Those pesky Swiss are at it again. In a tongue-in cheek June post, I ranted a bit about how I was mad at Switzerland for being so much better than my country Canada at building global brands. Well now my favourite brand strategy blog in the world brandchannel.com has taken up the cause with this [...]

A great post this morning on bladeronner.com (A Valuable Business Lesson from “The Princess Bride”) got me thinking: a) what a brilliant movie Princess Bride is; 2) how relevant the “Dread Pirate Roberts” idea is to branders; and 3) how many other lessons for us are hidden in this great film. Branding lesson 1:  Names matter.  Westley: No [...]

Next week, on Thursday August 27, we’ll be holding another Beg to DIFFER Brand Strategy Boot Camp in Ottawa with partners the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI)and Brandvelope Consulting. As part of the Camp, we’ll be dealing with the 4 Big Questions of Branding – the four fundamental things humans need to know about [...]

This morning’s Twitter outage, is only one of the many problems facing brand Twittter. Back in June, early in my Twitter career (yes, the Twitterverse is turning quickly my friends) I blogged about this – No Twitter Brand, what are YOU doing? But now that I’ve had time to think about this some more (thanks [...]

(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 [...]