Early in the year, Trendwatching released a report detailing how companies should proceed in certain areas. In terms of luxury brands, the suggestion was to step outside the box. Others predict a glum forecast but remain focused on providing a truly luxurious product to a select few. BrandZ Top 100 report was recently published and assured that “even the luxury category has gained in brand value by 10 percent, affirming the deep and enduring claim that well-crafted items and brand heritage have on our imaginations and wallets.” It’s almost an affirmation of the success of established luxury brands that have had years to solidify their place in the market. Yet it doesn’t suggest that the luxury brands who aren’t... [Read more]

Millward Brown Optimor released the 2009 BrandZ Top 100 and Brand Curve recently posted the highlights from the findings. Jeremy Bullmore, author of Behind the Scenes in Advertising, columnist of ‘Dear Jeremy’, chairman of J. Walter Thompson Co. and subsequently of WPP Group, and Director of the Guardian, provided an introductory commentary for the BrandZ 2009 report.  Bullmore argues against the notion that brands were invented by manipulative marketeers to pursuade consumers into purchasing high-priced but otherwise “unremarkable” commidities. He claims that we’ve been building brands since 1955 when Sidney Levy and Burleigh Gardner’s The Product and the Brand was published by the Harvard Business Review.... [Read more]

This week, Millward Brown released the 2009 BrandZ Top 100, the world’s largest brand equity study. “Millward Brown Optimor created the BrandZ Top 100, a ranking that identifies the world’s most valuable brands measured by their dollar value.” The value of the top 100 brands has seen a marginal increase of 1.7 percent. Given the economic climate, this is a big deal! BrandZ reports that “when every key financial indicator plummeted, the value of the top 100 brands increased by 2 percent to $2 trillion.” In the BrandZ press release, Joanna Seddon, CEO of Millward Brown Optimor said that, “In the current environment, where the value of many businesses has fallen, brand has become even more important because... [Read more]

Is Apple stagnant? In a seemingly endless rain of new and tweaked products, even a few months without an Apple advertising campaign in my face seems like forever. What have they done lately? From Apple’s Hot News section, today’s entries are “Newsflash: University hosts app design competiton” and “Says J.D. Power: Apple highest in smartphone customer satisfaction.” The previous 7 before that: image: Flickr: kyz App Store Pick of the Week: Leaf Trombone: World Stage Delivering better patient care with iPhone Mac mini big on media-center capabilities Screening at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival The Year Was 1959 Coming Attractions: X-Men Origins: Wolverine App Store tops one billion downloads Maybe Apple is... [Read more]

Recently, a commenter of one of b5media’s branded properties got in touch with the company about deleting a comment she had written on a blog post from 2007. Two short years ago, this commenter had not considered the effect of leaving a single comment. However, now, with the practice of Googling oneself becoming commonplace (and so it should), she realised that a search of her full name yielded a LinkedIn result in first place and the comment she had made in second.While the comment was not inappropriate, it was a glimpse into her personal life at a particularly vulnerable and sensitive time. She may have regretted sharing that much or maybe she just didn’t want that piece of information to be the second search result for clients... [Read more]