A Rant about Canadian Brands for Canada Day 2009 So you ask: “Mad at Switzerland? What could anyone possibly have against the Swiss” – those lovely Alp-ine purveyors of Rolex watches, Nestle chocolate, and fastidiously discreet banking services? Sorry Switzerland. It’s not about you. It’s about you beating the pants off Canada in the global branding [...]

It’s very seldom I come across a new tool on the Web that jumps straight to the top of my bookmark lists, but it happened this morning. I got a tip from Charles Hodgson’s latest post on podicitonary.com on a funky new site called Wordnik.com that had my fast-twitch bookmarking reflexes firing almost instantly. How does [...]

Beg to Differ notices that Pizza Hut – the iconic American sit-down-fast-food restaurant and purveyors of pizza pies around the world – have been tinkering with their brand again. And the result? Sorry guys. This one’s been in the oven way too long. That smell could be your brand equity burning. (image above from the [...]

It’s hard to believe that a niche product category like Shawarma would become the subject of a heated competition for the affection, eyeballs, and garlic-craving tastebuds of a city. But in my home town of Ottawa, there must be gold in them-there-pitas. A few years back, authour Daniel Pink came to Ottawa lead a seminar. [...]

Okay, confession time. As an emerging Twitter devotee, (@denvan) I’ve been “drinking the Kool-Aid” of the Twitter brand for too long to really be objective about their brand strategy. I’m a tribe member now, and I’ve learned the buzzwords, tools, and idiosyncrasies of this social media monster. But as a brand strategy geek, I also [...]

Maybe I’m a bit slow, but I just came across the term “crowdsourcing” – the process of solving business problems using social media (not to be confused with another term I recently picked up: “FLASHMOB” – the process of creating absurd but strangely compelling YouTube videos with your friends). The image above is from my experiment [...]