Today wraps up my 5 favorites on friday series on great brand resources with a post on favorite podcasts.  While the challenge with past entries in the series (covering favorite brand books, blogs, and articles) was narrowing down the huge number of choices, this week I struggle to name 5 great podcasts on brands/branding. 

Don’t get me wrong — I know there are lots of great podcasts out there which say they’re about brands/branding, but the vast majority of them are either about 1.,  social media/new PR/new marketing, or 2., personal branding.  Both of these are hot topics these days — and indeed they are important and interesting.  But I am mostly focused on brand development as it relates to business strategy and operations and so I want to recommend brand resources that provide insights, news, and information in this area.

With that in mind, I’ve decided the following podcasts fulfill this criteria enough to be considered my 5 favorite brand podcasts:

1.  Brand Fast Trackers — Each week Brian F. Martin, CEO and Founder of Brand Connections, a media company,  conducts interesting interviews with interesting businesspeople.  Recent guests have included Clayton Christopher, Founder of Sweet Leaf Tea Co. and Michael Fisher, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Coldwell Banker.  The combination of Brian’s probing questioning and the stories/angles that the interviewees bring makes for valuable insights and practical takeaways about brand-building.

2.  The Brand Show — This podcast also features interviews, such as one with Vani Kumar, Founder and CEO of The Suit Closet (a women’s apparel store which will soon be expanding beyond its Los Angeles location — can’t wait!) and another with Paula Berg, Southwest Airlines’ emerging media evangelist.  While The Brand Show focuses a lot on social media, generally there’s a mix of types of folks on the show and so listeners get a wide range of perspectives.  The Brand Show is produced by Two West, Inc. “a transformation design firm” and the hosts seem to have a lot of fun bringing brand-related ideas to their readers.

3.  The Starbucks Experience — Joseph A. Michelli, this podcast’s owner, is the author of the book by the same name.  But the name is a bit misleading — it’s not all about Starbucks.  Rather, Joseph serves up brand strategy insights like “Differently Different” an episode about how to identify and articulate your brand’s differentiation, and “Define and Refine” which presents a framework for thinking about the customer experience you provide.  The episodes  are short (3-5 minutes) which make them ideal for attention-span-challenged folks like me, but provocative thinking about brands is packed into each.

4.  Marketing Over Coffee — This podcast by John Wall and Christopher Penn covers a wide range of topics.  In a recent episode, they went from discussing Rand Fishkin’s SEOmoz article on the perfectly optimized web page to responding to a question about networking to find a job to talking about the value of writing an e-book and publishing it on Amazon.  Sometimes the focus is more on social media and marketing than on brand development, but business insights are always woven in (probably at least in part because Christopher runs a business himself, which gives him a unique perspective.)

5.  MorningNewsBeat Radio — Kevin Coupe of Coupe Communications, a corporate video company, offers up his unique perspective on brand-related news items in this weekly podcast.  The most recent episode provides a great example:  Kevin talks about what happened when a cyclist who was denied service while trying to use the drive-thru at a Burgerville made a social media stink about the experience — and he outlines the key lessons learned from Burgerville’s response.  The episodes are timely, frequently humorous, and deserving of the podcast’s tagline “Retail News in Context, Analysis with Attitude.”

Despite these recommendations, I’m sensing a real need for a podcast which serves up the kinds of insights and information found in my other favorite brand resources — that is, building strong brands, the brand:business connection, etc.   So I’m thinking about launching my own podcast soon.  After all, someone recently defined branding as “finding a hole in the market and filling it well,” so I hope to do just that.  Stay tuned.

In the meantime, thanks for your readership throughout this series.  Perhaps I’ve introduced to you some new brand resources?  I  look forward to getting your recommendations about other ones I should check out.

Continuing in the series on my favorite brand resources (see fave brand books and blogs)…Today it’s 5 of my favorite brand articles.

I have a huge filing cabinet which is stuffed full with copies of articles, presentations, research papers, and speeches – but I find myself continuing to return to a few pieces time and again.  These pieces, dog-eared and covered with notes and highlights, contain truths and insights which have informed my thinking about brands and marketing – and even though some of them are old (one was written nearly 50 years ago!), I continue to reference them because the content is so powerful and relevant to today’s business challenges.

Here are 5 of those great brand articles:

note:  In order to respect the authors’ intellectual property (and copyright laws!), I’m including links to official sites from which you can access the pieces – in a few cases, subscriptions or fee payments are required  (the content is worth it!)

1.  Marketing Myopia – by Theodore Levitt, published by Harvard Business Review in 1960, republished in 2004.  Levitt’s seminal paper introduces the famous question, “What business are you really in?”  It challenges readers with the assertion that businesses will do better in the end if they concentrate on meeting customers’ needs rather than on selling products.  The paper is about more than marketing; it’s about strategy and how to ensure your business continues to grow.  That’s what I love about it.

