Rational, emotional and self expressive benefits and a little magic = brand strategy.

Branding a Blatantly Bad Deal: Dollar Loan Center

When we set fingers to keyboard to excoriate First PREMIER Bank Platinum Mastercard for exorbitant fees and a 79.9% APR, we hoped it represented a low watermark for awful consumer credit offers. Unfortunately, we discovered a new ignominious winner: a 196.96% APR from Dollar Loan Center and <a title="Dollar Loan Center" href="http://www.don

Branding Autumn When It’s Summer Outside

As James Taylor once crooned, "Well, the leaves have come to turning / And the goose has gone to fly . . . The frost is on the pumpkin / The hay is in the barn . . . ."  But wait.  It's September 4th and 90+ degrees (32+ degrees Celsius) in most of the northern hemisphere (bl

Conspicuously Private Branding: The Koch Brothers’ “Path to Freedom”

Normally BrandCultureTalk steers well clear of topics political.  We are a broad tent comprised of Cato Institute free marketers, Reagan Democrats,

Thank You for Your Loyalty

In the annals of brand experience, there is no reward quite so prized as that of personal appreciation and recognition.  As consumers, we like to think that we have a choice in the brands we buy and frequent, and feel (justifiably) validated when these br

Can Brands Be Too Honest?

Kumon Logo Strikes Precisely the Right Note of Misery

Our last post on the fuzzy math of social media got us thinking of . . . the 3Rs, back to school, and more precisely, back to school performance!  In the race to ever greater achievement, never have a circle, two dots and a line struck as much trepidation in students and concomitant delight in ambitious parents than the "<a title="Kumon Logo Explanation" href="http://www.kumongr

Naked Pizza = Pizza 2.0

If ever there was a food in need of a brand makeover, the noble pizza would be up high on the lis

Starbucks’ Mission Statement Writers May Have Had One Too Many Venti Peppermint Mocha Twists

The design community is abuzz with yesterday's launch of the modified Starbucks logo into the real world. The visual vocabulary is clever and innocuous even if it is a little too now to be timel

Packaging So Good You Can Smell the Fertilizer

Ever the conscientious consumers (or guilt-ridden bourgeois souls), we couldn't help but choose these when shopping for free range eggs recently: Shockingly bad corporate wordmark aside,

Send in the Clowns: The Circus Rebranded and Reimagined

If we were to hold a contest to find the single word that at once inspires unbridled joy and abject horror, "clown" would undoubtedly make the short list. From the lovable cigar-chomping "King of Laughter" vagabond portrayed by Red Skelton to the malevolent mischief of the WWF's Doink the Clown to the classically trained <a title="Aguste C