Establishing competitive advantage is one of the basic tenets of business strategy. Companies must establish a way of standing out from competitive offerings and being perceived as different and better from those offerings. One business aspect that I believe is underutilized as a lever for competitive advantage is business size and scale. (more…)
Last month I asked you to vote to get my manifesto, “Reset: Re-Ignite Your Business with the Power of Your Brand,” published on ChangeThis. I really appreciate all of your votes which ended getting my paper to one of the top spots on the list — but apparently others garnered more and so they took a pass. So…I’m publishing it here instead. And, I’m also posting some bonus content. (more…)
Today I’d like to do a little experiment. I have an idea for a new brand tool but my thoughts aren’t fully fleshed out. So I thought I’d use this blogpost as a way of reaching out to like-minded folks who might be interested in refining and fleshing out the idea. The following post outlines my idea as well as questions and points for feedback. I hope you will be eager to participate and actually read this as invitation to collaborate on something that could be quite exciting.
Steve McKee has started a great project, Find Your Nerve, “a grassroots effort to help get the economy moving again.” Each business day of the fourth quarter features a post from someone about jumpstarting the recovery. Today was my day: please check out “A Leap of Faith.”
Also I thought you might want to see a video taken during my leap of faith:
click on the image to view movie
Last week’s Ad Age featured an article called “Why It’s Time to Do Away With the Brand Manager.” The piece, and the Forrester research report which inspired it, argues for “changing the name ‘brand manager‘ to ‘brand advocate,’ and fundamentally changing marketer organizations in response to the onset of the digital age.” It reminded me of an article I wrote several years ago.
The following is a guest post from Dan Phillips, the co-founder of Skybend, a design and brand company focused on helping businesses navigate the gauntlet of electronic media. A classically trained artist turned graphics designer turned entrepreneur, Dan brings his unique perspective to branding efforts for businesses around the country. Contact Dan through his website at http://skybend.com or on Twitter via @ruqus.
Today I heard a story about the immediate impact of Twitter, or Twitimpact (that’s right you read it here first, Twitimpact). 
The story goes like this: (more…)
This is a continuation of the debrief from the Brand Managecamp conference. In my last post, I relayed insights about Innovation from the “elite conference on branding” that I attended in Las Vegas last week. Today I’m covering the 2 remaining themes that arose – both fall under the category of “stuff that matters”: Substance (meaning, mission, authenticity, integrity) and Results (ROI, accountability, behavior, reality).
Earlier this week I attended one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to – Brand Managecamp.
Billed as the “elite conference on branding,” and featuring some heavy hitting speakers like guru Guy Kawasaki and marketing professor/legend Phil Kotler, I had quite high expectations going into it – and they definitely were met. Len Herstein and his team did a fantastic job of assembling the perfect mix of speakers and topics to educate, inspire, and in some cases, provoke the assembly of high caliber attendees.
Now that everyone has had a chance to digest BusinessWeek/Interbrand’s Best Global Brands report, I thought I’d offer some suggestions for how to use the results. 
There’s a risk that if someone doesn’t know what brand valuation really means or what it’s useful for, the conclusions and implications drawn from the report could be off.