Tag: participation

Are corporate brands dead?

Reading Time: 5 minutes Recently Jan Rijkenberg raised some interesting points in an article (thanks Jeremy) in which he questioned the importance, indeed the relevance, of underpinning individual brands with the identities of their corporate owners. It does brands no favours, he suggests, to collectivise them as part of the bigger entity. In so doing, he maintains, they lose […]

Brand participation: Not everyone is in the market at once

Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s tempting to think of consumers in binary terms in relation to the brands you are responsible for: in, or out; buying, or not buying; loyal, or not loyal. But for many brands, the status of an individual can be more complex. At any given point in time, people can take on other roles in […]

Make your brand useful before you make it amazing

Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s tempting to believe that every brand must be vastly different and that every opportunity to push the boundaries should be taken if the brand is to win. But is there a case for normality that we’re missing here? Should, as Jay Bauer has suggested, brands stop trying to be amazing and just get on […]

Can brands change the world through participation?

Reading Time: 5 minutes There’s crises and dangers everywhere we look. From ISIS to mass shootings, pandemics to weather events, Greek debt to commodity slumps, the actions and repercussions stream onto media in a seemingly endless scroll. In that sense the world we live in has changed little from when I was a child.

Every brand culture needs a benchmark question

Reading Time: 5 minutes Every brand has a truth point – and that point is always the point of contact: the moment when the customer makes contact with the brand, to buy, to ask, to complain, to enquire … Everyone whose studied marketing for any time nods at this obvious point. But interestingly, whilst all brands acknowledge contact as […]

How to integrate purpose and business strategy

Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s easy to think of what your brand is there to do (purpose) and how your business intends to prosper (strategy) as separate things, different agendas. But more and more brands are looking at ways to bring these two ideas together: building and focusing their business around the wider impacts they intend to have.

Brand expansion – diversification vs adjacency

Reading Time: 3 minutes When Al Ries took aim at McDonald’s decision to broaden their menu, saying that introducing more items had not worked as a strategy and would not so do into the future, his piece raised questions for me on the differences between diversification and adjacency.

Brand purpose is easier said than done

Reading Time: 3 minutes I call it the goodness movement – the rush to appear responsible that has gripped global brands over recent years. Recognising that ethics, sustainability and CSR are now consideration factors in consumer purchasing (although we could debate the extent), brands are eager to show the world that they are doing what they can. But how […]

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 […]

Why branding experts need to step out of their silos

Reading Time: < 1 minute In our latest article at Entrepreneur, Pete Canalichio and I examine why now, more than ever, the marketing consulting industry should be promoting an interactive brand ecosystem that more closely aligns the disciplines of brand insights, brand strategy, brand protection, brand licensing and brand valuation. The full article is available here. Hope you enjoy it. […]