People are still trying to understand the most important thing of all – how the healthcare bill affects them and their families. Patients make the decision as to their care provider based on their perception of that provider’s brand. Any industry where the service provider has a unique skill set that is not commonly understood by the public will always be driven by perception. At no time in recent history has a medical professional’s brand been as important as today. With 32 million Americans who did not previously have health insurance now gaining access, the medical profession is sure to see an uptick in demand.

Today, the web is the most powerful branding tool available. The web provides more access to branding opportunities than ever before with extremely low barriers of entry.  The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years – from 8 percent in 2005 to over 40 percent today. Facebook, for example, currently has in excess of 350 million active users on a global basis with 50 percent of active users logging into the site every day. This presents a unique opportunity for direct communication or “digital direct marketing”.

A recent Forrester Healthcare online survey pointed out that even for “older: disease categories with average ages of 50-60 years, roughly 20 percent of all patients turn to social computing for health information.”

Your usage of these tools should be in line with your brand. If you are the doctor who is perceived as cutting edge, innovative and accessible than you will be well off to utilize a lot of social media. If you are renowned as the conservative expert in your field, using online press releases to distribute information about your latest accolades will bolster your brand.

In addition to the web, now is a unique time for medical professionals to utilize the services of a public relations arm to position themselves as leaders. From small practices looking to make a deeper connection into their local communities to large national healthcare corporations seeking national exposure, there has never been a better opportunity for big brands to expand, and smaller brands to grow and compete. Close to 95 percent of all Americans get their information from a seemingly unbiased third party source (television, radio, magazine, newspaper, blog, etc), which can lend credibility to a brand looking for higher visibility and long-term presence within the healthcare industry.

There are tremendous opportunities to effectively brand your self in a cost effective manner. Your brand and in turn, business, will grow with properly executed initiatives.  Medicine is a profession where patients make decisions based upon reputation, and you stand to gain immensely by being proactive in creating the perception your target audience has of you.

BrandlandUSA guest columnist Adam Bierman is president of The BRANDX GROUP, a marketing and branding firm in Los Angeles, California.

That’s right, they fail.

The word must morph into a brand name. That is, we don’t think of the chaste when booking a flight on Virgin Atlantic. Virgin is the linguistic shorthand for all that the brand means to you. Tide is a detergent, not the ebb and flow of the ocean. It is this transfer of meaning that makes brand names so powerful. They can take an understandable concept and co-opt its use to a brand context. Or, they can use coined names that were never words and imbue the “empty vessel” with the brand’s meaning. In this case, there’s no meaning to replace.

So, should you conclude that the meaning behind a word is immaterial when considering names for a brand? If the word’s meaning is something to overcome, should we agonize over its relevance? Well, yes and no.

Yes, in that early meaning establishes the brand’s essence and aligns those managing the brand around a central positioning. For example, “Amazon” was likely chosen because the benefit of the brand was to be wide selection. The vastness of the river was an apt metaphor. The company focused the brand on a benefit rather than a product, and vast selection is core to the brand, regardless of the type of product. Consider the Toys R Us name. It elicits little beyond describing the product line and limits expansion beyond toys.

On the other hand, far too much angst is expended over the pre-transferred meaning. Brand folks spend too much time agonizing over the day one word and too little imagining the on-going meaning the name should morph into. This often leads to overly descriptive names where the brand never really gets past the literal word. Like Sony Reader versus Amazon Kindle. I can tell people I love my Kindle and the testimonial is understood. If I tell them I have a Reader, I need to include the Sony endorsement-an endorsement that doesn’t conjure an e-book specialization. The result is that Sony fails to create a new e-book brand name that takes on its desired meaning. It’s a product focus, adding nothing to position the brand or tell a deeper story.

Conversely, Kindle uses the imagery of igniting the imagination out of the gate and then quickly eclipses that by co-opting the word and turning it into a brand. The company has a basis for storytelling, and the brand owns a proprietary name centered around an idea rather than a thing. Amazon may or may not continue to exploit the spark idea, but the essence of the brand is established, and the company can use it as a filter to vet future brand decisions.

