BrandlandUSA™

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

On day one, the meaning of a new brand name can be found in the dictionary (assuming it’s a real word). For a fleeting moment, “Amazon” was a river, “Apple” was a fruit, and “Kindle” conjured fuel for fire. But if early, literal meanings remain over time, the managers of the brands fail. That’s right, [...]

[Read more →]

We got a great idea today from Israel tourism. It’s called Dinner in the Sky. The idea is simple. You build a platform, make a crane, serve folks from dinner and hoist them up in the sky. It’s called Dinner in the Sky. Certainly, it isn’t as snazzy as the rotating dining room atop the [...]

[Read more →]

Bob Seelert, the author of Start with the Answer: And Other Wisdom for Aspiring Leaders gives some advice to BrandlandUSA readers with an excerpt from his new book. We are glad to reprint it, as there is some good stuff there and  they were gracious enough to let us have it. The financial crisis that [...]

[Read more →]