BrandlandUSA

NEW YORK - We noticed something interesting in how Estée Lauder manages its brands. The mention came in a press release where Coach (NYSE: COH) and Estée Lauder (NYSE: EL) decided to market a […]

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The late landscape architect Charles Gillette had a trademark in his garden designs. Gillette, so focused on symmetrical designs and order, was not afraid to leave something wild or out-of-sync in his landscape. If he was landscaping a property, and there was a native cedar tree stuck in an odd location, he would sometimes leave […]

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No, I’m not talking about the late Jerry Garcia. I’m talking mums. Potted mums.
I have been thinking about a pot of red mums that sit by the walkway into my house. Different things happen to mums in different economies. When things are booming and we all have cash, we tend to get some new ones […]

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The ideas of branding and brand revival follow closely the ideas of historic preservation. There is outright restoration (making an exact copy), renovation (taking pieces of the old and redoing) and adaptive reuse. We heard another historic preservation analogy that fitted the branding process, in today’s New York Times. It was a story on preservationist […]

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Saturday Night Live and British Airways’ new LCY-JFK flight one are two different business ideas illustrating an important idea, namely adaptive reuse.Traditionally, adaptive reuse is applied to historic preservation of buildings. It is a very specific idea; to properly understand it you need to go and read James Marston Fitch’s seminal book, Historic Preservation. In […]

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New York is, of course, a great tourist destination. But with vacancy rates going up, it needs a spurt.
Recently, The Fantastiks came back. That’s quite interesting. And then a version of the old Horn &  Hardart Automat returned, in the format of Bamn!
It got us thinking. What are the other tourism opportunities out there […]

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Actually, there are many more, but I just present these to get them off my brain and onto a page.

Co-branded VISA and Mastercard. I mean, how great is that for a brand to get yourself connected to a bank that’ll rack your customers with 25 to 30 percent interest, an interest rate that used to […]

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There’s one indisputable truth about brand naming: your name is only as good as your company, product, or service. Consumers rarely invest in something based solely on the perceived quality of its name. They invest in a product’s or brand’s reputation. Names can influence purchase decisions, but they don’t unilaterally prevent or guarantee them.
Which leads […]

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Building your brand name used to be about running commercials. No longer.
Today, with new technology, you still need to run commercials and do in-store, and all those other things. But now, you need to do other things, including posting content about your company on the web.
One of the easiest ways to do it is through […]

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Whenever we talk business, my friend Tom tells me the following:
“You can’t fight the macro.”
He means, of course, that while you might have a good business idea, if it goes against macro trends, you better rethink it. You can’t fight it.
I think of the macro when I ponder a “recovery” in home-builder stocks. The reality […]

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