Garland Pollard is publisher/editor of BrandlandUSA. Since 2006, the website BrandlandUSA.com has chronicled the history and business of America’s great brands. He has decades of experience across all media, including newspapers, TV, radio, magazines and the web.
When folks look for water skis, brand names like Obrien and Connelly come to mind. The main brand that comes to mind, though, is the Cypress Gardens Dick Pope brand. The question is what happened to Cypress Gardens Dick Pope skis? There was a Dick Pope Jr AND Cypress Gardens.MORE HERE
Wall Street may be all atwitter at the merger of Payless Shoe Source and Stride Rite. And after all, the company now owns some great American brand names. Classic and priceless brand names like Keds, Pro-Keds, Sperry Top-Sider and Saucony. Actually, they are not EXACTLY priceless, as Payless, led byMORE HERE
It’s about time that McDonald’s stopped running away from what it is. A new set of “I’m loving it” commercials details the career of Karen King, who worked herself up from swing manager at the chain. We all might laugh about McJobs, but the reality is that a lot ofMORE HERE
Happy day. Kmart hasn’t given up on Blue Light yet. The height of 70s tacko became a dot-com story with Bluelight.com. Today, Kmart seems to be terribly sensible about what to do about the legacy of Blue Light Specials. No longer does a harried store manager need to run aroundMORE HERE
Like John Deere, most everyday farm folks know the name Royster, which has roots in the Royster Guano company, born in 1885. Why would a company dump that brand equity? MORE HERE
In April of 2006, Bank of America announced that it would consider dumping Visa in favor of its own credit card network named BankAmericard. The announcement isn’t all to the story. Because actually, Bank of Americard sort of brought the cards back in the summer of 2005, albeit as a co-branded Visa. The offering read: “In 1958, before there was Visa, Bank of America introduced the first credit card to the world–the BankAmericard.” MORE HERE
Hilton sent out a release that the newly minted Waldorf=Astoria Collection will now include the Arizona Biltmore, La Quinta and Grand Wailea. The brand operates functionally as a Hilton, but with its own Waldorf identity. MORE HERE
It would be hard to create a candy brand more perfect than Willy Wonka’s. From the start (and as fictionally conceived by the British author Roald Dahl) Wonka embodies every characteristic a great candy brand might have. In fiction, it comes out of a wildly psychedelic factory, each candy sub-brand,MORE HERE
In our modern age, one of the biggest legacies we will leave is our products and services — the thousands of consumer items and corporate names that run through our lives: the Ukrop’ses and Capital Ones, the Reynolds Wraps and ChapSticks. Those names have evolved through the years. Indeed, theMORE HERE