In these tough economic times, the tendency is to revert to the “safest” choices. “I don’t have the money to teach people what my brand stands for, I have to describe it in the name.” But, the perceived safe move is nothing more than an illusion. The true risk is an undifferentiated brand name that never graduates beyond its literal definition.

Steven Addis is CEO of Addis Creson, a strategic branding agency dedicated to creating positive change. The independent, 25-year-old company partners with clients to achieve growth through sustainable brand innovation.
www.addiscreson.com

The IAM 250 is the result of Intellectual Asset Management’s extensive research process, which included five months of face-to-face and telephone interviews, as well as e-mail exchanges, with several hundreds of international intellectual property professionals. Honorees had to be nominated by at least three people who work in organizations unrelated to their company, as well as whom further research showed to have exceptional skill sets and profound insight into development, creation and management of IP value.

Grounded in creating an enhanced market perception of a brand, G+G’s brand management and licensing process positions companies in the marketplace by considering the best way to grow businesses on an individual basis. These approaches include: category extension and new channels of distribution through brand licensing, sub branding, Intellectual Property sharing and brand asset maximization.

G+G has developed brands and created retail and online projects for Sears, Timberland, Carpet One, Saks Fifth Avenue, Levi’s and Target. G+G was most recently hired by HGTV to develop a brand extension and product licensing platform.

About Intellectual Asset Management magazine

Intellectual Asset Management magazine is a publication that reports on intellectual property as a business asset. The magazine’s primary focus is on looking at how IP can be best managed and exploited in order to increase company profit, drive shareholder value and obtain increased leverage in the capital markets. Its core readership primarily comprises senior executives in IP-owning companies, corporate counsel, private practice lawyers and attorneys, licensing and technology transfer managers, and investors and analysts. IAM magazine is part of the IP Media Group.

These brand names have value in a web-centric world.

With that in mind, let’s look at one newspaper, the New York Herald-Tribune. When the newspaper died in the 1960s, what survived was the International Herald-Tribune and the supplement, the New York magazine. The latter was rescued by Clay Felker in 1964 and turned into a very profitable magazine brand. Each flourished; perhaps one could argue that if the Herald-Tribune company had sold off or shut down the newspaper and kept New York and the IHT, it would still be in business. (We wonder how long New York Times Co. is going to keep the IHT brand? We believe that they should NOT change it. What they are doing now is perfect, leveraging the content of the Times, but still keeping the IHT identity. It’s a totally different paper. NYT did shut down the IHT website.)

I noticed on the website Newspapertiger.com that Journal Register had closed down a number of flags. (Read a great Alan “Newsosaur” Mutter analysis here.) While not having a familiarity with the exact market, in general any local newspaper that has been around for over four decades has much regional clout, and long relationships with local advertisers, even if they have been ruined by over-leveraged companies. In addition, they have back issues that sometimes go back 100 years. This is all legit “goodwill” that needs to be sold for cheap, not ditched. Dirks, Van Essen & Murry, a longtime broker, handled the sales; I am sure they would love to talk to anyone with cash.

Now, I am not saying these papers have LOTS of value. They have small value. What I am saying is that there is some value there, and with the investment of tiny amounts of money, and large amounts of expertise and time, many of these properties do not have to disappear. Perhaps the company could offload them for nominal amounts for a five-year balloon payment of some reasonable sum. That way there might be some long-term hope for the local flags.

It looks like some newspapers are being saved. For instance, in the Media Post story by Erik Sass, he writes that says that The East Hartford Gazette was closed, but its longtime editor Bill Doak has reincarnated it as “The Gazette,” serving as publisher, chief writer, and deliveryman. This type of setup has a long history in newspapering.

According to the Media Post story, the daily newspapers, The Herald of New Britain and the Bristol Press, were “saved from closure at the last minute when they were sold to Mike Schroeder, a former Newsday executive who also bought three weeklies: the Wethersfield Post, the Newington Town Crier, and the Rocky Hill Post.”

God bless Schroeder.

