When great design is bad
New York designer Vincent Fileccia has recently undertaken an interesting project I thought worth sharing. In it, he took various iconic consumer business logos and redesigned them using the names of iconic luxury brands. The results I think are quite neat, check some of them out at the bottom of this post or via the […]
Forget “purpose”, do this instead
A sad fact of life is that even the best ideas will often get warped and simplified to the point of uselessness. As concepts pass through the public consciousness, people will inevitably focus on their most “sticky” elements, slowly changing their meaning until they barely resemble their original definition. For example, consider “integrity”. Integrity, quite […]
Why new brands need to be less ethical
You may have heard Voltaire’s phrase “the perfect is enemy of the good” – often used in a business context to essentially mean “just get it done”. Admirable though this interpretation is, for the purposes of this piece I’m interested in employing the phrase in a different context. Rather than “good” meaning high quality, here […]
Gillette the latest brand to succumb to the “marketer’s fallacy”
If you’re reading this, two things can be assumed: You have seen the new Gillette ad You have an opinion on the new Gillette ad Now, for our purposes here what that opinion is doesn’t matter. Don’t worry, this piece is strictly about strategy, not politics. All that matters is the one thing we can […]
Why “big brand thinking” is poison for independents
In spite of everything you read – including here – there isn’t really one right way to run a business. Businesses can become successful via all sorts of weird strategies, including ones that are diametrically opposed to one another. The single greatest fissure of this type is that between independent companies, and group companies. By […]
The self-loathing business
As has been touched on in these pages before, there is little more insidious than a focus on gaining “market share”. The idea encourages all sorts of self-destructive beliefs, such as: That the market you operate in is zero-sum (markets are far more blurry, fluid, and open than the market share pie suggests) That purchases […]
Marketing needs more cynicism
Frank Zappa, when asked “why modern music sucks”, had an interesting answer which is highly instructive for the degradation of all sorts of artistic disciplines – not least marketing. It’s an answer you wouldn’t expect, but one which once you’ve wrapped your head around it makes perfect sense. He believed the problem began when people […]
The power of an unfashionable business
There’s a theory in music which suggests, broadly speaking, that there have been no significant new genres created since the advent of the internet. Whilst no rock n’ roll song could ever have been written in the 40s, no disco song could have been written in the 50s, and no grunge song could have been […]
Does negative publicity matter?
If you’re a big corporation, it now seems more likely than not that you’ll get caught up in a major public scandal. The convergence of 1) rapidly changing cultural norms, 2) increased transparency, and 3) a media climate that values outrage as the most potent currency, means that it’s really a matter of “when”, not […]
The rise and fall of parasite brands
This piece first appeared in Contagious. There are two ways brands can be created – by giving or taking. Most people imagine the giving kind; where the business wants to offer something new to the world, or make something better. They see a need that isn’t being met, and serve it, leaving the world richer […]