BrandlandUSA™

WARSAW, Virginia – On display in the window of this Northern Neck town at The Daily coffee shop is a snazzy Martin “40″ outboard motor. Once, there were many American outboard brands. While Evinrude, Johnson and Mercury survive, Martin did not. Martin Motors was from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. This motor was made when the brand [...]

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Tretorn. The Swedish brand still has that country club allure, made even more exotic by the fact that they are still a bit hard to find in U.S. stores, though now seem to be reappearing. Above, an old commercial for the brand that seems to date from a 1990s revival of the brand in the [...]

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Please make graphic designers stop! First Pepsico does a number on Tropicana, and then this G for Gatorade. Annoying. Can we not just make the product and sell it? We keep seeing it on the shelves and tried to ignore it. Certainly, the new design is tasteful. And we have to allow a company to [...]

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I’d like to send a warning to those cities that are looking at putting up a new venue for their local ball clubs: The era of “retro” parks could end soon. (Quite an upbeat theme for baseball’s Opening Day, eh?) This also dovetails into a recent post on the the status of a ballpark in [...]

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NEW YORK – We need to end this crap right now. Does everything have to be torn down, rebuilt, and then torn down again. So we are reading an AP story about Carlos Zambrano of the Cubs. It reads: Standing in the plush visitors’ clubhouse of Yankee Stadium, Carlos Zambrano made a plea for Chicago [...]

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SEATTLE – A small-scale, but highly unlikely, brand revival will take place Thursday when the expansion Seattle Sounders F.C. take the field in Major League Soccer. While the sport remains a niche pastime in the United States, this legacy nickname shows the power of branding with an established and eager audience. The original Seattle Sounders [...]

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This site loves old brands that tenaciously cling to life even as they become prey of short-sighted conglomerates or a develop into a punchline.In that spirit, let us salute the National Invitation Tournament, the postseason college basketball affair that pits 32 teams not good enough to reach the highly visible NCAA Tournament. Derided for decades [...]

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