So often people think “branding” means creating a name, logo or tagline. All the outside stuff. A few recognize that great brands actually start inside. Starbucks revolutionized coffee in the…
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If you are a manager, your employees think of you as the company they work for. Are you living your company’s brand? Or to be more precise, are you behaving your…
Ah, the “happy hour” — a civilized concept harkening to a sort of 1950s civility — when one celebrates the day’s work, finds an hour of ease, light banter, perhaps…
I couldn’t NOT write about this. Two of the biggest passions in my life: rock climbing and advertising. Back story: Alex Honnold is arguably the most famous rock climber on…
Most conversation, strategy and planning about brands has to do with what they are and how they are different. But brands are for saying no as well as yes. In…
Neuroscience shows that our brains encode emotions more strongly and durably than any other information. We forget facts and figures. We lose historical dates and misremember chronologies. Algebraic formulas and…
What business are you in? Accounting, technology, insurance, banking, real estate, healthcare, consulting? I encourage you to get out of it. Today. Don’t change jobs. Don’t sell your business. Just…
Thoma loves great thinkers, especially if they also happen to be accompanied by great work ethics. We are accepting internship applications from promising college students who have completed a minimum…
We often think of brands as the emotional connection between customers and the products or companies those brands represent. Certainly brands elicit emotions. They spur affinity, love, revulsion, contentment. One…
The year 2016 is here and with it all the excitement of turning a new page on the calendar. What page might the brand leader turn? I’m not thinking about…
All I really need to know about branding I learned in a cup of coffee. In the beginning, coffee arrived on our shores in unwieldy, roughly marked burlap sacks stacked…
Over the course of 25 years as an agency writer, strategist and creative director, many a creative brief for a tagline has hit my desk. The clients have ranged from…
A powerful and competitive brand is not something you solely advertise or design. It’s everything you are and do. This means that “branding” is leadership, not marketing. Consider this: if…
Every time I visit the wine country of California I am awestruck by so many things. The miles and miles of vineyards undulating over the Sonoma and Napa valleys. The…
Your brand is not real. That is, it does not exist as a tangible, concrete element. Your brand is not your logo. It is not your product. It is not…