Category Archives: Branding

How to Mine the Crisis

By nicemod | Published: August 26, 2009

From an inter­view with Patrick Rod­mell, CEO of Watt Inter­na­tional, in Monday’s Globe and Mail on what retail­ers can learn about brand­ing in the recession:

“One of the core chal­lenges, par­tic­u­larly in North Amer­ica, is over­com­ing the devel­op­ment of strate­gies from silos. Mar­ket strate­gies are often done with­out con­sid­er­a­tion for the over­all retail envi­ron­ment. Adver­tis­ing can be done in the absence of look­ing at the actual store. How many times have you been to a store and then seen the TV ad and felt like they could be two dif­fer­ent busi­nesses? They have to bring that inte­grated mes­sage together or it gets lost in the noise.

“The win­ners in retail after this reces­sion will be those who oper­ate from a truly brand-​​centric point of view. [This means] the core essence of an idea that trans­lates into all the touch points of your customer.”

Fur­ther, he iden­ti­fies that cus­tomers are seek­ing “the right choice” over “every choice avail­able.” Per­son­ally, I believe a curated prod­uct line is impor­tant, and would add—and firmly believe in—attention to detail and an unre­lent­ing com­mitt­ment to quality.

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No Brand

By nicemod | Published: August 12, 2009

Begin­ning Spring 2010, Rick Klotz, owner and designer for Freshjive, is strip­ping all brand from the firm, their mar­ket­ing and indeed, soon, their website:

“Through­out the years I’ve become uncom­fort­able with this busi­ness of brand­ing and brand iden­tity. I’m not the type of per­son that buys some­thing for the brand name. I’ve also never done a very good job at cre­at­ing a cap­ti­vat­ing iden­tity to our own brand logo. Also, within the streetwear cul­ture, the pro­mo­tion of a company’s brand has become down­right silly to me.”

Worth not­ing is that Freshjive is a sub-​​brand of Gen­eral Pants Co., which includes 70 retail loca­tions across Aus­tri­alia, gen­er­at­ing at least $250M in rev­enue annu­ally. So: is this a ballsy cor­po­rate move? Is it punk, as Klotz states, for an iconic com­pany with two decades of his­tory to drop it’s name?

Catch the full inter­view with Klotz at The Hun­dreds blog.

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Rebranding Nations

By nicemod | Published: August 11, 2009

Unapolo­getic, and unabashed, Wally Olins speaks on the brand­ing of nations (Note: .pdf file.):

“And the rebrand­ing of France has pro­ceeded spo­rad­i­cally and often vio­lently ever since. Napoleon’s Empire gave way to the restored Bour­bons, who were over­thrown and replaced by a bour­geois Monar­chy, which was fol­lowed by a Sec­ond Repub­lic which turned itself into a Sec­ond Napoleonic Empire. In an attempt to recre­ate the glory of his uncle, the first and incom­pa­ra­bly greater fig­ure, Napoleon III and the Sec­ond Empire went down to humil­i­at­ing defeat by Prus­sia in 1870. By the time the Third Repub­lic emerged from the ashes of the Sec­ond Empire, French politi­cians had become the worlds spe­cial­ists at brand­ing and rebrand­ing the nation.”

And fur­ther draws par­al­lel between the brand strat­egy of nations and businesses:

“Busi­nesses have to cre­ate loy­al­ties; loy­al­ties of the work­force, loy­al­ties of sup­pli­ers, loy­al­ties of the com­mu­ni­ties in which they oper­ate, loy­al­ties of investors and loy­al­ties of cus­tomers. In cre­at­ing these loy­al­ties they use very sim­i­lar tech­niques to those of nation builders. They cre­ate myths, spe­cial lan­guages, envi­ron­ments which rein­force loy­al­ties, colours, sym­bols, and quasi-​​historical myths. They even have heroes.”

Here in Alberta, there are ongo­ing con­cerns with pre­sent­ing the province to the world in a pos­i­tive light, some­times con­tro­ver­sial, some­times regarded as expen­sive and ulti­mately unsuc­cess­ful. This has resulted in a multi-​​front war of words divided amongst the Provin­cial gov­ern­ment, advo­cacy groups, envi­ron­men­tal stew­ards and the news media.


(Sun­cor Energy upgrader and tail­ings…

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