Interesting that Journal Register could not find buyers for the Harlem Valley weeklies. Some of these readership areas are very affluent and that the company was unable to find a buyer speaks not only to the crazy market, but to the company’s utter lack of imagination in figuring out how to run these small papers. The reality is that most of these papers could have run themselves if given independence from the parent company, but realistically, they sucked so much life and cash out of all these small papers for so long that it is no wonder they could not survive. I wonder if the company had so much to worry about that it just couldn’t do it all in time.

A few mentioned in the story:

Taconic Press (Journal Register subsidiary)

• Millbrook Round Table
• The Voice Ledger of Pleasant Valley
• The Gazette-Advertiser of Rhinebeck
• The Pawling News Chronicle
• The Harlem Valley Times
• The Hyde Park Townsman
• The Register Herald of Pine Bluffs
• The Putnam County Courier

Connecticut (apparently) closed:

• Bloomfield Journal and is said to be preparing to close the Shoreline Times
• Pictorial Gazette
• Branford Review
• Clinton Recorder and The Advertiser, of East Haven.

Interested in saving the actual newspaper? Read our post 20 Ways to Save the Daily. You might not agree with them all, but I think you will find that there are some suggestions that make you think. You might also read my story on saving newspaper flags; there I mention that over a decade ago I revived a newspaper name in Richmond, The Richmond State. We lasted for two years; perhaps at age 28 I wasn’t ready to run a newspaper. But in that scenario, I learned that using an old flag made a start-up much easier. I can look back on the project and see many mistakes that are easy to see in hindsight; one thing that was NOT a mistake as taking an old legacy newspaper flag and reviving it. Instantly, I found a spot in local libraries, and with the community.

I would love to hear from some folks in NY and Connecticut about these individual flags. While many cannot be rescued immediately, the folks at Journal Register should listen to suggestions on how to keep these newspapers alive in some form, so that these great towns can still have a voice. When these newspapers disappear, it is not like a filling station closing up. The soul of a community often leaves with the weekly newspaper.

That’s sort of a saucy way to describe the message-board search engine Twing.com. While Google and the rest search up vast amounts of news, web pages and the like, Twing is all about allowing users to search the Internet’s fragmented online communities, user groups, bulletin boards and message boards.

“People have not been paying attention to this,” says Scott Germaise, Twing’ s director of product management, as he talks about the way that information is spread across user forums. Twing, based in Jersey City, N.J., launched in January 2008, specifically to help its users make sense of this explosion of content.

Message boards are an unglamorous area that has sometimes been forgotten by search engines, yet about 28 percent of Internet users regularly read online forums and participate, more than blogs, according to stats from Forrester’s North American Social Technographics Online Survey, Q2, 2007.

Forums pre-dated web

Bulletin board systems, or BBSs, were popular in the era of 300-baud Hayes modems. They catered to niche communities, and as they moved online (and new ones were created) they became easy and cheap ways for like-minded folk to share information.

Today, certain items from major message boards like the foodie-oriented Chowhound show up in web searches, but mostly, the sort of information that is posted on message boards is really insider, and typically mixed in with repetitive data. This means that it is not the sort of page that is practical to mainstream Google readers. In fact, if some of the pages showed up on searches, they might not make a lot of sense. Twing takes a methodical approach to ferreting it out.

“There is some serious architecture to this,” says Germaise, who says the algorithms are “optimized for understanding consumers who use forums.”

In the old days, when companies wanted to monitor brands, they would hire clipping services. Today, many p.r. agencies and brand managers rely on simple Google news searches. If they do just that, they are missing a second level of information out there in niche online communities. These consumers are useful not just because they buy, but because they influence others.

Twing is not just useful to see if there are mentions of your brand name. Instead, Twing’s Buzz Graphs allow you to save and graph the trends, themes and subjects, and compare them to other brands. On Twing, you can actually plot the usage of a keyword, and then match it against other keywords over a particular period of time.

We tried a few Buzz Graphs:

• At right, Florida (in the green) compared to Las Vegas, over the last year. We are not sure what the search results mean, but looking at the graph helps us begin to ask the right questions if we are thinking about how each is marketed.
• As a test, we compared Hummer and Jeep for the last 3 months. What do we know about the two brands? We know that the Hummer brand (green) has been under consideration of being sold or dropped by General Motors because of its low sales and gas guzzling ways. Jeep (the brown line), however, is in the lead-up to its fall selling season. The graphs match reality perfectly. Hummer is stagnant, and Jeep is getting some mentions.
• We also compared Holiday Inn and Hilton. Hilton (green line) is obviously a more valuable word, though we guess the fame of a certain publicity friendly heiress confuses the search term a bit.

