I am serving in a full operating role at the moment for a company reinventing advertising and marketing for the Digital Age.  In that capacity, I have been reminded vividly of the differences in a good operating executive and a good opportunity executive. We have a relatively new employee, Jimmy Bogroff, a sales team leader [...]

“I follow your emails/blog and have read your book Killer Brands several times – love them both.  We spoke briefly a couple of years ago about my branding as a realtor.  I wanted to offer this thought: I recently realized that “FedEx Kinko’s” has now re-branded itself as “FedEx Office”.  This is the culmination of [...]

Slimfast  is proving that no matter how old a brand might be, one can finally get to a great copy line that tells the story and does so in a way that links directly to the name of the brand.  And makes you wonder where this idea has been for so many years? “Who has [...]

You are the marketing manager of a well-known dinnerware brand and you get the idea, “Let’s put our name on a brand of public toilets!”   How much sense does this make to you?  Would an average 8th grader make this mistake? Well, the public toilets in the Charles DeGaulle airport in Paris proudly and visibly [...]

Why do auto companies fail to recognize rental companies as a great trial mechanism for their cars?   As a rule, the cars that companies sell to Avis etc are stripped down versions of their least expensive models guaranteeing that a renter will get the worst possible impression of their cars. Not always though.  Yesterday, Avis [...]

Here is a simple example.  I am in New Zealand on holiday.  I am watching a little TV mostly to see the advertising here.  And of course many of the brands are new to me. Last night I saw an ad for SKOF, a chiplike snack food that made a big deal of its differentiation, [...]

I learned about the value of “customer service as exception” back in my Mr Ching venture days from Pepsico, our investor.  For instance, a customer comes into a Pizza Hut at 2:30pm and asks for a personal pan pizza which the company does not make after 2:00pm.  The manager is trained to explain the 2:00 [...]

I was showing a friend tonight a Tervis™ tumbler, you know the plastic insulated drinkware that was originally introduced in 1946.  Here is a killer brand in its own right with thousands of sku’s, 99.9% solidly on strategy.  They have all different shapes of insulated mugs and glasses, even an ice bucket which also makes [...]

I was talking with a friend who grew up in China and moved here permanently six years ago, and she mentioned that she wanted pancakes for breakfast.  I suggested that she go to IHOP.  She knew the brand name and where two stores were near her home, but had never been there because she did [...]

This is one of my favorite topics, or should I say favorite rants. Will  your grandchild know what an OREO is, or was?  How about a Reese’s?  Our experience is that a brand has one single pivot foot and that it can move one step from the pivot foot only, much like a power forward [...]