Prashant Malaviya suggested in the June issue of the University of Chicago Journal of Consumer Research (subscription required) that people familiar with the subject of an advertisement are likely to elaborate on it in their minds relationally. That is, they think of it in terms of other products or services in the field and then [...]

In a blog post meant for free-lancers, Dave Navarro suggests that most don’t know the answers to the following questions:

Why Do You Enjoy Being My Customer?
What Else Do You Wish My Business Did?
Who should you tell about my business?

It’s not just free-lancer who cannot answer these questions. It’s many, many businesses. And many of those [...]

People often weigh buying decisions on how they anticipate they will feel about the purchase after they’ve done it.
A recent study by researchers at University College London found that people almost always misinterpret how they are going to feel and consequently go on to make poor decisions.
The job of brand is to see to it [...]

ADVERTISE SOMETHING THAT THEY ARE INTERESTED IN!
Again researchers are showing us anew what common sense has said all along. People pay attention to stuff if they already have an interest.
A new study by researchers from the Netherlands and the University of Michigan used eye tracking and timing equipment to measure what really got subjects attention. [...]

A small chain of specialty restaurants has discovered that most of its new customers (65 percent of them) come from word of mouth. The rest are a result of the owner’s advertising campaign.
Question: To get more business, should the owner invest more in advertising to reach customers who have not yet heard of him or [...]

Image courtesy of Neutron, LLC.
I don’t know what else there is to know.
This brilliance from Marty Neumeier’s book, Zag. I’m buying it today!

The Brand Gap
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Here is another act of brilliance from Marty Neumeir. This slide show is visually outlines his classic book,
Minding the Brand Gap. Click through the slides and learn the three big questions about focus every brand
should answer along with the five disciplines of brand building.
Posted by Harry Chittenden

We are all familiar with the “elevator speech,” those carefully crafted sentences that organically relay important messages about our business. Sometimes we work so hard to craft them, we forget about the main message. Ourselves. Our audience is going to pay much more attention to our personal brand than the elevator speech, no matter how [...]

I recently saved a couple of articles on current thinking in psychology. While neither is on branding, they both demonstrate first how brands are constructed in the mind and secondly how the mind uses brands to make decisions.
Scientific American published an extensive article by Phillip E. Ross called “The Expert Mind.” The theme of the [...]

Brand voice is one more way your brand is distinctive.
While designers and art directors are thinking about how your brand looks, copywriters are thinking about how it sounds. How does your brand express itself? Is it hip and sassy? Or more erudite? Formal or casual? Folksy or uptown?
Voice helps reveal – and reinforce – the [...]