The site does not show whether the mentions are positive or not, and we guess that in these days, except if you are a Wall Street Brokerage, bad press is better than no press. Germaise hopes brand marketers can figure out new ways to use the data. The big question everyone should ask?

“What are the things that are not obvious?” says Germaise.

Do you have a suggestion? If so, add one at the end.

To send them to your friends, see our Facebook application called BrandlandUSA’s 100 Brands to Bring Back.

1. Fisher Body. Every American used to look for these below the doors of GM cars. Can’t they use the logo occasionally? We know it appears on a new company that sells buses, so that is better than nothing.
2. F. W. Woolworth. What a waste to lose this American company.
3. Englehard Metals. Mr. Platinum, Charles Englehard, had his company closed down by BASF.
4. Buddy L Toys. Pressed steel toys made by the Moline Pressed Steel Company might be a bit dangerous today, but hey, I am sure no worse than any other toy.
5. International Harvester Scout. Can’t somebody make this thing again?
6. Burroughs Computer. Made history. And now gone.
7. Garfinkel’s. As much about D.C. as you can get in a department store.
8. B. Altman. What a screw up that was that killed this great, stylish N.Y. department store.
9. Hot Shoppes. Marriott started here; please bring it back J. Willard Jr.
10. MCI. The scandal is already forgotten.
11. Euclid Trucks. Great brand of big trucks, created a market.
12. First Boston. A notable WASPY investment firm, much beloved.
13. S.G. Warburg. What a great, substantial name.
14. Dillon Read. A great New York firm.
15. Canor Plarex. Cool raingear.
16. Brownie chocolate drink. Better than Yoo-Hoo.
17. El Marko indelible pens. Could have been Sharpie.
18. Howard Johnson’s. While you can stay in the hotel, you can’t eat the ice cream in a restaurant. Bring back those perverted clam strips.
19. Morton Frozen Foods. Love those Honey Buns.
20. Schiaperelli. A great fashion brand. We’ve heard its back, a bit.
21. Sea-Land. Why oh why did this not survive? We know the Maersk brand is great but Sea-Land started the category.
22. Riggs Bank. Right on the money, one of the great D.C. brand names.
23. Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company. Manny Hanny where are you? Certainly this might be a good brand for high end trust clients.
24. E.F. Hutton. Still talking, but the parent company that shut it down isn’t listening.
25. Paine Webber. UBS is fine but Paine Webber still is a household name.
26. Enron. We admit this goes into the weird category; we wonder if it would brand some discount space heaters?
27. Chemical Bank. Why is this great bank brand gone. WHY?
28. Hallicrafters. The way cool World War II radio brand could have a new market with HD radio.
29. Plymouth. Chrysler dealers would do well to have a moderately priced sedan to sell alongside their increasingly posh offerings.
30. Romper Room. The Claster Television show should be back. NOW. Romper Stompers are still great.
31. Time-Life Books. It’s very important to have sets of the History of America in the living room, though they Jumped the Shark when they sold that Wild West series.
32. Oldsmobile. We want Ninety Eight. We want Delta 88. We want Cutlass. We want Toronado. We want Vista Cruiser.
33. St. Charles Kitchens. Before AGA stoves were sold in the U.S., these were the upper middle class holy grail.
34. Biggs Furniture. The best reproductions in Virginia.
35. Kinney Shoes. How Foot Locker killed off the Great American Shoe Store is a mystery that will never be solved.
36. Mister Donut. Could-a been Dunkin’ Donuts. Better than Krispy Kreme. Still sold overseas.
37. Burger Chef. Could have been a contender. Could still be a niche player.
38. Dr. Denton’s. The inventor of kids’ footie pyjamas deserves to be a household name again.
39. Pan American World Airways. It lives, sort of, but Pan Am is only fun when they operate trans-Atlantic Boeing 747s.
40. White Tower. Like White Castle, but with tiny round burgers and much more stylish architecture. Shame on Tombrock for letting it go.
41. Decca Radar. Shame on Northrop Grumman for letting this brand of radar die. Way cool thing; it was a spin-off of the gramophone company.
