Walls of Separation

Many companies, brands and organizations are inadvertently building walls between themselves and their customers. It's unintentional, happened over time—but ultimately in this age of empowerment, customers feel more connected to each other than they do to your business or brand. Maybe it's always been this way—but it seems to me that it's getting worse, not better.

Logic + Emotion

20 Corporate Brand Logo Evolutions

Have you ever wonder how the first Apple logo looks in 30 years back? Did you know Volkswagen was Hitler’s idea? Or how the IBM logo changes over the time? Or where the Mercedes-Benz Brand And The Three-Pointed Star logo came from?

Instant Shift

What Is the Best Book Ever Written on Marketing or Media?

Last week one of our reporters asked me what books she should read on media and marketing. My response: "Where the Suckers Moon," by Randy Rothenberg. His account of Wieden & Kennedy's dysfunctional relationship with Subaru is the best behind-the-scenes report on the ad business that's ever been written.*

Ad Age

Pay recycling costs, stores told

"If retailers create unnecessary rubbish, they should help taxpayers by paying for it to be recycled."

BBC

'Breathtaking' Is One Word for Purported Arnell Pepsi Doc

Over the past 24 hours, adland has been abuzz about "Breathtaking," a 27-page document purported to be the thinking behind Arnell Group's recent revamping of Pepsi-Cola's logo. Littered as it is with marketing jargon, images of yin-yangs, mobius strips and Da Vinci's Vitruvian man, you'll maybe wonder whether Michael Phelps wasn't the only one hitting that bong.

Ad Age

Pepsi Gravitational Field

Failure

Honda.com

Thanks Nathan.

P&G feeling the squeeze

ut even P&G is feeling the squeeze during this recession. Spooked by rising unemployment, a bear market and crisis in the financial industry, consumers are pulling back even on necessities, buying less and using up what they already have in the house before buying more.

Cincinnati Enquirer

The 25th Anniversary Of Apple's "1984"

CNBC

Trend Briefing: Generation G

"Captures the growing importance of 'generosity' as a leading societal and business mindset. As consumers are disgusted with greed and its current dire consequences for the economy—and while that same upheaval has them longing more than ever for institutions that care—the need for more generosity beautifully coincides with the ongoing (and pre-recession) emergence of an online-fueled culture of individuals who share, give, engage, create and collaborate in large numbers.

In fact, for many, sharing a passion and receiving recognition have replaced 'taking' as the new status symbol. Businesses should follow this societal/behavioral shift, however much it may oppose their decades-old devotion to me, myself and I.”

trendwatching.com

Tap Dance

But if Flavor Options suggests that progress on the front lines in the marketplace is incremental, it also offers proof of just how resistant the marketplace can be to limits. At a certain point, you would think, the race to purity gets won; eventually, you cannot get purer than pure. And yet, just as you can never actually drive to the horizon, the end point of “new and improved” simply does not exist. That’s why the idea of selling filters that add something to water, even as they subtract something else, isn’t actually surprising at all — it’s pretty much inevitable.

New York Times

Work Ethic 2.0: Attention Control

It's time we upgraded our work ethic for the age we're living in, not our grandparents' age. Hard work is still a virtue, but now takes a distant second place to the new determinant of success or failure in the age of Internet distractions: Control of attention.

InternetNews

Disney Focuses on Boys

Walt Disney Co. is making a push to crack a market that few media companies have been able to conquer -- boys aged 6-14.

Next month, the company will launch a boy-focused entertainment brand called Disney XD, consisting of a new cable television channel, a comprehensive Web site with games, music, videos and social networking.

Wall Street Journal

Gatorade Quietly Aims to Revive Brand

The ads are part of a big rebranding effort for the Gatorade brand that includes a redesigned package and, according to a person familiar with the matter, a Super Bowl commercial. PepsiCo is trying to reach consumers beyond sports nuts to help reverse the brand's weak sales performance. The company is expected to spend roughly $150 million on the ad push, according to the person.



Wall Street Journal

"Innovation" is Dead. Herald The Birth of "Transformation" as The Key Concept for 2009.

“Innovation” died in 2008, killed off by overuse, misuse, narrowness, incrementalism and failure to evolve. It was done in by CEOs, consultants, marketeers, advertisers and business journalists who degraded and devalued the idea by conflating it with change, technology, design, globalization, trendiness, and anything “new.” It was done it by an obsession with measurement, metrics and math and a demand for predictability in an unpredictable world. The concept was also done in, strangely enough, by a male-dominated economic leadership that rejected the extraordinary progress in “uncertainty planning and strategy” being done at key schools of design that could have given new life to “innovation. To them, “design” is something their wives do with curtains, not a methodology or philosophy to deal with life in constant beta—life in 2009.

Nussbaum On Design

Gatorade Changes Up Its Game

New iterations of Gatorade Thirst Quencher, the flagship Gatorade brand, will sport a large letter G next to the brand's iconic bolt. "For Gatorade, G represents the heart, hustle and soul of athleticism and will become a badge of pride for anyone who sweats," according to a company press release.

BrandWeek

Clay St. Project lets P&G think outside the pyramid

A big Clay Street success story was P&G's Herbal Essences brand. After it was acquired from Clairol in 2001, sales plummeted and the brand was floundering so badly that retailers were threatening to no longer stock it. A Clay Street project was convened to find a way to resuscitate the brand and improve sales. The team agreed to target a hypothetical consumer who was in her late teens to early 20s and active, fun-loving and drawn to the brand's appeal to those interested in natural ingredients.

Cincinnati Enquirer

Sales Down? Time To Dial Down The SKUs

There's a widespread consumer frustration out there, with many shoppers feeling there are too many choices, presented in a way that's needlessly complicated.

So in apparel, they want stores to be curators. You don't go to a museum to see every landscape ever painted--you want to see things from the 18th-century pastoral school. They want that kind of editing. They want retailers to stock brands that show they understand a certain lifestyle, especially now, coming off five years of hard-core brand identification. Take Juicy Couture. Fans know it's come a long way beyond that pink sweatsuit with "Juicy" on the bottom. They think, 'this brand knows I dress up sometimes, and that sometimes I want new sunglasses.'

MediaPost

FedEx Whites-Out the Kinko's Name

Some longtime customers are lamenting the imminent demise of the Kinko's sign, which FedEx will start removing from stores next year. Andy Sernovitz, an author and marketing consultant in Chicago, says he got more frustrated reader responses to a blog item he wrote about the name change than to any other. "It's not just a place you shop," he explains. "A Kinko's moment culminated in something big. It's the night before the term paper, and you've got to get to the frat party. It's your wedding invitation, your résumé, a big presentation."

Business Week

Students At Parsons and The University of Cincinnati Are Innovating And Generating Economic Growth.

It’s easy to get pessimistic in this holiday season as major institutions in our lives, especially the financial institutions, break our trust. But we shouldn’t despair. I recently visited two senior design/innovation classes in Cincinnati and New York where the students were so wonderfully brilliant that my own personal gloom was lifted and replaced by hope.

NussbaumOnDesign