One of the weapons graphic designers use to support the wholeness and harmony of a visual identity is the addition of an extra graphic motif. A frame, an area of color, or an unusual layout grid can...

For drinks, even more than food, the packaging and branding have to do the lion's share of the work. Most soft drinks are very cheap to mass-produce—basic ingredients are water, corn syrup,...

The supermarket is a metaphor for our consumer society; it is the place we go to learn about, select, and buy food and drink, detergent, shampoo, toothpaste, cough medicine and cigarettes,...

Brands generally arise in situations of plentiful production. In the US, there were boom periods for new brands after the Civil War in the 1860s and again after WWII. Manufacturers with extra...

Vive la difference! Since women and men are so wonderfully different, it's no wonder that many brands try to address them in different ways. Where many brands fall down, however, is in stereotyping...

The discipline of branding is the love child of graphic design, advertising, marketing, PR, and corporate identity. A branding consultancy competes with all of these businesses for both respect and...

For most of the twentieth century, advertising was branding. It is still a critical tool for shaping how brands are perceived. James B.Twitchell, in Twenty Ads that Shook the World, describes the...

Broadcast Once upon a time, advertising on TV was the best way to guarantee big success for your brand. It was expensive, but you could reach millions of potential customers in 30 seconds, with a...

Web Web advertising, which started out with simple banners, is now run by highly sophisticated software that conjures a miniature, full-featured website within the banner itself. Web advertising not...

When brands take a stand, who benefits? Why do some companies support charities loudly, while others are more discreet? The cynical observer will quickly bring down any effort by a big-brand...

Buzz campaign, word of mouth, viral marketing ... Whatever the jargon, it all amounts to the same thing—trying to reach customers in spite of their increasing immunity to the many commercial images,...

Marketers often face questions about their marketing activities and the way in which these activities relate to their various stakeholders. Many of these questions need to be answered from an...

Views vary about the exact nature of relationship strength. Donaldson and O'Toole define it as 'Both the economic ties and the social bonding of the partners: belief in the spirit of cooperation and...

To win over increasingly savvy (and jaded) customers, many brands now strive for something generally called "authenticity." They want to be perceived as "real." In other words, they want to be let...

The conventional wisdom in marketing, design, and branding is that everything communicates in some way. Brands that give little thought to their communication, the thinking goes, must be...