42. Studebaker. Case study on how to kill a great American company, but just because the management was bad doesn’t mean the brand was.
43. United States Lines. Bring them, and the S.S. United States, back.
44. Rambler. The first real compacts. Retro hip, could be America’s Mini.
45. Addressograph Multigraph. While the Addressograph survived, it’s a great name even though the technology is not advanced anymore.
46. Grace Lines. Luxury liners to South America could have survived.
47. Climax Ginger Ale. Sexy name for a stodgy Richmond, Virginia ginger ale.
48. Statler Hotels. The first great hotelier’s name died off; there is no reason why it can’t come back if a luxury hotel brand is needed.
49. Look. Life has had a hard time returning, but we still want Look back, just like it was.
50. McCall’s. When Rosie killed it off, Gruner & Jahr should have switched the name back to McCall’s. Shame, shame.
51. Digital Computers. An early and great name in computing.
52. Twentieth Century Limited. Why this doesn’t run once a week between New York and Chicago, we don’t know. But don’t sell it as a commuter train. Make it plush and streamlined.
53. Disney’s True Life Adventures. Disney needs to go back in the lemming business.
54. Life of Virginia. Creeps killed it off; it is now Genworth. Stupid.
55. Wheat First Securities. Brokers used the name even after it merged with First Union because the name was trusted.
56. McDonnell Douglas. No wonder the DC-9 stopped selling. They started calling it the MD-80 and then the Boeing 717. But it was a Douglas Aircraft.
57. Burdines. The Florida department store deserves a second chance.
58. Kress. One of the early chain department stores; the Target of its day.
59. Realistic. One of the great store brands of Radio Shack. Optimus is great too.
60. Pullman Company. The brand may have become genericized, but the concept is good. A luxury railcar that contracts with a passenger railroad.
61. Eastern Airlines. Frank Borman, Eddie Rickenbacker and Laurence Rockefeller’s airline is missed.
62. General Cinema. Had way cool graphics, and were pretty hip for a theater chain.
63. Hofheimer’s. A regional shoe store based in Norfolk, Virginia; it could have been Nordstrom of the east.
64. Eaton’s. Sears should not have killed off this great Canadian store.
65. Mutual Radio. The original home of Larry King should come back as King’s last royal act. Re-brand a second CNN radio feed as Mutual.
66. Esso. Exxon is fine, but a little Esso would be fun.
67. J. Lyons Tea Rooms. Those great tea rooms of England. Not American but we love it.
68. Furness Withy & Co. The best steamers to Bermuda.
69. Pennsylvania Railroad. Pretty hard to bring back a railroad when some other company owns the track, but if Amtrak is pulled apart, it could be brought back like the U.K., where all the great railroad names returned after British Rail was broken up.
70. Abraham & Straus. The great Brooklyn department store is now a Macy’s. No more.
71. Tinee Giant. A way cool regional convenience store brand in Norfolk, Virginia, one of many that have disappeared
72. TWA. American would do well to bring TWA back as a luxury brand, or at least keep the name alive as a commuter brand instead of American Eagle, which means nothing.
73. Marshall Field’s. This will be a case study like New Coke.
74. Bonwit Teller. We read that a Chicago group is working on bringing this store back.
75. Pathé News. Fox News came back; why not Pathe? Their newsreels were synonymous with the history of the end of the Empire. Why not use the brand for a new newsgathering organization.
76. Peck & Peck. The most special New York department chain, once an adjective, lives as a boutique or store brand at Stein Mart. It still has punch. Read our story Revived Preppy Brands‘
77. Bohack’s. The New York area grocery chain once had over 700 stores across Brooklyn, Long Island and Queens. Founded by German immigrant H.C. Bohack, H.C. Bohack & Co. first opened in 1887; the chain closed in 1977. It was headquartered in Maspeth, where it had its own railroad line. While it is hard to revive a chain like this, the name would be an excellent one for a start up gourmet food line, a regional food store, a deli, a catering company or a food delivery service.
