How's your collaboration?

-How well do you and your colleagues work together?

-How well do you brainstorm?

-How do ideas flow within your organization?

If you are interested in a white paper that can help you and the people you work with work better, let me know. It's called Better Brainstorming in the Idea Economy. I'll gladly email you a copy. I'd be interested in your feedback.

-g

Empowered Health and Living Brands

Talking with a colleague of mine last week, our conversation led to an interesting
place, one that continues to stick with me:

EMPOWERED CONSUMERS POWER BRANDS.

That was it. The simplicity of the idea caught me off guard. But it made a lot of sense.

It cleared a lot of what I've been thinking about lately with regard to brands, and why some win and some lose. Brands like Apple, Whole Foods, NIKE as well as Dell and Scion (build your own) underscore a powerful concept at work today. Brands that are able to empower their customers and make them feel a part of the brand, are more successful than those brands that don't.

Let's face it, successful brands have a way of putting the consumer in a position of power that ultimately power the brand beyond its competitors.

I call them Empowered Health & Living Brands. These are any brands in any category that give consumers information, education and confidence for the purposes of making their life better and more enjoyable. The above brand, Vitasana multivitamins, talks about "adding a little life to your life." While the ad was done a few years ago during the height of the growth of natural supplements, the tactic still rings true today.

Powerful brands get that way by empowering consumers.

Unique Selling Proposition

Let's face facts, without a clear and compelling selling promise, your offering is bound to get lost in the sauce.

This week, the team brainstormed names for a new service one of our larger clients is launching. It represented a potentially great new service at the retail level. The team was juiced and ready to create the future.

After an initial round of naming, we started to hit on richer, more interesting names that seemed to have one thing in common. They had a powerful and distinctive promise "baked" right into the name. The benefit of this is that the new names did much of the heavy lifting in the mind of the consumers. They didn't have to work hard in their head to figure out what benefit the company provided. A great name is literally a conversation starter. It moves a consumer instantaneously ahead which means the name has a much greater chance of being seen, noticed and acted upon.

If you're developing a new product or company name, make sure the names you consider work hard right from the start. They telegraphic the values and promise you wish to communicate. Words matter and so does their meaning in the marketplace. Choose wisely.

Day in, day out

A little down time

Time to disengage.

Happy Fourth of July...

Shoestring Creative Solutions

A stack of Monopoly money. A pair of googly eyes. Actors playing it over the top.

Geico adds to its Gekko, Cavemen and celebrity sidekick series with a stripped down, dumbed down solution around the money you could be saving with Geico.

Genius or just annoying?