PRBreakfastClub

A few thoughts on recent marketing and PR industry news: Read the rest of this entry »

Aside from the hoopla over the Royal Wedding, one thing was pretty evident last week: big international events often bring out the worst in brand marketing.

From silly tie-ins like Royal Wedding sliding doors from Spaceslide.co.uk (Hey, you never know when you need to see Wills and Kate’s smiling faces while walking in and out of a room!) to the utterly ridiculous £500 pizza from Papa John’s made to look like the happy couple to constant debates about whether Kate’s dress would be a boon for fashion PR, marketers were out in full force last week trying to hock just about anything that could possibly … just maybe … be connected to the Royal Wedding.

All of which left many annoyed and ready for the whole show to finally come to an end.

Thus, two recent op-eds in MarketingWeek could not have come at a better time. While neither dealt directly with the marketing/Royal Wedding mashup, each made its point plainly clear: brands need to be especially careful when trying to tap into the cultural zeitgeist of the moment or teaming up with potential partners. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week’s unveiling of the new and more clean Starbucks logo — featuring only its iconic siren, with the words “Starbucks” and “coffee” removed from the outer ring — and the subsequent ridicule and critique the company took on the Internet, left me wondering whether a brand will ever again be able to successfully change its logo, or undergo a full rebranding effort, in the digital age.

Think about it: When was the last time within the past five years when a new logo or rebranding effort was met with resounding applause in the blogosphere? . . . Yeah, I’m still trying to think of an example, too. Read the rest of this entry »

After my recent post, Cog asked that I take the time to apply the same conversation on naming your brand to my family’s jewelry business, Honora.  Now, considering the fact that it is a 64-year-old company and I am only 30, clearly I was not involved in the decision making.  My last post also focused on the difference between naming your brand after yourself or after your niche.  This really does not relate to us as we are the third kind of company name, one that does not clearly denote a person or a category.   From what I’ve been told, my grandfather wanted a blank canvas to build a brand upon, one that was bigger than any one person or limited to a particular niche.  Not wanting to disappoint the powers that be at PRBC, I hope these lessons learned from marketing Honora, a name selected in 1946, over the past few years will suffice. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since the debacle of Gap  unveiling its new logo last week, I’ve been a rather outspoken critic of not only the design, but Gap’s somewhat bizarre and poorly articulated attempts to make it appear that the rebranding effort was all part of one big crowdsourcing exercise or a PR stunt. (Why is it every time a brand does something odd in the digital space, we have to label it a “PR stunt?”)

It wasn’t.

News this week that Gap was abandoning its new logo—after just seven days on the market, and before the new logo had even hit stores or merchandise (the new logo was rolled out via a “soft launch” on Gap.com—left me wondering one thing: Does Gap even realize how badly it’s hurting it’s brand right now? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m guilty; I’ve been making fun on The Gap and their new logo.  It is an ugly, half-assed, badly designed misstep from a brand that hadn’t made a logo change in over 20 years.  In our little world of Social Media, we are having a field day and The Gap is taking a heck of a licking for their latest new design.  As if that were not enough, now I’m taking things one step further and making fun of their mind-numbingly poor decision to leave the design up to the crowd and invite people to suggest better logos via Facebook.  I cannot help but mock their “Fine if you think we screwed up that badly, you do better” mentality.   They are really going to regret ever posting the follow up to what was already a fairly massive branding gaff.

That said, I am done talking about it and I think you should be too.  Here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »

Buzz … Buzz … Buzz. What happened to sales results?

An article late last week on BNET noted that the hilarious viral videos that Old Spice put out recently in tandem with ad/marketing agency Wieden + Kennedy, showcasing The Old Spice Guy (former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa) responding to celebrity and fan tweets, e-mails and other social messages to instantly create one-hit wonder viral videos actually did very, very little in the way of boosting Old Spice’s sagging year-over-year sales. Read the rest of this entry »

For marketers, 2010 has thus far been a tough year – at least on the branding front. We’ve seen the downfall of several of the world’s top brands, including the ongoing BP oil spill debacle and the ensuing fallout for its corporate image and brand, along with Google’s recent privacy concern issues and several other high-profile branding dustups.

A recent Financial Times article (PDF Version) examined the perils of a tarnished brand. After reading the article, we thought it might be interesting to examine the broader issues and implications from a marketer’s perspective, with Jeff Esposito coming from the point of view of a corporate communications guy working for a global brand (Vistaprint), and Keith examining this issue from the perspective of a PR agency exec who works with SMBs, global brands and everything in between. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you see the big social media news that broke Friday afternoon? Probably best to read up about how location-sharing site Blippy, which allows users to broadcast to their friends any and all of their credit card purchases, somehow managed to allow four users’ credit card numbers to slip through a public Google search.

This whole Blippy incident is an unbelievably epic fail, and frankly, not a good sign for the emerging, yet at times, controversial, location-sharing industry.

Here’s the explanation Blippy gave on its blog (from WSJ.com):

In a post on its blog, Blippy said the problem was “a lot less bad than it looks.” “While we take this very seriously and it is a headache for those involved (to whom we apologize and are contacting), it’s important to remember that you’re never responsible if someone uses your credit card without your permission,” the company wrote. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite all of my love for social media, digital communications, community engagement etc., something that is beginning to particularly strike me as a clear fact of 21st-century PR is that yes, media relationships do matter. A whole lot. And dare I say it? It does matter who you know. More importantly, how well you know/trust them.

Let me put this into a bit more perspective: Say you’re working on a pretty time sensitive client announcement that has a lot of moving parts (e.g. 2-3 parties involved with multiple executives/personalities and many different times zones), which requires you to be both confidential with how closely you hold the client announcement/information and also proactive enough so you obtain the desired outcome from the announcement with a little extra audience reaction thrown in from a good pre-announcement story or two. Read the rest of this entry »