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About Branding

Attention young adult: Buy this automobile

Car commercials have been a staple of television advertising for as long as I can remember. The new coupe racing around alpine turns, mom taking the kids to soccer practice, slicked down pavement (or easily surmountable rock formations), definitely no other cars in sight. If you put two and two together, these cliched scenes tell…

Covert action at the Oxford English Dictionary

You may have missed it. There’s been a lot going on this holiday season. But news has emerged of foul play at one of the English speaking world’s most hallowed institutions: The Oxford English Dictionary. Linguist Sarah Ogilvie charges in a new book that Dr. Robert Burchfield, former OED chief editor, covertly deleted thousands of…

Pink gold and plasmaclusters: What Japanese women want in a car

The Japanese auto market is all about specificity, where products are tailored towards discrete niche markets. With a UV coating on the windshield to prevent premature skin aging, a “Plasmacluster” air filtration system to improve skin quality, and a pink gold paint job, Honda’s “Fit She’s” is a car made for the female motorist. Honda…

‘Tis the season: A short history of holiday branding

Now that the first of this season’s feasts is behind us, let’s take a look back at the origins of the frenzy that follows. In 1939, FDR moved the official day of Thanksgiving from the last Thursday of the month to the fourth Thursday to boost holiday retail sales during the final years of the…

Snakes On A Plane: The hilarious horrors of SkyMall Magazine

SkyMall magazine is where bad ideas go to die … and then crawl back to feed on the brains of innocent air travelers. A criminal line-up of infomercials, the magazine takes mankind’s worst ideas and puts them in your seat-back compartment. In a pressure-sealed cabin. At 30,000 feet. At home you can change the channel…

It surely wins: Kit Kat’s supremacy in Japan

Go to the corner store. You’ll find some Kit Kat bars populating the middle shelves below the Watermelon Bubblicious and above the Sour Punch Straws. Maybe you’ll chance on a box of King Size, or if the stars are aligned: Big Kat and White Chocolate. Ok, your work here is done. Now go to Japan….

The NFL and the color pink

If you’ve watched any professional football in October you might have noticed large swaths of a color that usually doesn’t make it onto the gridiron – pink. See, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The NFL and the American Cancer Society teamed up on a campaign called A Crucial Catch to raise money for breast…

There’s nothing wrong with making your brand a little more human

There’s got to be some lessons in the fall from grace of heroes like Lance Armstrong. One is that we seem to like our heroes imperfect. You could argue that the higher you go the bigger the fall, but somehow it doesn’t seem to work that way when you are a little bigger than life….

Foreign National: why the best Americana comes from overseas

It pisses me off to no end that American heritage brands are doing much cooler stuff overseas. Filson has Red Label in Japan, Carhartt has Work In Progress in Europe. Red Wing and Converse have imprints in Japan that are doing much nicer stuff than their American motherships. Now, it’s a familiar story for foreign…

Are you for real?

I have car insurance. I bought it from a man who we’ll call ‘Bill’ in Oakland, because my uncle said he was a swell guy. Recently I needed Bill’s phone number so I looked him up online. I was greeted with his striking good looks and some strange achievements: Crystal Excellence Agency Golden Triangle Agency…

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