Assessing Relationship Strength

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 trust … and actions taken indicate the strength of...

Authenticity

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 through the walls and filters that customers...

Brand Discovery

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 communicating badly. How is it, then, that some brands succeed even without any...

Brand Personality

Every brand can be anthropomorphized to a certain degree. That doesn’t mean every brand needs a little mascot character with big eyes and a funny name; it means that at the heart of every brand is a set of characteristics, akin to a human personality, that...

Branding and Marketing

The practice of branding is a distillation of activities that were first developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as marketing, advertising, public relations, graphic design (once called commercial art), and corporate identity. These intertwined areas...

Branding Options

The world changed rather dramatically toward the end of the twentieth century. The end of Soviet communism; the advent of the World Wide Web; an economic boom across Asia; the unification of Europe; investment in fiber-optic and wireless networks; the success of...