Brand management

Marketers often worry that performance marketing and its focus on short-term sales is crowding out brand-building activities aimed at enhancing customer...

Here's how to materially benefit LGBTQ+ communities year-round instead.

Companies across all industries are putting personalization at the center of their enterprise strategies. For example, Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase, Starbucks,...

A better alternative to branded content

Companies may want to shift a brand's position--to exploit less crowded territory, for example, or grow sales. Companies have long used perceptual mapping...

Nike is a champion brand builder. Its advertising slogans—“Bo Knows,” “Just Do It,” “There Is No Finish Line”—have moved beyond advertising into popular expression. Its athletic footwear and clothing have become a piece of Americana. Its brand name is as well-known around the world as IBM and Coke. So it may come as a surprise […]

Sales departments tend to believe that marketers are out of touch with what's really going on in the marketplace. Marketing people, in turn, believe the...

There's no going back to the old normal.

Your strategy should be driven by relationship-building - not shiny new tech.

Even as companies devote increasing shares of their marketing budgets to paying social media influencers to tout their products, researchers know little...

Ruffin CEO Bill Bronson is on a mission. Counterfeits of his company's adventure gear and clothing are on the rise, and Bronson is hell-bent on stopping...

Brands are not just names slapped on products by the marketing department; they embody the value those products have for your customers. That may be more true for high-tech products than it is for soap.

Your choice of typeface tells customers whether your brand is attractive, innovative, dishonest, or unpleasant.

In the last post, we discussed how Google, in a startling contradiction of orthodox strategy and economics, has built the world’s top brand in less than a decade – all by refusing to play by the traditional rules of branding. This is a simple example of a more complex phenomenon: cheap interaction driving one of […]

After hearing from friends that SoulCycle's very first studio was different from other cycling studios, Whelan decided to give it a try. One visit was...

Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood, founders of The RBL Group and coauthors of Leadership Brand. To start building your personal leadership brand, ask how you want to be known by the people you need to serve.

It’s fashionable today to enthuse over globalized markets and cite glowing examples of standardized marketing winners around the world. True, some markets are globalizing, and more companies are taking advantage of them with signal success. But the rosy reports of these triumphs usually neglect to mention the complexities and risks involved; for every victory in […]

Augustin Rey, the president of Emilia, a century-old clothing retailer in Spain, is determined to revamp the company's merchandising strategy and redesign...

The only real way to grow sales and profits is to create innovative offerings with some “must haves” that define new categories or subcategories for which competitors are not relevant. The goal is not only to find and successfully introduce such offerings but to create barriers that inhibit or prevent competitors from entering and becoming […]

2010 was the year that proved that logo change is not always for the better. Gap got taken to the cleaners when it updated its branding and Tropicana came a cropper when it removed the iconic orange and straw from its packaging. Perhaps with these debacles in mind, Starbucks waited until 2011 to unveil its […]