Tronvig Group Blog

"What if company logos were honest" is a very funny blog post featuring the work of the artist and designer Viktor Hertz. It kind of gets you thinking though. I talk a lot about truth and why it matters for a brand. And yet look at all these great brands. They are jokingly being shown at odds with the reality of what they actually deliver. I think this situation shows, among other things, that a brand is NOT just a logo. But at the same time, it points out how our brand associations really are not rational.read more

Year End Message from Tronvig Group

Top Four Reasons Branding Can Pay Off For Financial Advisors

Bill Shannon Biographical Dictionary of New York Sports

I am not a traditional sports fan. I follow no particular professional sport. I have attended few professional sports events in my life. And yet, I do in fact love sports, all kinds of sports. Perhaps this is why the Bill Shannon Biographical Dictionary of New York Sports that we created for the New-York Historical Society has become so dear to me in the short time we have been working on it. It is not an homage to any one sport, but rather to the idea of sport, and the role that sport plays in the lives of great andread more

Adaptation and Loss

What a Website Wants

What does a website want? I was in a presentation yesterday and I explained it like this: For the first time user a website wants three things: 1. During the first 15 to 30 seconds that I spend on a website, I need to know that I have arrived at the right place. This is the brand establishment moment—a critical juncture—and the moment when I decide to stay or go. If the brand message—visuals, text, overall look and feel—are right, I recognize that I have, in fact, come to the right place, and I stick around long enough for number 2.read more

Apparent Failure Focuses the Mind

Value of Truth in Photography

“Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.” —Ansel Adams Our initial reaction to photographic images often leans towards belief or trust that the picture tells a true, unbiased story. By following these gut reactions, we are often led by the hand toward manipulation by advertisers, marketers, and product designers, but if we aren’t going to get the thing that we are shown, why even bother?read more

The many forms of intelligence: Is Snooki the smartest guy in the room?

Non-Profit Brand Basics

For any organization, arguably your most important brand asset is your name. Some names are better than others at explaining why you exist and why you matter. So, along with the name, most organizations also need a tag line. The tag line can serve various roles. For a non-profit it's most important roll is clarification. Some non-profits have very practical tag lines that do a good job of explaining why someone should support them. Others have taken on a very catchy marketing style and are often lofty sounding but vague tag lines. Sometimes these work. More often they do not.read more

The $5,000 Website

There is no such thing as a branded $5,000 website. There certainly exist many people who will design and build a business or even a non-profit website for $5,000 or even less for that matter, but in doing this, they are inevitably leaving aside much of the essential stuff that makes a website effective. Among the important things that probably populate the "left out" list are consumer/brand and competitive research, original photography, copywriting, original design application of a brand strategy, integration and training on a content management engine of some kind, etc. Leave out a few of these things, and youread more

Brand as Defence Against Attack

Branding is often managed like a propaganda war for the hearts and minds of brand consumers. This aligns with Wikipedia's basic description of propaganda: "As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda, in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience." Propaganda is not really about the truth, but about influencing minds, and so may resort to a variety of tactics such as errors of omission, selective truths and the straw man fallacy to make its case. Interestingly, if you look at the history of advertising and propaganda, they both came of age as vehicles of massread more

Addressing Objections: Web Conversion

Architects and Flash

Architects fell in love with Flash. I think it gave them the kind of absolute design control that they generally expect from the world. The problem, of course, is that the Internet no longer loves Flash, and it seems architects are slowly coming to terms. When Fast Company published "Why Can't the World's Best Architects Build Better Web Sites?" back in March 2010, it was a kind if epiphany for me. I understood then what was going on with our architect clients. It was a feeling of, "Oh, now I get it, it's not OUR architect clients. It's architects in general."read more

Brand Health

A strong brand is not a luxury to be enjoyed only by companies like Nike or Coca-Cola. It is a key factor in the success and prosperity of all businesses and non-profits, regardless of their revenues. Your brand health is guaranteed to have a significant impact on the consumer awareness of your brand AND your bottom line. It directly affects your ability to sell, to fundraise, to hire the best employees, and to grow. A healthy brand is the hallmark of a company or non-profit that is prepared to prosper.read more

Serendipity’s Value in Business

Serendipity is a significant factor in both the creative process and the business process. In my experience, making good use of serendipity is a combination of things: actively setting up opportunities, a willingness to go with the flow of events, the ability to see the thing that arises by chance, and finally, being prepared to seize the opportunity—prepared both in the sense of being open to the possibility and ready to take advantage of it. A recent article in the Economist, "In search of serendipity" reviewing the book "The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Tread more

Invisible Consequences: How Branding Impacts B2B Sales

Open Source Evolution

To Brand or Not To Brand

MDLF First 15 Years: Underwriting Democracy Through the Fourth Estate

Arakawa + Madeline Gins

Arakawa Shusaku — July 6, 1936 - May 19, 2010 It was 1991, and I was fresh from Japan, adrift in New York, and uncertain of my destiny. It was Madeline and Arakawa who found me (especially Madeline). They took me in, fed and nourished me with scraps of wisdom—and curry—from the kingdom of intellectual freedom in which they habitually dwelt. They surrounded themselves with young minds. They fed us daily from a seemingly endless supply of insight and compassion...and stories. They respected our thoughts and gave them room to grow.read more

The Way We Were: New York

I came to New York in 1991. Arriving with a only one suitcase and a vague plan for an extended visit. After my many years in Japan, New York was a bit of a culture shock. The subways did not have schedules (How could this be?), many of the public phones didn't work, the streets seemed way too wide, all the electronics people used seemed very antiquated... As a highly adaptable species these impressions were soon replaced by familiarity and affection. As I walked up Madison Avenue late this afternoon I was reminded of this early 90's New York.read more

You’ve Got 30 Seconds

"If your single most persuasive idea takes more than one sentence to explain, it probably isn't single. Or persuasive." —Lee Clow's Beard from Twitter, January 14th 2010. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but I make a habit of telling my clients that they only have thirty seconds to convey their keynote brand message. And we work very hard to achieve this so the website (and most of the time we are having this discussion in the context of a website) communicates its essential truths immediately and with word and visual expression.read more