It was SNL's secret sauce. That punchline from the hysterical, now-classic SNL skit with a mock Blue Oyster Cult in a recording session featuring ...
Cracking The Code On Brands We Love (and Hate)
Brands we love vs. brands we hate. It's an endless battle. “A brand’s value is merely the sum total of how much extra people will pay, or how often they ...
Businesses Don’t Need Templates: They Need Breakthroughs [Video]
I was sitting down, having an espresso, and thinking about what challenges businesses face today. I looked at all the business trends towards "simplifying ...
7 More (Vital) Questions Brands Must Ask
It's refreshing to speak with an entrepreneur who has the intelligence to step back and ask the hard questions. She has a company that has certain parts ...
What Passes for Most Branding is a Crime
In too many cases, what passes for branding is an outright crime leaving potentially great brands dead, lying face down in some alley. And too often, it's the ...
How to Not Become Meaningless Noise in Your Market
There’s little worse than having a brand and a message that are nothing more than white noise in the market. The same white noise as the other 5,000 ...
The Lean Mean Branding Machine
There is a little-known brand formula any brand (and startups) use to get the differentiation needed to grow fast. It’s a technique that helps brands: ...
The 4 Devils of Branding (Revealed)
We know them as "branding devils." They show up: at the water cooler, at meetings, at brainstorming sessions, at moments of inspiration, at ...
Why Your Brand Needs a Unicorn on Its Marketing Team
Unicorns (and billionaire mentors). They’re the stuff of legend (and in Silicon Valley, Unicorn is a term in the investment industry denoting a startup with a ...
Innovation Hell: Saving Good Ideas From Premature Death
Why is it that so many ideas grow weaker during the exact process that is theoretically designed to bring them to life? It’s a painful but true phenomena ...
Mission Impossible: How (and why) some brands go rogue
Mission Impossible is a powerful movie franchise. It's also a powerful brand. Yes, it has a mission, but more importantly, what is it's secret? And what can ...
How I Saved a Client (and Their Brand) $4.5 million
In the last 10 days, one client approved and aired a very smart "Super Bowl" ad and got covered by Forbes and Huffington Post. Here's what I learned along ...
A Most Powerful Tool Your Brand Might Not Be Using
Your best branding tool might be staring you in the face, and if it's not, it's costing you (big time) business, sales and phenomenal growth. There is one ...
Which of These 9 Misfires is Holding Your Brand Down?
Sir Richard Branson is someone who knows a thing or two about elevating a brand and rising above the noise. In his own words, he wrote, "The key to generating ...
What Helped This Napa Valley Rebel Break Tradition (and Triple Sales)?
To adhere to convention or to boldly go against tradition? That was the question facing this Napa Valley startup. Since their rebrand two years ago, ...
9 Simple Ideas to Dramatically Transform Your Brand
Steve Jobs said, "A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players." The same is true of ideas: "A few A+ ideas can run ...
How a New Logo Reintroduced a Co-op to its 66,000 Members
"In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further ...
27 Years at Nike: “What I Learned about Branding”
“Our job is to wake up the consumers. If we become predictable, that’s not waking them up.” Phil Knight, Nike founder How much of an advantage would working ...
How Did This Rebranding Catapult Sales 900% in 24 Months?
"My doctor told me I had to stop throwing intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people." Orson Welles "Cookie cutters are for baking, not ...
Breaking Open the Branding Vault: The David Brier Videos
Dancing alone sucks. It's the same reason sticking to old, unworkable branding strategies and tactics suck: it's lonely and unrewarding. In business, there's ...
Helping a Startup Avoid this Most Common Branding Pitfall
Most startups (over 97% by actual experience) begin with a fundamental flaw. It's the first inclination commonly driven by the thrill and enthusiasm of ...
The Marketing Lesson 19,084 Businesses Learned This Past Weekend
To date, over 515,000 people have viewed my branding presentations on Slideshare with 350,000 of those since January of this year. Two have made it to the ...
What is Branding? 3 YouTube music videos that perfected the art
They're quirky. They've got this stoic bearded guy who rarely utters a syllable (who you can't help but notice). And they're contagious as hell. They're ...
The Lucky Break J.C. Penney Needed (and How Your Brand Can Benefit from Its Mistakes)
In my Fast Company blog, I discuss the nearly $1 billion dollar loss J.C. Penney had in 2012. I also discuss the ignorantly shortsighted comments by ...
My First Google Hangout Interview: “Branded Alive”
Marketing today is filled with so much double-talk and corporate marketing-speak that it makes the DaVinci Code look like a simple crossword puzzle. So, when ...
