Company makes dough on the Den while another eats it. Beg to Differ is going to focus on a beauty and the beast story of two hometown brands that showed up on Dragon’s Den last night, with very different results. One plucky little company made a pile of money from investors, while the other – [...]

My family and I walk by this tiny church on our way to the grocery store all the time. And while I’d always noticed the odd architecture of the place, it was only recently that I took a second look and was struck by the name. Big promise + tiny package = big let-down Now [...]

Ten days ago, I wrote  10 days to Interbrand top 100 brands & 10 reasons to care. Well Friday (three days earlier than adverstised), the results came in. And if you have time, you can read full results and commentary at two sites: 1) Interbrand and 2) Business Week. But I’ll warn you, it’s a lot of [...]

Registration has just opened for the August edition of our successful Beg to DIFFER Brand Strategy Boot Camp – brought to you by the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI) and Brandvelope Consulting. Register here at the OCRI Web site. This  boot camp is for all managers and executives with marketing, PR, or communication responsibility–whether in [...]

(NOMO part 4 of a series of 4) Don’t blame John Mc Cain. Or at least don’t blame him for his problems with “alphabet soup”. Most acronyms are actually “nomonyms” – our word for unhelpful abbreviations, to which we say “NOMO!” We also discussed initialisms like “IBM” – which are also usually a really bad [...]

(Part 3 of a 4-part NOMO series about abbreviated brand names) Right, so this week we’ve dealt with nomonyms, our term for any unhelpful abbreviated names, initialisms like IBM, and whether they can be a brand at all. And later we’ll deal with the 25 worst acronyms of all time. But first: acronyms. And here’s my [...]