August 5th, 2011
“In ordinary times, most men and women do not have radical questions about their identity.” Sam Keen “In every society, however, there are extraordinary men and women who, for a variety of reasons, stand outside the social consensus, shatter the norms, and challenge the status quo.” Sam Keen BlackDog was […]
August 25th, 2011
The hardest thing about Brand Development isn’t the time intensive research…. It isn’t being consistent yet flexible… innovative yet timeless. The hardest thing about Brand Development isn’t creativity, charisma, social media, new marketing, old ideologies, fierce competition, or even too many cooks in the kitchen (although that is a much […]
December 15th, 2011
Everything you need to know to get your brand new brand up and running… from writing your business plan to choosing your brand name, creating differentiators, identifying your customer….
July 18th, 2012
I hate the word “branding” for 2½ reasons, all of which have everything to do with popular usage and connotative meaning…. Courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/trimmer741/ 1.) When Branding is used as a verb, it typically refers to the isolated one-time or occasional applying of tactics to improve brand image. “Branding” typically […]
October 9th, 2012
When it became clear that it was time to retire the “flashy” BlackDog website, we did what we always do around here. We started looking around, asking questions, and reading the facts and findings of the guru’s that write the research. What we gathered was informative, most of it was […]
March 3rd, 2013
Iceland is a very small country with a big “brand” influence in a state of recovery, discovery and evolution. “Few countries blew up more spectacularly than Iceland in the 2008 financial crisis. The local stock market plunged 90 percent; unemployment rose ninefold; inflation shot to more than 18 percent; the […]
June 3rd, 2013
We’ve all bumped into Cicero’s Latin placeholder in templates, websites and other draft work pieces. It serves to give a sense of shape, text or typography without confusion “by removing the distraction of meaningful content”.(1) Unfortunately, the same is true for much of the results of “branding” projects, or “re-branding” […]