Brands rush to aid Japan by doing what they do best

[This post was originally published on FutureBrand's FBlog.]

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is integrally linked to brand strategy. An company’s approach to CSR can differentiate it from competitors, lend credence to its purported brand promise, and strengthen the brand’s relevance and emotional currency with customers. But making sure CSR activities are “on brand” doesn’t only benefit the brand. When organizations align these initiatives with a well-defined brand, they can also give back more effectively.

In the aftermath of the tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan last week,

continue reading…

Five things you need to know about product naming

I recently attended a meeting in Singapore as preparation for a new role (!) I’ll be stepping into with FutureBrand later this month. As pre-work, all attendees were invited to write a quick “five things you need to know about,” in the style of Campaign Asia-Pacific’s regular column of the same name. Limiting it to five things and 300 words made it an interesting exercise in self-censorship. Here’s what I wrote:

Naming is a process. Generating product names is a creative exercise, but there is an accepted process for finding strong, available product names, and there are people who make a decent living doing nothing but making up names.

Sleep on it. There’s a very long list of brand names that sound fine now but must have sounded crazy once: Snickers, Macintosh, Virgin, Google, Gap, etc. Names that seem strange, ridiculous, or even offensive at first can be the best candidates, so you should always take a few days to reflect on the options.

Context matters. We often evaluate name candidates in isolation, but they’ll rarely be experienced that way.

continue reading…

Using Google Translate’s “detect language” feature for linguistic checks

I’m a firm believer in using available online tools to supplement and expedite the creation of master lists for naming projects. Here’s one that’s existed for awhile, but it only recently occurred to me to use it this way.

Google Translate has a “detect language” feature that you could theoretically use to do a quick and dirty linguistic check. Linguistic checks are what (hopefully) prevent tragic naming blunders, like Mitsubishi’s Pajero SUV, which is apparently “a commonly used Spanish term for ‘wanker,’” or the apocryphal (as in not true) story of Chevy’s Nova being interpreted as “will not go” in Spanish. Using Google Translate is not at all a safe replacement for the real deal, but it might help out in those situations where you’re working on something and think, “this sounds like it probably means something in…some language.”

Three quick examples:

continue reading…

Nitpick with Google’s Veterans Day logo

Google’s holiday logos, or Google Doodles, are great, and show off the company’s willingness to have a little fun at its own expense—something I think far too many big corporations are afraid to do. It’s an unfortunate fact that the brand consulting industry is partly to blame for this fear of “fun” and creative expression, as documents like visual identity guidelines (although very useful for many companies) can err on the side of restricting too much, preventing in-house creative talent or well-intentioned managers from effectively expressing the company’s personality. Guidelines and charters like these need to walk a fine line between preventing inconsistency and allowing a reasonable, useful amount of flexibility. They should, in fact, enhance the expression of a brand’s personality.

But all this is a topic for another post. All I really wanted to ask was whether anyone else was a bit freaked out by the pointy “horn” of the “e” sticking out from behind the US flag in this Veterans Day logo from Google a month ago:

I feel like Senator McCarthy saying this, but that red shape, peaking out from behind the American flag…it seems reminiscent of another symbol to me…

continue reading…

How digitally competent are prestige brands in China?

This is a pretty cool report issued by L2, in partnership with Labbrand (where I work), looking at the “Digital IQ” of prestige brands operating in China and ranking 100 of them. This version of the report identifies some strong positive correlations between Digital IQ measurements and the brand valuations published by BusinessWeek and Interbrand every year. Of course, correlations don’t imply causation, so the relationship between the numbers may bring more questions than answers.

Thanks to everyone at Labbrand and L2 that did the research and put this all together. Stay tuned for an article-form version of this report, which I’m currently helping to write. Should be available in a few weeks.

Really? That fast?

As seen today on Dictionary.com