It’s time for Romper Room. Again. A Chicago company, River West Brands, has re-registered the defunct brand name, according to the USPTO. If you lived at the tail end of the baby boom and into Generation X, you remember Romper Room. It was a brilliant concept, led by Baltimore schoolteacherMORE HERE
Can Wal-Mart feel? Does Disney possess self-control? Researchers in psychology at Harvard University are interested in how people attribute mental capacities to corporations and brands, and whether those attributes influence how people act towards companies and their products. The folks at Harvard say that the survey will take about 10MORE HERE
The Today Show recently featured the effort to bring back old brands, including the Hydrox cookie. The big question. Does Donny Deutsch actually wear Hai Karate? Ideas? Comments? Contact the BrandlandUSA editor. We love to hear about old brands being revived, dead brands resuscitated or great brands in jeopardy. WeMORE HERE
CHICAGO – The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Bonwit Teller will be coming back. It will come back as a boutique, now that revitalization company River West Brands of Chicago has bought the brand and intellectual property. Chicago-based River West Brands is a company that specializes in brand re-launches, and theMORE HERE
Our memory of this place is totally gone. But apparently there was a Village Inn Pizza chain that had arcades. It was a big enough operation that individual franchises had their own game tokens. Here, a token from the Norfolk, Virginia location at the Janaf Shopping Center. We had itMORE HERE
The excellent blog The Agitator, for non-profits, had a great post on bringing old charity brands back to life. Fascinating. Here at BrandlandUSA, we always MISSED that United Way was no longer Community Chest. Community Chest will have free advertising in perpetuity because of Hasbro’s game, Parker Brothers’ Monopoly. LookingMORE HERE
In the 1960s and 70s, television provided hours of entertaining but educational fare for kids. Things like ABC’s Schoolhouse Rock. The best of the best was In the News, a CBS Saturday morning news segment for kids. It was only one news segment, but it was slickly produced and toldMORE HERE
The idea of a brand-life cycle is (mostly) flat-out wrong. Certainly, brands have phases and iterations, but the wholesale jettisoning of old brands by large conglomerates is wasteful, especially in an era when much manufacturing has been sent abroad and licensing, sales and distribution are the remaining competencies of manyMORE HERE
Miss those pneumatic airline audio programs? There was a time not so long ago when airline music and audio came from what were basically stethoscopes. It was the era of the pneumatic airline headset. The music was piped in through an air tube. The airline had plastic headphones, with rubberMORE HERE
We are gloomy and cry when thinking about American manufacturing and electronics. But it is always instructive to look back. One top product electronics product of the late 1950s was the Zenith Trans-Oceanic, or Royal 1000. To this day, it is seen as one of the top consumer radios ofMORE HERE