http://mjbraide.com/mjblog What's on my mind... Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:59:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Okay, so no one can totally recession-proof anything, but I've been thinking about some simple things you can do with and for your brand during down markets, when the temptation is to cut costs, slash prices, eliminate staff, lower service levels, change who you are and very possibly alienate customers ... http://mjbraide.com/mjblog/recession-proof-your-brand/ Who cannot place their hand on their heart and say that what consumers really want is authenticity? I can't. With sincerest apologies to the burgeoning authenticity industry, as documented in Gilmore and Pine's What Consumers Really Want: Authenticity (and just about every bibliographic reference in it), what is mistaken as an ... http://mjbraide.com/mjblog/authenticity-the-big-lie/ When it comes to competitive brand strategy you can be right in a lot of ways, but you can be really, really wrong in just two: 1) believing that there is no one out there like you and so you own your category and have no direct competition or 2) ... http://mjbraide.com/mjblog/the-truth-about-difference/ From Peter C. Newman going on about power games to Naomi Klein dissing brands altogether to Andrea Mandel-Campbell telling us why Mexicans don't drink Molson beer, we just have not had a lot of optimistic discourse on Canadian brands in the last 40 years. Jeannette Hanna's and Alan Middleton's new ... http://mjbraide.com/mjblog/finally-an-intelligent-and-optimistic-view-of-canadian-brands-ikonica/ I responded to Richard Florida's request for a city story and the request came back to spread the word, so please contribute and....spread the word. http://creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/2008/06/whos-your-city.html I need your help for the new Canadian edition of Who's Your City? I'm working on for publication in early 2009. My team and I ... http://mjbraide.com/mjblog/who-is-your-city/ I am fascinated by the presence of intense contradictions in organizations. It may be possible that the highest performing, most innovative organizations are the ones that can manage the greatest degree of internal paradox, and not spin out of control, or lose their centre. http://mjbraide.com/mjblog/opposites-are-attractive/ I was reading Richard Florida’s latest book Who’s Your City? and really liked the chapter on how the Big Five personality types (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism) cluster geographically by region and in doing so, create geographic personality-scapes that one should be aware of when choosing a place to ... http://mjbraide.com/mjblog/do-organizations-have-personalities/ One of the most satisfying applications of corporate brand strategy is in helping hospitals define their proposition and orient themselves to a promise that sets them apart from others in their networks. This is far more than renaming, re-skinning or capital campaign sloganeering. In Canada anyway, it's a survival tactic. ... http://mjbraide.com/mjblog/branding-hospitals-you-can-and-you-must/ When I got tired of asking my clients “who are you?” I started asking them “why are you?”. What’s the reason you are the way you are and do what you do? Then things started to get interesting. I’ve found that one of the best ways to answer that question ... http://mjbraide.com/mjblog/the-creation-story-make-the-past-the-key-to-the-future/ In my last post I argued that real brand strategy is too big, too important and too much work to be expressed only through a creative brief that goes to communication specialists, design firms, public relations types and advertising agencies. In Part One I proposed the Organizational Brief, in which ... http://mjbraide.com/mjblog/get-more-from-brand-strategy-part-two-the-experience-brief%e2%84%a2/