BrandlandUSA

SAVANNAH – Entries are just out in the Savannah College of Art & Design’s Phoenix Project, an yearly contest of Prof. Sean Trapani, a specialist in branding and copywriting. The idea? Take an old brand and reinvent it for today. A full gallery of all the entries is at Phoenix Entries; we will be writing [...]

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NEW YORK – The branding firm Graj + Gustavsen said that Founding Partner Simon Graj has been named to Intellectual Asset Management magazine’s inaugural list of the World’s 250 Leading Intellectual Property Strategists. The IAM 250 – A Guide to the World’s Leading IP Strategists debuted in the publication’s April 2009 edition, set to launch [...]

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SARASOTA – From $40 in 1998 to $3.80 in 2009. That’s not good. Some see disappointment. But not everyone. The news recently was that the Italian luxury shoe maker Tod’s had purchased shares in Saks (NYSE: SKS). Apparently Diego Della Valle, Tod’s Chairman (called the Italian Ralph Lauren), purchased 8.48 million shares, and he paid [...]

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LONDON – The UK seems to have been a holdout in the brand-washing category, namely dumping old brands in favor of invented ones. But this is no longer the case. We heard about the news that the Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley brands are to be scrapped in favor of the Spanish [...]

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Europeans are trying to bring back Polaroid and its SX-70 instant film. This points up a very important idea in brand preservation, namely that it is important to keep something continuous going as it is hard to start something completely from scratch. Today, as companies morph and change, it is important for company owners to [...]

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SAN ANGELO, TEXAS – They were, and are, icons of America. The windmill, specifically the Aermotor windmill. Pictured at right, an Aermotor windmill tail in a museum in Palmetto, Florida. All of us know the iconic Aermotor, though maybe not by name. Even fewer still realize that they are still made. The company has been [...]

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Fun recent searches that landed Americans on BrandlandUSA. The keywords are in bold and our smart-alec comments after: Chrysler Factory Tours. To bad they don’t have them; they might actually make some cash as I would love to see a restored Plymouth with Torque-Flite! Discontinued Charles of the Ritz. Once a great brand, now gone. [...]

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While I think I ate more Banquet (an RCA subsidiary) and Morton frozen dinners, Swanson has taken the crown of being the official “retro” TV dinner. And why not? They invented the name. I liked the Salisbury Steak the best. That’s why I showed it in the picture at right. Pinnacle Foods Corp. now owns [...]

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So we are watching American Life, in its redux of the Saturday night early 1970s CBS lineup (Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Newhart) and we look at the credits at the end. MTM Productions gives thanks to clothing by House of Worsted-Tex and Norman Todd. Today, lets look at House of Worsted-Tex, the men’s clothing [...]

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Last Friday, during the gut-wrenching (literally) Farrah documentary, we got to see the commercial again. Not Farrah shampoo (a Faberge product), nor her Mercury car ad, but Noxzema Shave Cream. We still use Noxzema, thought the plain medicated kind in the white can is hard to find, and not all stores stock it. Proctor & [...]

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