Recently, my work, magnificently, has taken a creative turn. From the cold and calculating straight sales world, I blessedly find myself surrounded by bright, lively and brilliant people. And we’re building something. As time goes on, I find myself doing something, oddly, impossibly, that looks like design. Believe it or not, once upon I time, I wanted to be a product designer. I enrolled in one of Canada’s top design institutions, and had a great time doodling and making IKEA furniture out of cardboard, but at the end of the year one of my professors asked me a simple question: He asked me what I wanted to do with design, upon graduation.

“I want to be a product designer of course. I want to work at a big company like Sony or Nike, making cool stuff like TV’s, sneakers and flying cars” He then dropped his head, and gave me the bad news. Or the Test. Depending on how you look at it.

“Oh…you wouldn’t be doing any of that. Only Engineers get to do that kind of thing.” Continue reading →

What is a brand? Is it a name? A logo? A funky design or attitude? A brand is a symbol for an idea. More specifically, a brandname is a word that can be uttered in any country, in any ‘language’ and mean the same thing. If a company is consistent and strong in repeating the same message over and over, in time, its brandname will become synonymous with an idea. If the company keeps changing its stripes, the name never catches on, and means nothing. McDonalds is about Family Food. Subway is about Fresh. Pepsi is about Fun. If you get really good at this, as a Brand Manager, and you create a brand new product and its name can describe an entire category. A few examples of unbeatable brandnames often mistaken for actual words:Xerox.Band-Aid.RollerBlade. Even the iPod for a time was the ‘placeholder’ word that meant ‘Digital Music Player’.

Moreover, brands are not only synonymous with ideas, they’re synonymous with colors. Again, this only works if, after decades of promotion, the company has been consistent:Coca Cola is Red. IBM is Blue. John Deere is Green

The list here is short, because frankly, many companies screw this up. They pick the wrong color. They don’t pick a color. They pick two colors. Pepsi, though a very successful company, foolishly picked Red and Blue as their colors when going up against the Red of Coca Cola (the leader in the market). Obviously, they should have just gone with deep Blue. They figured it out eventually, but they’re still stuck with a blue and red logo. Oops. Continue reading →