Beyond The One-Time Click: 6 Social Media Rules For Creating Brand Evangelists 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.
Updated Tue Feb 7, 2012
The Painful Paradox Of Facebook Advertising Vs. Super Bowl Advertising 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.
Updated Mon Feb 6, 2012
How Our Perception Of 9/11 Is Evolving With Time Ten years later, what does Sept. 11 mean to us collectively, and how does it compare to other transformative national shocks to our national sense of self?
Updated Mon Sep 12, 2011
The Casey Anthony Brand Wins 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.
Updated Wed Jul 6, 2011
Innovation: Not as Simple as Obama Made It Sound Listening to President Obama last night, I wondered if his speechwriters had been reading Stephen Johnson's new book "Where Good Ideas Come From." When the president talked about the unexpected nature of innovation, he was channeling Johnson.
Updated Wed Jan 26, 2011
Manufactured Intimacy and The Logo Wisdom of Crowds Suddenly, a change in a corporate logo becomes
headline news.
Updated Fri Jan 14, 2011
Manufactured Intimacy and The Logo Wisdom of Crowds Suddenly, a change in a corporate logo becomes
headline news. Last week, Starbucks, Starbucks decision to drop the words "coffee" from its
brand identity - announced with great caffeinated fanfare by Howard Schultz
- generated a serious foam of journalistic attention.
Updated Fri Jan 14, 2011
Manufactured Intimacy and The Logo Wisdom of Crowds Suddenly, a change in a corporate logo becomes
headline news. Last week, Starbucks, Starbucks decision to drop the words "coffee" from its
brand identity - announced with great caffeinated fanfare by Howard Schultz
- generated a serious foam of journalistic attention.
Posted Thu Jan 13, 2011
Why Are There No Price Wars in Consumer Financial Services? 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.
Tue Nov 9, 2010
Black Box vs. White Box Companies - What Are the Real Differences? 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.
Thu Feb 18, 2010
The Crotch of An Opportunity; How the Terrorist Attempt Can Be a Boon to A Smart Airline 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.
Posted Tue Dec 29, 2009
The “New” G.M. Sounds Dangerously Like the Old, Dead Saturn “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.
Posted Fri Oct 2, 2009
The New GM, Clueless as the Old GM Hey you - a 60% owner of General Motors. Are you worried about the innovative dynamism
of the post-bankruptcy, government-owned GM?
Are you anxious about whether they are truly committed to excellence? Have
no fear, kick-back and have a Margarita.
Because this week, the company proudly announced
via a press release that they are launching an online suggestion box called
Posted Wed Jul 22, 2009
Opinion Exhaustion: Skittles, President Obama, and the Assault of Everyone
Something new is happening on Skittles.com. The company isn't putting its real estate to work as a marketing platform--singing the vast and socially beneficial aspects of Skittles.
Instead, they have turned their homepage over to their Twitter feed. On some days, Skittles turns their homepage over to their Wikipedia entry, and to their Facebook page.
That means that they're willing to live with
anything that anybody might have to say about Skittles--laudatory, or
lambasting them as evil purveyors of chemical sugar drops.
Posted Thu Jun 25, 2009
Mediocrity: The Hidden Economic Price of Fear
I’ve been haunted by a story I read in the New York Times business section a week or so ago. Dr.
Posted Mon Dec 15, 2008
Ten Steps to Turn Around Wal-Mart, Part 1
Wal-Mart has succeeded as a highly-evolved culture of the tangible by creating a dazzlingly efficient logistics operation, shaving cent-splinters off an item, and driving down overhead. This is the whole relentless apparatus that brings us "everyday low prices" and it is made up entirely of business practices you can touch, feel, and measure. And no one is better at it than they are.
Posted Tue Jul 8, 2008
Ten Steps to Turn Around Wal-Mart, Part 2
[Editor's note: This column was published in two parts. Click here for Adam Hanft's first five suggestions for Wal-Mart.]
Posted Tue Jul 8, 2008
The Death of Corporate Permanence
Is the pandemic of bankruptcies actually changing our national perspective on corporate mortality in some fundamental way? It's an important question to ask, given the frequency of once-iconic brands turning into corporate panhandlers, at the mercy of creditors and the courts.
Posted Tue Jul 8, 2008
