Americans spent an estimated $17.6 billion this year on Valentine's Day dinners, flowers, chocolates, and other seductive gifts. But in this era when brands struggle to cozy up to their customers 365 days year, it seems like the perfect time to give brands some advice about creating love that lasts year round.

There’s a vast expanse between the transactional moment when a consumer likes, friends, or follows a site and the instant that same consumer becomes a brand evangelist, entering into a state of emotional commitment.

There’s a delectable irony in the fact that Facebook’s IPO was announced the same week as the Super Bowl. While they are both the subject of obsessive media attention, they actually represent two radically different versions of the future of branding and advertising.

The prosecution lost because they acted like product managers, PowerPoint logic in tow. The product manager says, "Buy our widget for all these rational reasons." But the defense understood that the case rested on the strength and believability of the Casey Anthony brand.

Suddenly, a change in a corporate logo becomes headline news. Read More »

Maybe the insightful Freaknomics boys can explain this to me, because I don't get it.

The Dodd-Frank bill (also known, felicitously, as the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009)

is eliminating a whole armada of bank and credit charges, ranging from over-draft fees to debit charges.

I found two recent articles about two radically different corporate practices to be indicative of a fundamental divide in how brands conduct themselves in the public sphere.  Or more accurately, are seen to conduct themselves.

The airline industry – which is deep in a reputational cesspool – is normally the victim of its own incompetence.

Now, it is also being punished by the incompetence of Homeland Security.

The too-little-too-late security measures being rushed into practice as a result of the failed attempt to bring down Flight 253 are resulting in long lines, angry passengers – and very likely – less travel.
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“The General Motors Corporation today displayed the prototype of a small car intended to someday match similar Japanese cars in cost and match or exceed them in quality.”

So wrote The New York Times on November 4th, 1983.  And yesterday, with the withdrawal of Penske as a potential purchaser of Saturn, the “someday” of that distant, gauzy announcement has turned out to be never.
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