All posts by Brent

Brand Culture | Disney And Apple

With Apple’s help, Disney is rethinking its retail presence:

Disney Stores, which the media giant is considering rebranding Imagination Park, will become more akin to cozy entertainment hubs. The chain’s traditional approach of displaying row after row of toys and apparel geared to Disney franchises will be given a high-tech makeover and incorporated into a new array of recreational activities. The goal is to make children clamor to visit the stores and stay longer, perhaps bolstering sales as a result. Over the next five years, analysts estimate that Disney will spend about $1 million a store to redecorate, reorganize and install interactive technology.

New York Times

Positioning: Defining Your Category

Harvard’s Mary Tripsas stresses the importance of categories:

GLANCE through a photo album of early automobiles and you’ll find an eclectic assortment of vehicles, including three-wheeled machines and bicycle-like contraptions. You’d be hard-pressed to identify many as cars.

Early consumers were confused, too, until innovators finally converged on a carriage-like design and coined the term “horseless carriage” in the 1890s, giving a clear point of comparison. More than 100 years later, we can learn from their example.

New York Times

Brand Culture | The Sunset Tower Hotel

Jeff Klein knows that a hotel is more than a destination:

A New York society brat turned serious hotelier and restaurateur, Mr. Klein, 39, bought the Sunset Tower in 2004 and has transformed it partly by throwing out the handbook of how entertainment industry haunts are managed, especially in Los Angeles. A ban on media leaks about boldface business deals or celebrity frolicking is strictly enforced. Mr. Klein is also very careful about curating a clientele.

New York Times

Brand Experience | Showtime

Lakers’ owner Jerry Buss on brand experience:

“Right after I bought the team, I used to go into this little lounge in Santa Monica. The owner was also musical director for MGM, and they used to perform musicals there late at night, it was just fantastic,” he says. “Just before they would start, everyone would start shouting, ‘Showtime! Showtime!’ I remember thinking, this is how I wanted people to feel about their team.”

Los Angeles Times

Brand Culture: Victoria’s Secret Demures

Victoria’s Secret CEO Sharen Turney feels her lingerie brand has become “too sexy” for its own good:

“We have moved off of our brand heritage,” she said in a conference call with analysts. “We use the word ‘sexy’ a lot and really have forgotten the ultra-feminine.”

Turney said the brand’s original storyline was of a to-the-manor-born Londoner named Victoria whose lacey underthings, we assume, were her little secret. But in recent years, Victoria became known as simply “Vicky,” and she had no qualms about flaunting her sex appeal.

Washington Post

Brand Culture | Skywalker Ranch

George Lucas reminds us of the importance of a backstory:

Lucas has been described as a frustrated architect, but to draft his dream academy he needed more than blueprints. “He created a story for the ranch,” Bay says. “He created a history. It belonged to a cattle rancher. Each building was added at a certain time and built in a certain style. There was a winery, for instance, but then it burned down at a certain point in time and was rebuilt in an Art Deco style. This room we’re in, it belonged to the rancher’s daughter She had brown hair and green eyes and went to the University of Arizona and she couldn’t get horses out of her blood.”

Los Angeles Times

Product Branding: Ancient Brand Strategy

Branding turns out to be older than we thought:

In “Prehistories of Commodity Branding,” author David Wengrow challenges the widespread assumption that branding did not become an important force in social and economic life until the Industrial Revolution. Wengrow presents compelling evidence that labels on ancient containers, which have long been assumed to be simple identifiers, as well as practices surrounding the production and distribution of commodities, actually functioned as branding strategies. Furthermore, these strategies have deep cultural origins and cognitive foundations, beginning in the civilizations of Egypt and Iraq thousands of years ago.

ScienceDaily