The way I see it, BlogDay is an opportunity to recommend blogs that are not the usual suspects. So here are some blogs I think deserve more recognition.

1. Assi Sharabi is an anthropologistsocial-psychologist-come-planner, who keeps getting cool ideas like analysing the youtube leader board.
2. Anecdote is narrative lead organisational consulting group-blog from Australia.
3. Nova Spivack writes dense musings about the web and points to thought provoking science news.
4. Raph Koster’s ideas about gaming are too good to be kept just for that. Let’s steal them for marketing.
5. Ben Hammresley is renaissance action guy. Coding for the guardian, Snapping in Afghanistan and writing. I’m sure his upcoming Octet book will kick ass.

For Hebrew recommendations, I have another blogday post in my Hebrew blog.

Technorati Tags: blogday, blogday2006

Many traditional branding methods, rely on values & attributes to define brands, but these tend to be similar in competitive markets. “Innovation” and “Simplicity” come to mind as current popular values. “Empowerment” and “Enabling” were very strong about 5-6 years ago in the bubble days.
Values & attributes also tend to be limiting when things get intricate, they start to merge or contradict, broaden their meaning to the point they become useless at creating focus, or worse turn to generic clichés.
Often they will just float out there in their pure bright solitude, increasingly disconnected from your organisation, your brand, what you meant for them to do. From meaning.

Stories are closer to the way people interpret, articulate and communicate (complex) meaning in most contexts.
That’s another reason one-word-equity (whether you refer to the “new” concept or the “old” one) just can’t work - The association networks people have about brands are tangled, fluid, complex things. Trying to introduce focus using this “laser” approach is hopeless - the mind will (and should) resist. Telling a story influences perception in a much subtler way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before we go on to discuss “advanced storytelling” among other things, I would like to make something clear:
Your brand in not “your brand”.

To some of you this may seem as stating the obvious, but as my years in marketing go by, again and again I find this confusion at the centre of many branding projects. Quite often, the same team in the same room will talk about two different things. Read the rest of this entry »