I once knew a CEO who asked me why the phones weren't ringing off the hook. He said that the sales efforts were costing too much money. "We need to make our phones ring!"
Continue reading "Why the Phones Never Ring" »
I was pretty surprised to see Intuit change its corporate logo. In the past, I've used both Intuit's TurboTax and H&R Block's TaxCut. For my own reasons, I like TurboTax better. Recently, I went to their site and almost thought I misclicked on my bookmark. The Intuit logo is never really prominent on its boxes. Whether for Turbo Tax or Quicken, the packaging always blaringly screamed out the product name(and still does). Also, the company's TurboTax headquarters building in Southern California doesn't even sport the corporate logo (Turbo Tax signage sits in its place).
So, I really wonder why they changed their well recognized logo. Unlike companies that are currently undergoing a logo change (such as Ford or Xerox) as part of on overall image makeover to actually distance themselves from their recent stumbles and fumbles, Intuit is a very solid company with a pretty loyal customer base.
Continue reading "Intuit Gets New Stickmen Logo" »
I was reading a page on company name orgins in Wikipedia and wanted to point you to it HERE.
I'm amazed at how many corporate names are either derived from the names of its founders or cryptic acronyms of a descriptive phrase. It's a good approach since a lot of companies end up doing something entirely different than what it first set out to do. It's a lot better than a new "Web 2.0" startup calling itself iStorage or SmartShopper only to change its business, change its name, and waste a lot of brand equity (ie., mony, time, goodwill) in the process. Well, I guess there would be very little brand equity to begin with and these companies - or "products" - won't last long enough to go through such a change anyway since too many of these endeavors are outfitted to sell "features" to Google ... fair enough.
Continue reading "What's in a Name?" »
I’ve been asked countless times about what branding means. It’s usually an innocent question posed by a genuinely interested individual. But, quite a few times, I’ve been asked by someone who simply wanted to see if I knew the answer. I’m not sure if there is a single, unanimously agreed upon answer but I’d always make my attempt to describe what I think branding represents. My reason for doing so is quite simple. For a marketing professional, branding is critical to fueling and supporting high trajectory growth.
Branding represents a promise. When promises are kept, the brand gets stronger. Before a brand can propel itself, it needs to be constantly fed or nourished. A brand gets automatically reinforced through what I like to term ‘the repetition of making promises and keeping them.
Continue reading "You Promise? Absolut-ly!" »