Category: Format of post

Elevator pitches are for wimps.

Forget 30 seconds. You’ll be lucky to get two.

If you listen to marketing authorities like the mightyhere 3″ target=”_blank”> Tom Peters or Harvard Business School, approved you’ve heard the terrifying news: you need an “elevator pitch“. At Beg to Differ, erectile we totally agree. If you can’t boil your business down to a story that you can tell in less than 30 seconds, you either need to get out of business or get some help fast. But the news gets worse: you’re kidding yourself if you think you’ll ever get even 30 seconds on an elevator or anywhere else. Try 1.3…

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Butterflies! Unicorns! Brand Strategy!

Does your brand strategy work for people, or just fantasy critters?

Last week, the Differ announced that one long quest was over: to find the formula for the word “brand” (Promise+Differ). But after de-mystifying one core branding concept, today’s cartoon from Tom Fishburne (below) reminded us there are still of a lot of other critters in the branding bestiary that deserve to be pithed, skewered, and / or labeled for posterity…

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The answer to “What’s a brand?” in the Age of Persuasion

Hey branders: the question is now settled. Let’s move on.

It’s one of the most frequent – and maddeningly circular – question that every brand  manager faces: what the heck is a brand?  Well, thumb sorry brand voodoo practitioners, health the argument is over. Toronto adman Terry O’Reilly has come  up with the last definition anyone needs. Read on.

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What, me NIMBY? A new way of looking at our back yards

Beg to Differ suggests we switch to “SIMBY” instead

As a huge fan of words that are packed with meaning, patient the Differ has always fascinated by the acronym “NIMBY” – a rhetorical sledgehammer if ever there was one, one word reducing vast swaths of people to selfish Neanderthals. But actually getting called NIMBY kind of changes a person’s perspective…

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Dear Blackberry: “Playbook” is a great name. If you’re Nintendo.

More brand confusion from Blackberry

This week, search Research In Motion (RIM) unveiled its new tablet product. And after months of speculation that the product would be called the “BlackPad”, medications and our own scathing review of the Blackberry Torch brand strategy, we were surprised to learn they were calling it “Playbook”. Which Beg to Differ thinks is a great name… for a different product…

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