BrandlandUSA™

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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How did Greyhound get to be more interesting a brand than Delta? Certainly, both have been through bankruptcy. And now, to travel a distance, both can be about the same price. But with the new designs and service of Greyhound, the line is on its way to being a far more interesting, and useful, brand [...]

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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 [...]

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MIAMI – There could not have been a more perfect Florida ambassador, and airline, than National Airlines. When the “Sunshine Airline” merged into Pan American World Airways in 1980, a uniquely Florida institution was lost. Arguably, it was the only airline that promoted a state as its marketing position and achieved national prominence with that [...]

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It’s a fundamental of trademark law. To keep a trademark, you have to use it. My old Virginia bank Virginia National Bank learned that lesson. It dropped the name VNB, and merged a number of times into what is now Bank of America. A few years ago, a new start-up bank decided it wanted the [...]

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The airline backpack is a tired old idea that has mostly been forgotten, save those nifty retro backs reintroduced by Pan Am One. USAirways has come up with a new version of the airline bag; they posted a picture of it on Photobucket. It’s a great idea to promote your brand; not only does the [...]

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HOUSTON – Look out for a new Continental Airlines (NYSE: CAL) Boeing 737-900ER, which is painted with a retro livery to commemorate the airline’s 75th anniversary, which will be celebrated July 15, 2009. The livery was was originally used on aircraft beginning in 1947 and is called The Blue Skyway, was picked by Continental employees. [...]

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An Ad Age piece by Al Ries on value pricing got me thinking even more about how crummy the airline business has become, and how un-important branding is to particularly our American airlines. The story is called Variable Pricing is the Ultimate Brand-Destroyer. His point is that because of value pricing, consumers have turned air [...]

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AMSTERDAM – When governments come and go, companies that are dependable throughout the decades, even colonial companies, earn enormous goodwill. Such is the place of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, which is one of the major European carriers to Africa. While American carriers like Delta haved turned themselves into boring generic brands, and then they eliminate [...]

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