Living life as an Olsen twin and as Co-Presidents of the Olsen Twin empire can have twists and turns but can be very beneficial. As you look at how the Olsen twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley, have built their brand, one will see that it has been many years of hard work and smart moves to keep the brand image in the public eye. If you don’t know who the Olsen Twins are, then visit Hulu.com to checkout the video about them and their branding.
Since they were babies, Mary-Kate and Ashley have been building a brand that has lasted through the …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 …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 …read more

A good friend of mine is an avid recreational sports player in his community. He plays basketball, beach volleyball and ultimate. Apart from his competitive nature, what he’s most intense about is his refusal to call the sport “Frisbee.”
The game itself (with rules much like football) is called “ultimate” but the act of throwing a round, flat object is called “flying disc.”
So why is it that Frisbee is so much more universally known that “flying disc”?
From The Great Idea Finder:
A baker named William Russel Frisbie, of Warren, Connecticut, and later of Bridgeport, came up with a clever marketing idea back …read more

You know that you have a really successful brand when you see things like this:

This Fuji apple has actually been ‘tanned’ with the Apple logo by putting a sticker on it in the last phase of growth.
There are also apples with iPod logos an ‘Apple hearts’:

It would be an interesting tactic if it was run by Apple, but it was actually the brainchild of a Japanese Apple fan.
So this is what you should be aiming for: a brand which is so involved in people’s lives that they create promotions for you.
Source: Nobon (translated)

Neither Guitar Hero nor Rock Band actually need a brand boost.  Both are incredibly popular video games, but nevertheless, the idea of smacking a brand name as big as The Beatles on Rock Band or Guitar Hero games would be nirvana for either EA Games or Activision (the manufacturers of Rock Band and Guitar Hero).

Today’s lackluster buzz is all about the new HP TouchSmart Touch-Screen PC, but much of the buzz is actually skeptical based on former incarnations of the touch screen PC by HP.  Those in-the-know are saying the new HP Touch Screen PC is actually very good, but still, a cloud of pessimism and “so what?” is threatening to burst HP’s PR bubble.
The question being asked is this …
What if Apple had released this Touch-Screen PC?  Would the buzz be as big or bigger than the touch-screen iPhone buzz we’ve all been wrapped up in for the past year?
I wonder.  Frankly, I think …read more

Each year, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) releases a list of the most searched for terms throughout that year called the Google Zeitgeist (spirit of the times).  Not only do the lists provide a nostalgic look back at 2007 from the iPhone to Hannah Montana and everything in between, but they also provide a great tool for marketers to learn which brands successfully generated an online buzz in the prior year then take lessons from the marketing tactics employed by the companies (or people) behind those brands to help develop our own strategies for the following year.