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.
A tour of the Mission on the holiday that helped establish the Mexican identity.
History is rarely this tidy. Exactly one hundred years after Kaiser Wilhelm gave Austria his famous ‘blank check’ in 1914, Mario Götze kicks the decisive goal to win the 2014 World Cup for Germany. The media on both sides of the Atlantic respond: a century of tarnished national identity, absolved in an instant! Or is it even more surprising that we still think in terms of nineteenth-century ‘national identities’?
Here is the secret to visiting Ireland: go West, young traveler. While Dublin is the almost unavoidable gateway to the country (a role it’s been playing since the Vikings first set up camp on the River Liffey), it’s only when you’re safely past Heuston Station that you begin to feel you might indeed be in a very different land.
You’ve seen them. Typos and strange words in the New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal, and Politico. These are all publications that should know better. Yet nonetheless, sprouting like weeds, they’re there. Sentences that have an odd ring, Word choices that don’t fit. What’s going on here?
A trip across the ages from the beginnings of content strategy to the present. We’ll start all the way back when tablets were, well, tablets…
By combining search and browsing history with geographic and other spatial information, mobile devices have greatly accelerated the ability of our favorite applications and websites to predict, suggest, and refine responses to a query–or respond even when no overt query has been made. In other words, context itself has become the new query.
Much of the lexicon of branding, from mission statements to company values, and from visions to manifestos, suggests terms from religion, philosophy, and politics. What do brands have in common with these more typical examples of belief systems?
Google’s somewhat muted announcement of a major upgrade to its search algorithm, named “Hummingbird,” is a much bigger deal than it looks, and much more of a milestone in our relationship to computing than we might think. So what’s going on here?
As with all disciplines, brand strategy comes with its own set of largely agreed-upon vocabulary. From positioning to messaging, values and benefits, the conversation is guided by a set of understandings of the key elements of a successful brand program, and how they should be worded. But what are we really talking about?