I have a great sense of humour. I also fully support hair removal including Brazilian waxing. I am aware of the disastrous deforestation happening in the rainforests of Brazil. And I’m really good at connecting the dots, so what in the hell do all off the above have to do with each other?
The philosophy behind corporate promotional items has always been that “they offer an opportunity to get a brand name out to a target market” – and keep it there. Yawn... how many pens, coffee mugs and ball-caps can a person use? OK let’s get semi-current and talk mouse-pads, jump-sticks and laptop bags?… stop it. So how about apples with in-grown logos? Yes, you read that right.
Remember "instant coffee"? That crystallized, dirt-like substance reserved for camping and gramma's cupboard? How about Folgers commercials with Juan Valdez and his bean-totin’ donkey? Hardly memories that bring on coffee cravings, but Starbucks new VIA brand is changing all that with portable packets of jolt-worthy joe.
Last post, I lamented about my grease-monkey debacle with Murad’s skincare products… the ones Joan Lunden talked me into on a late-night infomercial (duh). Anyway, I was kicking myself for not consulting Paula Begoun’s Don’t Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me which basically pans the entire Murad Resurgence line. The Robert Parker of beauty products, she accepts no kick-backs and takes no prisoners with cosmetic product reviews based on science and performance... and she's a classic case-study in personal branding.
My skin – where some of my body parts were “over looked” the skin gods delivered and I thank them by looking after it. Although a couple of decades ago, between sun-beds and basting in baby-oil and iodine in the hot summer sun, a entire generation of us never really “got” it. Suntan? Ha…that’s an understatement. We were orange people… year-round. And now we're trying to turn back time with miracle-in-a-jar anti-aging fairy-dust like Murad Resurgence.
As my favourite digital marketing demi-god Mitch Joel said in a recent blog post, "Product Is The New Marketing". “The individual is empowered is code for Social Media,” writes Mitch. “This isn't really about word of mouth marketing in as much as it is about the fact that customers don't just tell one another about brands they love (and hate)... they tell everybody.” Which is exactly what happened with 1-800-Headsets.
How many blondes does it take to light a barbecue? That’s what I was asking myself this weekend as a friend and I were trying to spark up a piece-of-crap grill at a girls' soiree – right before the click-click-click of the dead starter turned to the WOOF of a propane-fuelled cloud of fire. We both still had our eyebrows but as the unmistakable whiff of singed forearms hung in the evening air… followed by some painfully slow, uneven cooking… all I could think was I LOVE MY WEBER.
When my old vacuum recently started to blow vs. suck, it was a little problematic. Decided it was time to invest in a dirt-sucking solution that was built to last. More...
Snooth.com has created the ultimate online wine experience. A community with so many layers of functionality and ways to connect, it’s like the Facebook of wine. An online brand designed to not only purchase wine and wine related products, but to actually participate in wine culture... digital viticulture if I could make an on-the-fly attempt at capturing the "X factor"?
To me, cupcakes are like the "banana of sweets"... perfectly packaged and full of goodness! But there’s an art to a cupcake... an art that’s not represented in the bulk, plastic packs of sprinkle-suffocated cupcakes you often see in super-markets. So suffice it to say there was no one more delighted than me to see the original Cupcakes franchise explode onto the scene. But do they deliver the goods?
