All posts for the month March, 2012

Can Luxury Brands Be Irreverent?

When I first started out as a young copywriter, I learned fast that when it came to luxury brands, there was a certain line that couldn’t be crossed. Irreverence was reserved for fun, young, grassroots brands. Luxury brands were to be given the white glove treatment. But as Gen X and Gen Y consumers unleash [...]

Retro Ad of the Week: Hinckley Yachts, 1965

Great photography can make or break an ad. Consider this one broken. Hinckley Yachts are some of the finest crafted yachts in the world. The poorly lit interior shots and the ultra-cropped exterior shot really do these boats no justice. FUN FACT: The Hinckley Bermuda 40 has been in production longer than any other fiberglass [...]

Innovation: The No-Brainer That Brands Like to Ignore

It’s one thing to have a fantastic product here and now, but what happens a year or two down the road, when your cash cow fizzles out? You can choose to drop off the radar and search helplessly for new, successful strategies, or you can make it a point to plan in advance how you [...]

Retro Ad of the Week: Old Spice, 1942

It’s interesting to see how the definition of “manly” changes over 60 years. While today it’s embodied by, well, a good body, back in 1942, it was (clearly) all about the mystery of the nautical world. FUN FACT: While Old Spice may define what is manly, the first product they launched was for women. It [...]

The One Thing Spotify Does Wrong — Or Does It?

If you love music, you’ve probably already tuned in to Spotify, which allows you to listen to new streaming music for free (for a few months at least) and even put together your own playlists. They also offer radio stations in a similar fashion to Pandora, and you can listen to your iTunes playlists through Spotify [...]

Tracking Your Brand on Pinterest

I came across this article on Mashable today that offered a very neat trick to see who is pinning things from your website on the new social network Pinterest. To quickly see who is using your content, type: http://pinterest.com/source/YourWebsite.com/ into your browser window, substituting your company’s URL for “YourWebsite.com”. I quickly did this for Mascola [...]

Is Your Brand Strategy Getting Stale?

When you have a strategy that’s worked for a long time, it’s easy to get complacent. You think if business has always come to you, it will continue to do so. But just because you had a good brand strategy once does not mean it will be a good strategy forever more. Times change. Demographics [...]

A Day in the Life of the Internet

As we know from my previous post, I am a fan of infographics. So when I came across the article Everything That Happens on the Internet in One Day from Business Insider (graphic from MBAOnline.com) I fell in love. Not only is this a well-designed graphic, but as marketers we can use it to gather a [...]

Retro Ad of the Week: GE, 1941

How do you make motors and propulsion systems mean something to the general public? You write about how they are helping make the world a better place, and you call attention to a message that today we have seen on thousands of products: Made in U.S.A. FUN FACT: While “We bring good things to life” [...]