The key question a brand must answer is, "Who are we?" The best answer to this is one that is short and clear.
The answer cannot be, "this, and this, and, oh yes, this." No matter how complex the reality is, a brand's keynote expression must be immediately graspable if it is to have real power. And it still needs to be true.
In a recent conversation with a very senior person at a financial institution, my colleague was told, "I think private wealth managers will have a hard time seeing the value of branding—they see marketing as a cost center, not a driver of sales."
Hold it. How did we go from branding to marketing in one sentence like that?
Yesterday we had Thanksgiving dinner at our neighbors house. The kids—who have all known each other since birth—piled up their plates with whatever they wanted most (including Brussels sprouts), and our host asked each of us to express in a single word what we were thankful for. Answers: "Food," "Friends," "Family," "Death"...
One of the biggest marketing and sales challenges wealth management firms face is differentiating their offering in a crowded field. Here's an explanation of how a strong brand can move your firm past competing on price.
Tronvig Group has launched the DiMenna Children's History Museum website as part of the New-York Historical Society website. Featured on this new website is a kids section that showcases the first of three kid-friendly educational games: Sloppy Copy.
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 and interesting people.
In August I took a two week vacation during which I was totally disconnected—off of emails, phone calls, any kind of electronic communication. I became (by the second week) very comfortable with my slowed down and uninterrupted life. I adjusted enough during that short span of two weeks that when I came back to the office I was—for a while—a kind of foreigner there.
That was back at the end of August. Now it's October, and I have fully recovered.
Rarely do you get handed a project with some of the coolest, strangest images and ideas on the planet as your visual assets. This was the case for the book website for Madeline Schwartzman's See Yourself Sensing.
One of our new designers is fresh out of school and exudes talent and potential. She also spent her first few working days instant messaging her friends and watching TV shows WHILE doing her assigned design work. She was doing what might be called visual multitasking.
My art directors, who range in age from their mid 20's to their mid 50's, were shocked by these work habits.
During the first 5 seconds after I arrive on a website, I need to know that I have arrived at the right place.
In my working career, I have taken many types of vacations. They have ranged in duration from a rather luxurious 6 weeks to nothing at all, and experience has shown that a contiguous period of at least two weeks is the most valuable.
Probably the two most valuable things that have happened to me as a business person were:
1) Being laid off from a corporate job and having to start a business on my own, forcing the question of how to survive and support a family without a regular salary, benefits, or anything to rely on but myself.
2) My former business partner's choice to walk off with all our clients, leaving me with the company debt and virtually no business.
“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?
Radiation Disaster: What impresses me most about nuclear materials is the inhuman scale of their behavior. For example, what does it mean that some radioactive materials, like Plutonium 244, have a half life of 80 million years? This "half-life" is 8,000 times longer than all of recorded human history. This has to make you wonder, at least a little, if we are out of our league when we mess with this kind of stuff.
"Reason should investigate its own parameters before declaring its omniscience."
(Immanuel Kant)
When I was in junior high school, I remember being both arrogant and stupid. I say this because I remember thinking I was the smartest kid in the class. I thought this because I got the best grades and I spent time thinking about things that did not seem to interest others. Only later did I learn there are many forms of intelligence.
