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The Semiotics of Branding
Is a brand a sign, or is it the destination? Or is it both? Or is it something greater than either one? How you answer that question may well depend on where you sit professionally, in-house in a product or sales group, as a strategist or communications expert in or outside the organization, or at…
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Sending the Right Message
If the brand is the message, content strategy is how it gets delivered: the sum total of the activities to enhance the written and spoken expression of a company’s brand. The term ‘content strategy’ is best known in its digital context: the structuring, development, and management of content for websites and digital applications. However, in…
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Branding the State
May Day musing: is it just a coincidence that some of the best literal examples of consistent branding in history come from authoritarian states? Logos, ‘taglines’, key messages, color palettes: name a classic component of brand management, and the worst of the 20th-century dictatorships were on top of it, with clear, consistent, and differentiated communications.
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The Linguistics of Branding
My day job (that takes a few nights as well) is helping companies connect to their customers through ‘verbal branding’: that is to say, positioning, messaging, corporate language, and brand voice. It’s somewhat unusual in that to many people, brands are visual constructs, consisting of logos, color schemes, visual vocabulary, and guidelines. However, that’s not…
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Of Peanuts and Personas
Does our understanding of brand and user personas derive, at least partly, from the classic personality archetypes we read about as kids? Even the names you see in a typical customer segmentation, such as “Sally Social Media” and the like, suggest a possible source: Peanuts characters.