2.  What Great Brands Do – by Alan M. Webber, published by Fast Company, August, 1997 – Way back when Starbucks was still an up and coming brand, Scott Bedbury was the company’s chief marketer.  Prior to that post, Bedbury directed Nike‘s worldwide advertising efforts and broke the “Just Do It” branding campaign.  So this guy is a great brand-builder and when Fast Company asked him to identify his 8 brand-building principles, I listened up.  This piece explains some of the best brand tenets I’ve heard, including “A great brand knows itself.”

3.  Brand Leverage – by David C. Court, Mark G. Leiter, and Mark A. Loch, published by McKinsey Quarterly in May, 1999 — Reporting on research into the connection between brand strength and corporate performance, this article unlocks the mystery behind brand leverage – that is, the power of a brand to move into other business domains.  It also prescribes success strategies for brands that are focused, and those that are more diversified.  I found the piece clarifying when I first read it and I believe the principles still apply today.

4.  Brands Matter: An Empirical Investigation of Brand-Building Activities and the Creation of Shareholder Value – by Thomas Madden, Frank Fehle, and Susan Fournier, published by Harvard Business School, 2002 – Like many other papers on brand valuation, this one reports on research which proves that brands deliver statistically- and economically-significant performance advantages such as stock returns and returns on equity.  What makes this paper so remarkable to me, though, is that the research found that firms which had developed strong brands created shareholder value with less exposure to risk – thus supporting the role of the brand in reducing the volatility and vulnerability of cash flows.  It’s convincing data to share with CFOs and other brand skeptics.

5.  Varying Perspectives on Brand Equity – by Jonathan Knowles, published by American Management Association’s Marketing Management, July/August, 2008 – This article puts forward simple, but not simplistic, arguments that marketers can use to show how brand equity is a critical measure for demonstrating marketing’s role in adding to business value.  I particularly appreciate the author’s instruction on how to use brand valuation data to frame the business case for marketing investment.

As with previous weeks, I had a hard time narrowing down all the great options to these 5 – but for now, these are my favorites.  Please check back next Friday as I conclude the 5 favorites on Friday series with 5 of my favorite brand podcasts.

P.S.  Please vote for best blogpost to help me celebrate the 1 year anniversary of my blog – and be entered to win a $50 Nike gift card – it’s my attempt to thank you in some small way for your loyal readership!

Last week I started a series about my favorite brand resources.  Last Friday’s post reviewed 5 of my favorite brand books; today it’s brand blogs.

This is probably by far the hardest entry of the series, because there are so many great brand blogs — narrowing it down to 5 is a difficult task.  I decided to use some specific criteria to aid in my selection:

• the blog has to be primarily about brands/branding — there are some great blogs on related topics (marketing, business strategy, communications, social media, marketing to women, sustainability, etc.), but this list is focused on brand resources.
• it has to be a blog, not an aggregator of blogs or other content — I regularly consult several aggregators (like Alltop and FutureLab’s Marketing & Strategy Innovation), but I’m only including the actual source content in this list.
• the blog writer/owner is an individual (vs. a group/firm/agency) — I struggled with whether or not to apply this criterium, but since I know from personal experience what it takes to maintain a blog by oneself and thus I have a greater appreciation for those that are, I decided to include it.   Plus I needed to narrow down the plethora of choices and so this is one way to do it (I am considering doing a favorite brand blogs part 2 which would only include blogs by groups/firms/agencies — let me know if you’d be interested in this.)

Now onto the list:

1.  Tom Fishburne’s  blog — Tom, a “management cartoonist” and creator of Brand Camp cartoons, is also a Managing Director at method (the designed — in every sense of the word — home products company).  This blog captures the creativity and pragmatism of these different, yet complementary roles.

Most of Tom’s blogposts start with a cartoon that pokes fun at the stupid things we brand marketers say and do, and then provides insights and ideas on the same topic.  For example, a recent post featured a cartoon of the “view from marketing” and challenged marketers to combat the myopic, egotistical, and insular thinking which we all fall into at times.  I love the elegant way Tom uses humor to make his points.

2.  Brand Autopsy — by John Moore — Although this entire blog is really good, I consider it one of my favorites because of its “Would You Miss” series.  In the series, John poses the question:  Would You Miss X?, with X being a brand.  Readers are invited to post responses to the question, with prompts from John like, “Does X provide such a unique product and customer experience that we would be saddened if it didn’t exist?” and “Does X forge such unfailing emotional connections with its customers that they would fail to find another [insert category] that could forge just as strong an emotional bond?”

Brands in the series include Costco, Ace Hardware, and Dairy Queen.  I love the challenge of thinking through the role and value of the brand in question — and I always find the readers’ responses amusing.

3.  Brand Mix — by Martin J. Bishop — Martin describes his blog as “branding stories, ideas, thoughts and observations” and I enjoy this milieu of insights and information.  One feature of the blog which I really like is “SOTB” (Six of the Best.)  Every week, Martin writes a post which recaps 6 noteworthy news items, posts, articles, and events.

