but risky. Powerful, because it’s immediately recognisable. Risky, because unless you can provide a new spin, it’s a tale they already know. Perhaps too well.
Category: Archive
Why brands contradict themselves (& when that’s OK)
Reading Time: 2 minutes Can the same brand take two quite different positions? Yes. And no.
Why we still need people to manage brands (even though machines can do all the work)
Reading Time: 3 minutes In 2000, an article in Wireless called into question whether machines were quite the panacea we hoped they were. It was possible, said the author, that this dependence on machines was not going to a good place.
When should brands choose to challenge?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Is there ever a right time to get on the front foot and challenge your competitors by name?
Speaking in Wellington this week
Reading Time: < 1 minute As some of you know, I’m working with Pete Canalichio on a new book about how brands can rethink their growth strategies. Together we’ve been studying how and where many of the world’s most successful brands partner up to reach consumers, how they grow engagement with their brands by expanding their market sector reach, and […]
25 questions every start-up brand should answer
Reading Time: 2 minutes Some searching questions, by way of a guide, for the leaders of companies expecting to build lucrative brands in the years ahead.
Three myths that will hurt your brand
Reading Time: 4 minutes Everybody wants to believe they work for brands that are among the best. But just as marketers are in the business of telling others stories, they also tell themselves stories about the brands they work for. And some of those myths are just not good.
You can’t sell if you don’t start: A Long Virtual Coffee with Mark Hunter, “The Sales Hunter”
Reading Time: 7 minutes I met Mark Hunter on my very first trip to the United States. I was speaking at the National Speakers Association University on how to build a personal brand. Our conversations between sessions over several days would influence how I thought about sales and the business of keynote speaking.
Too many brands have forgotten how to sell
Reading Time: 3 minutes Have we become so pre-occupied with the niceties of brand that we’ve forgotten the reason they exist? Where’s the link to sales?
Three good reasons not to diversify your brand
Reading Time: 2 minutes There are certainly good times to consider diversifying your brand, but equally there are times when such a strategy should be avoided. Here are three situations when your brand shouldn’t go there.
7 ways brands just plain break their promises
Reading Time: 4 minutes Some time back, I looked at what it took to get a brand promise right. In this post, I want to examine the converse: when (consumers feel that) brands have not lived up to what they said they would deliver. What happens to generate customer disappointment?
How to protect your brand’s views (and stop others stealing them)
Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s happened to Doc Martins, Burberry and others over the years: groups turned their brand into a symbol of something the brand itself did not believe or endorse.