association brand gap

Shakespeare may have once asked, “What’s in a name?” and generally I subscribe to the notion that selecting the right brand name isn’t as important as developing the right associations for it.  But sometimes names really matter — and they definitely do in the case of professional associations if they want to close the association […]

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Here’s my latest Brand Book Bite, a write-up on and interview with the author of a book I recommend for brand-builders: – the book:  Non-Obvious: How to Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict The Future — an excellent guide to trends — full of insights, tips, tools, and trends themselves – the brain:  Rohit Bhargava, […]

Here’s my newest Brand Experience Brief, a video audit and analysis of a new or interesting retail or restaurant concept — and this store certainly is interesting.  SamplingLab is a store where you can try free samples of products and give your feedback to the companies that make them.  For product companies SamplingLab offers a […]

lean brand book

the book:  Entrepreneur’s Guide to the Lean Brand: How Brand Innovation Builds Passion, Transforms Organizations and Creates Value is a guidebook for startups the brains:  Jeremiah Gardner and Brant Cooper help startups get started.  This is Jeremiah’s first book and Brant was the co-author of the New York Times Bestseller, The Lean Entrepreneur.   They share […]

A Google search on the term “the uber of” returns 65,000 results, including The Uber of Gentleman Companions (an article about a new startup that promises “what women really want”) and We’re the Uber of Organ Transplants (a website posing as a non-profit in the organ donation space). In fact, Entrepreneur recently ran a piece on the proliferation […]

pivot

Pivoting can be a start-up’s smartest move or the last nail in its coffin.  For every Twitter (which started as a podcast subscription network before its founders realized that iTunes would quickly overtake them, so they turned their attention to microblogging), there’s a Color (a photo-sharing cellphone application whose founders tried unsuccessfully to pivot into […]

Downtown Project, the movement to revitalize downtown Las Vegas originally funded by Tony Hsieh the CEO of Zappos, has been in the news a lot lately.  On the downside, many articles (including this one) Monday-morning-quarterbacked the collection of businesses and organizations when it laid off 30 staffers.  But in the plus column, it was praised […]