We’ve compiled a list of the 25 worst acronyms, and yesterday we showed you that tag lines need to help people. We’ve also covered more municipal tag lines and other local examples. But now, here’s a list of 25 useless tag lines from brands that should know better. 25 useless taglines Note: most of these [...]

When I was in Korea a few years back, I was struck that even in cities where very few people spoke English, “upscale” stores always had an English tagline under an English name. But the words didn’t seem to matter: most were incomprehensible, vague, or with uninteded double entendres (as below). Weirdly, these businesses seemed to have taglines simply for the sake of filling [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]