One sign of a sucky economy: NASA has put the space shuttle on sale.
The 1970’s era icon used to be $42 million. Now if you want to ride the rocket (or rather just sit in it in your backyard) the price has been reduced to $28.8 million.
This fall, the old orbital workhorses will go on [...]
Have you seen the commercials for Chantix? It is a smoking cessation prescription medication. All of these pharmaceutical commercials have a long recitation of side effects and warnings. We have heard them for years: constipation, nausea, gas, etc. Everything on the shelf has those side effects. But anxiety, panic, aggression, anger, mania, suicidal thoughts, hostility, [...]
I have a friend who makes furniture. He makes each piece by hand in a barn behind his house. He is not a sophisticated businessman. He has no college degree, much less an MBA. His business has not suffered in the recent downturn. I talked with him about credibility.
All credibility is sticky. If you have it and live by it, people remember it. They associate you with it. Credibility is the Super Glue of branding. Without credibility, it doesn’t matter what your message is.
All of this is a huge duh. So why aren’t more companies concerned about credibility?
A recent national Yankolovich study concludes that the future will be less global and more local. It will hinge more on personal responsibility in how we treat each other and the planet (among other things). It will be built around consequences, meaning that we will ultimately think more about the consequences of our actions and [...]
I have recently been thinking about what will happen when we take the media out of social media and build more network into social networking. I am not the only one. David Armano at the Dachis Group recently gave a presentation to the Web 2.0 Expo in New York:
http://www.slideshare.net/dachisgroup/social-business-design-web-20-nyc-2548310
Below, I have framed some of my [...]
Recently, we had the opportunity to shoot in Wilmington, North Carolina. Michael Jordan is from Wilmington. They shoot movies and TV shows there. It is a friendly town, filled with college kids from UNC Wilmington and Cape Fear Community College. The Cape Fear River winds through downtown and between swamps and under bridges like it [...]
The Web is a churning ocean of endless information. That is hardly news. Insightful companies have posted some pretty telling numbers about what people think and what we’re doing about it. Edelman’s Trust Barometer alone is enough to make you wonder if your customers will be your customers tomorrow.
Few companies see their product as a character in a story. All of their customers see it that way, but they don’t. They see it terms of operations and org charts and marketing plans and manufacturing and distribution and they forget that all of this orchestration only works when the product or service is a [...]
Twitter is not the salvation of your branding. There. I said it. Even though I spent a lot of time on Twitter in the last 3 months, writing a novel and a short story Twitter will not save your business from the lack of a story. But it can help you tell your story.
I’ve caught a bit of grief from a few people for not writing blogs about business or branding. After all, I am in business and that business is branding. So naturally, I should be waxing on about the business of branding, right? 16.347 million others are, why not me? Why am I telling stories about [...]
I have one. You have one. Animals have them. While guys getting hit in the groin may still be popular, the biggest thing in advertising these days is your butt (not literally, of course). It started with the “does this dress make my butt look big?” commercial a few years ago. No one complained, so [...]
An old friend of mine, Peter Kaufman, recently invited me to a function where it was my job to be a panelist, talking to a fairly large group (who paid to get in – more for the drinks than the entertainment) about Super Bowl commercials. I was supposed to be a critic, comic, commentator – [...]
Everyone has a story. Books and movies and songs have stories. Every company and brand has a story. Schools and universities have stories. Governments have stories. My dog has a story. Stories are more important than you might think. In tough times like these, if your story is just about low price, your story will [...]
In Rob Walker’s book “Buying In,” along with espousing his thoughts on ‘murketing’ (look it up) he talks about how trust in authority is suffering even more than usual. A cursory Google dig will build a nice little stack of those we don’t trust anymore. Recently, the untrustworthy pile was as tall as a Malaysian [...]