This happens to me a few times every week: I’m standing at a store or restaurant, getting customer service by phone, or buying something online, and suddenly I’m faced with a dazzling, badly organized array of choices like this menu board at an Ottawa area Dairy Queen Brazier (no comment on that name for today). [...]

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 [...]

As an Ottawa naming and brand strategy consultant, I once thought the technology industry was the world’s biggest offender in the realm of unhelpful abbreviations. But then I started working with the Canadian federal government…. alphabet soup everywhere. My answer in one word: NOMO! The problem with acronyms / abbreviations / initialisms / alphabet soup [...]

Coffee giant tries to get mojo vibrating again Once, Starbucks was just a local coffee shop in Seattle. Then it became a mega-brand, standard-bearer for the premium coffee category worldwide. But lately, the “star” has been fading, and even the “bucks” are drying up. So now the chain will be re-launching a few of its [...]

First, though, let us take a moment to grieve for the famed Crunchberry, recently determined to be not real fruit.  Gasp! A California woman recently filed a complaint with the U.S. District Court that she had been purchasing ”Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries” for the past four years in the belief that she was eating real, live [...]

So with all the kerfuffle around the GM bankruptcy (and the gajillions of dollars we’ll all be shelling out to save its butt from the fire), the one thing that gets forgotten as always is the brand strategy angle: 60-90 days from now, GM will be re-emerging from bankruptcy under a new coporate banner. Now, [...]