Each SOTB has a theme, like the recent “Authenticity” edition which featured brief notes and links to items such as the letter from Tony Hsieh, Zappos‘ CEO, to his employees announcing the Amazon deal, a NYT article about the high-tech swimsuits that seemed to fuel recent victories, and an NPR piece on Jay-Z‘s new campaign on authenticity.  Although usually by the time a SOTB is published I’ve seen at least a few of the items included in it, the post usually prompts me to think more critically about them relative to the SOTB theme.

4.  Brand Tags — by Noah Brier — While not technically a blog, this project is fascinating.  The way it works:  visitors to the site are shown the logo of a company and are asked them to type in the first word or phrase that popped into their head upon seeing the logo.  Then the results are displayed in a word cloud (most common responses in giant type size and less frequent ones in proportionately diminishing point sizes.)

At the time of this writing, over 1,000 brands are in the project — everything from Amazon to Aston Martin, M&Ms to Medieval Times, and Pixar to Priceline.  The results are far from scientific, but I bet they’re pretty close to what you’d learn in formal brand perception research — and they’re revealing in content and format.

5.  If That Were My Brand — by Martin Lindstrom — This is a new blog which asks its readers, “Have you ever looked at a brand in the news and thought ‘if I were brand manager I’d do things very differently’? Well, now’s your chance. Every week we’ll be posting a real-life branding challenge and inviting you to give us your thoughts on what you’d do if that were your brand…”

I love this idea because the posts and responses are so provocative.  For example, one blogpost offered up Whole Foods after CEO John Mackey declared, “we sell a bunch of junk” — it spurred a slew of constructive criticism and ideas to reinvigorate and refocus the brand.  I’m going to be watching this blog to see whether or not it stays on point and how it evolves, but for now, I’m a fan.

Thank you to the writers/owners of these blogs.  You are a source of insight and inspiration to me!

PLEASE don’t be offended if your blog is not listed here — as I said earlier, it was really hard for me to limit the list to 5.  If I didn’t list your blog but I regularly comment on it or tweet about it or have included you in the blogroll on my blog, then you know I hold you and your blog in high esteem.  It’s truly a privilege to have access to so much great thinking and to learn from so many perspectives.

Thanks for reading!  Please let me know some of your favorite brand blogs — and then check back next Friday for the next post in the series – favorite brand articles.

related posts:

• brand disappointments — featuring guest posts by some of the above-named bloggers
• brand camp, give me s’more — about Tom Fishburne’s latest book
• favorite brand books

In light of it being summer and time for some fun, I’m devoting each Friday in August to a post about my favorite brand resources.  Over the next few weeks, I’ll include recommendations for favorite articles, blogs, and podcasts on my favorite topic, brand — today, it’s 5 of my favorite brand books.

By limiting the list to 5, I have to exclude some really great books — but from those I do include on the list, you’ll get a flavor of some of the resources that have shaped my thinking and practice of brand building. And perhaps, you’ll want to check them out yourself.

#1.  Building the Brand-Driven Business: Operationalize Your Brand to Drive Profitable Growth
by Scott Davis and Michael Dunn –  the inspiration and education that led to my focus on “brand as business.”  Written by my friends and colleagues at Prophet, the brand consulting firm, this outlines the tenets of how to operationalize your brand.

#2.  The Brand Gap: Expanded Edition
– by Marty Neumeier — a provocatively simple primer on brands and how to bridge the gap between brand strategy and execution.  It’s written in “the visual language of the boardroom,” so the content is particularly memorable and impactful.

3.  Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
– By Jim Collins — Before Good to Great, Collins wrote this seminal text on the habits of companies that experience long-term corporate success.  Although the book rarely uses the term “brand,” I found the vision and values ascribed to these “visionary companies” aligns with the values and attributes that anchor my definition of a brand.

4.  Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders (Adweek Book S.)
– by Adam Morgan — instructional and inspirational.  This book discusses how “challenger brands” (hungry, aggressive, and savvy second- or third-rank brands) successfully compete against their market leaders.  The “8 Credos of Challenger Brands” serves as a manifesto for all brands.

5.  Managing Brand Equity
– by David Aaker — the first brand book I ever read.  Like a great text book, it taught me the fundamentals of brand management.  The framework for understanding, measuring, and implementing brand equity was eye-opening to me back in the day, and I continue to refer to it today.

Enjoy — and please let me know what some of your favorite brand books are!

P.S.  I realize this post might seem overly promotional, like I’m shilling for book authors or publishers.  And the truth is, because I am an Amazon Affiliate, if you buy one of these books after clicking on one of the links above, I get a whopping 4% commission on the sale (woo hoo!)  But please know I’m not doing this for commercial purposes — as always, I’m simply trying to share some of my knowledge in an effort to be helpful to my you.