78. Irish Sweepstakes. It might not be American, but Americans sure loved the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes. Read more at Bring Back the Irish Sweepstakes.
79. Charles of the Ritz. Revlon purchased this brand, which was once owned by Squibb. Enjoli, a Ritz perfume brand, survived, but the full cosmetics line could have made it.
80. Hai Karate. Our reader, Gabriel Arregui, says for someone to “please bring back Hai Karate!” He has paid a small fortune on Ebay trying to get each of the scents (Oriental Lime, Spice, Musk and original), and loved those famous ads. You can read about it on this post about Donny Deutsch and Hai Karate.
81. Kellogg’s Concentrate. A concentrated cereal that was meant to be put on top of other cereals, but folks liked to eat it by themselves. And while they are at it, what happened to the Kel-Bowl Pack. And while they are at it, they need to reopen the Battle Creek Sanitarium for paying guests.
82. Cape Dory Yachts. They were the first big mass producers of sailboats. While the molds have been purchased by other boatyards, that is not the same thing as having the brand back.
83. Garfinkel’s. This was the quintessential District of Columbia society department store for wedding gifts and evening gowns. There is no reason why it is not around.
84. British Seagull. The Austin Healy or Barbour of outboard motors. Sadly, E.U. meddling made the two-stroke engines obsolete, but there is thankfully a cult following keeping the brand alive.
85. Klix Dog Candy. No sugar in these dog biscuits.
86. Sylvan Seal Milk. Once a northeast brand of milk.
87. Bond Bread. Once a sponsor of top TV shows.
88. Cliquot Club Ginger Ale. It was made with “real Jamaica ginger.” If we brought it back, we would say that it was made with REAL JAMAICAN and let drinkers guess what it was laced with!
89. Sunshine Lemon Coolers. Sunshine name survives on those cheese crackers, Cheez-its, but not on Lemon Coolers.
90. Blippo Choo Choo by Remco. This toy was a sort of Super Mario looking guy who ran a train and inside, were Erector set-like building blocks for kids.
91. Toni hair care products. While Toni Silkwave is still sold, other brands from this company, once a subsidiary of Gillette, are no longer found.
92. Royal Drene. Won’t dry hair out! A weird sounding name, we admit.
93. Screaming Mimi, the only toy rifle that shoots a grenade you can hear.
94. NBC Radio. Of course, there is still an NBC radio feed, but the network could easily reinvent itself for a modern age, using new programming ideas related to NBC content. Hey GE. Get Cameron Swayze from WCBS and let it rip! There is even an NBC Monitor fan page.
95. Great Shakes. A great product by the late General Foods. BrandlandUSA gets lots of hits of folks looking for Great Shakes. And why not the whole General Foods brand?
96. Desilu. The Lucy hit studio. Screen Gems came back. So did United Artists. And while we are at it, what happened to MTM, the studio that produced Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and Remington Steele?
97. Selchow & Righter. They made Scrabble and Parcheesi. While the games are still around, we don’t see the game brand around.
98. Rustler Steak House. And Ranch House. There are dozens of steak house brands of the 1970s. Love to visit some of them. Some weren’t that good. Others, like York, we never really knew. But Rustler? That was GREAT.
99. Branch Cabell. One of many great regional brokerage brands. This one was from Richmond. They became RBC Dain Rausher. Frankly, we spelled RAURSHER wrong but we are so annoyed that they got rid of the brand that we don’t even care to Google them.
100. Checker Cars. They were great cabs. And they were sensible cars for folks who had big families.
101. High’s Ice Cream. A great brand from Norfolk, Virginia with operations in the Southeast. Had ice cream shops too. They never should have disappeared. They ought to have High’s as a regional store brand sold at supermarket chains like Farm Fresh and Ukrop’s, which are both based in Virginia.
102. Rexall. A great brand of pharmacy. The signs are still up everywhere. Go to it.
103. GTE. Certainly that name recognition is still there. “GEE. No G-T-E.”

Got some ideas on this? Add ideas in the COMMENTS section after this article.