Brand

How Betty Crocker is Baking Content Marketing Success

Betty Crocker found a great recipe for content marketing success. (I know, that pun was hard to swallow.) When food brand giant and cultural icon Betty Crocker, a brand owned by General Mills, wasn’t having success online they developed a digital video series centered around solving common problems for at-home chefs. Since launching in 2008, […]

How Crowdsourcing Can Revolutionize Your Approach to Content

A few months ago an international team of gamers solved a complex problem that had scientists baffled for years. For a decade industry experts from around the globe had been unable to figure out how a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys folds. In a final attempt to solve the riddle, […]

Quality Down to the Last Crumb

Having grown up in a household in which we ate simply and fairly close to the land, I’m pretty sure I didn’t consume my first Cheeto until college. I don’t remember the exact occasion—I like to imagine it as a coming-of-age moment, along with my first taste of Twinkie and ferreting out the existence of […]

Look Before You Leap When Creating a Marketing Plan

Is your company brand image a Mercedes or a Ford Fiesta? Before you try to answer, the key question you must answer to figure out how your company stands out from the crowd is, “what is your value discipline?” The answer is not as straight-forward as it may sound.

3 Things the Top 10 Viral Videos of All Time Have in Common

Want to watch a baby do flips on rollerblades? How about people playing the piano with their feet? Maybe you’d rather see a biker riding on the tops of stores and jumping off bridges? Well I’m sure I have your attention now…or maybe you’ve already seen the videos I’m talking about on YouTube or some […]

Kenny Powers, K-Swiss, and the Ramifications of Viral Success

By now, you’ve probably seen the radical campaign from K-Swiss where Kenny Powers (a fictional character played by Danny McBride) takes over as CEO (ahem, mother***king CEO) of the company and reinvents their image via profanity-laced one-liners and no shortage of comic gold. (If you haven’t, scroll down for the video. Make sure you’re wearing […]

The Joe Paterno Guide to Branding

Whether you bleed blue and white or boo when you see it, it’s hard to deny that Penn State football has a strong brand. And most of the credit for that is probably due to the life work of Joe Paterno – the de facto face of Penn State football and the winningest coach in […]

Why It’s OK For You to Hate This Blog Post

We spend a lot of time wooing people to like us. “Follow us on Twitter!” “Like us on Facebook!” “Get our email updates!” “Share us with your friends!” “Please hang out with us Friday night!” (OK, so that’s from my personal life, but you get the drift.) And it makes sense that we do, kind […]

The Importance of Branding

Branding has come a long way from its cattle-marking origins. What used to be a way for ranchers to label what belonged to them (in case it wandered away) now means so much more. Brands are the reason caffeine fanatics pay more for coffee. Brands are the reason hungry road-trippers get excited when they see […]

4 Must-Haves for Must-Have Brands

When money’s tight, people look at their budget and separate things into two columns: must-have and might-have. And lately, branded goods haven’t been making it into the latter column as much as they used to, as a recent Harris Poll has found that 62% of people are making the choice to go “generic” instead of […]

Keep Your Brand Promise: An Argument for Less Cowbell

There’s probably a specific reason your customers love you. It may not be glamorous, it may not be pretty, but it’s real. And it’s the reason you’ve earned their devotion. But time after time, organizations will abandon their core in order to chase the proverbial shiny object de jour. The notion is perfectly illustrated in […]

The Truth About Branding (And Nothing But The Truth)

AMC’s hit television drama Mad Men is famous for its depiction of the hard-drinking, hard-working Madison Avenue ad man—the Don Drapers and Roger Sterlings of the world who churned out corporate slogans over pre-noon cocktails and pulls on their Lucky Strikes. The daughter of an ad man who grew up in the late sixties and […]

Battle of the Brands: How Nothing Sells Itself

From the CEO running a global corporation to the preteen hustling for loose change with a lemonade stand, anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes in the business world knows one thing for sure: nothing sells itself. It takes hustle. It takes guts. And it takes persistence. But as competition for shelf space in the minds […]

5 Things Brands Want from Facebook Fans Besides Money

ROI doesn’t always come in the form of cold, hard cash. Though your CFO might get nauseous at the notion of outcomes she can’t put in the bank, there’s a ton of value to be derived from Facebook fans that doesn’t make the cash register ca-ching. At least not directly.

The Future of Marketing: Cling to Your Core and Your Customers

Robin Fisher Roffer is a marketing force to be reckoned with. She’s crafted campaigns for brands people use and rely on every day. CNN using their Gulf War moment to launch into the permanent limelight? Her lightbulb. The evolution of the FX brand? Yep, hers, too. Bloomberg Television’s web expansion? Uh huh. And, oh yeah, […]

How to Create Unforgettable Content: 4 Tips Inspired by Nicki Minaj

You may or may not have heard the news, but there’s a new face in hip-hop and it wears a pink wig. What? Seemingly out of nowhere came a young woman who quickly built a brand and persona in the world of hip hop and in the process resuscitated the dying image of the female […]

Content, In Style

When you think of Burberry, what comes to mind? Stodgy British trench coats? Hardly. In the last four years, the 150-year-old brand has transformed itself into a digital fashion empire, with CEO Angela Ahrendts as the driving force behind the evolution. The result is a record year for the brand, with total revenue up 21% […]

A Screenshot to Take to the Board Room

Most brands don’t have the luxury of being able to ignore their customers and still be wildly successful, let alone the desire. Which is why it’s a surprise to see some companies still playing the “if we ignore it, maybe it’ll go away” card when it comes to social media monitoring. So, to those of […]