Category Archives: Branding

News and observations concerning branding and brand management

Bean Bits

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Looks like Leo is back from his coffee break. HP’s new CEO, Leo Apotheker, was MIA for a while, allegedly escaping a court appearance at the hands of Oracle.  Now that the nastiness of litigation has lapsed, Leo has reappeared in rumor mills that speculate on how he might possibly change HP more so that Mark Hurd or Carly Fiorina (though the changes wrought by that pair have Bill and Dave spinning faster than disc drives in their respective graves).  A Wall Street Journal report says that Leo, the former head of software shop SAP, wants to make software HP’s new focus. To which one former HP tech guru said “Lord help us, more HP software! Arghhh.” HP is not a software company.  Aside from Openview, which appears to be reverse mistake, HP is not only known as a hardware company, but also as a source of software incompetency.  Even … Continue reading →

Reputation Rehabilitation

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It hurts to be disliked.  When a whole market thinks you stink on an ice floe, you have polar bear sized problems. A client recently engaged Silicon Strategies because the market didn’t think much of the client.  Though their software was considered ‘competent’, it was also thought of as based on the previous century’s technology and was not rapidly updated.  Our client had a well deserved and growing reputation of holding onto former glory and not keeping up with new millennia mentalities.  In short, the market had assigned them a negative brand. For them, exhibiting at events was like walking into a singles bar and watching every woman in the joint walk out. Our client faced this difficulty while preparing a new product which, at very least, brought them to par with competitors in important market segments.  From experience we knew that merely introducing the product was not enough — … Continue reading →

Perception Problems

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I hate religious squabbles, like one recent war of words.  I speak not of invectives thrown concerning the inappropriate placement of a proposed mosque in New York, but a string of nasty words cast upon a private discussion group debating if the iPad is a real computer. Zealots … they are never more fierce than in geekdom. The group in question is an invitation-only cluster of former gurus involved with a now obsolete mini-mainframe system.  Each member is brilliant yet more opinionated than a lame-duck congressman.  Aided in part by a member journalist who once covered that mini-computer beat, and who now chronicles everything Apple, the group exploded into strings of sneering over the viability of the iPad for people who want to do work as opposed to consume content. I think it started with a dig about USB ports.  Who knows.  The rhetorical blood flowed regardless of who fired … Continue reading →

Branding Support

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By “branding support” I am not suggesting that one apply a red-hot iron with rancher’s logo to the flesh of a technical support representative.  However, having worked ranch when I was a kid, and having recently experienced tech support, the thought has a certain appeal. Your brand is created with every buyer interaction.  Some interactions occur in advertising. Others occur between buyers and cut you out of the interaction loop. The rest occur whenever your buyers visits your company, be it your web site, your sales office, or your support department. The letter can destroy you. Not long ago, Dell was flagging. Part of this was a change in the market which they failed to anticipate and were also slow in responding. Yet a good part of their fall from prominence was due to ill-advised shifting of technical support (something that had been a glowing aspect of Dell’s brand) to … Continue reading →

B2B Socially

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I’m hoping for antisocial media.  I can see how to make a buck off of that. Meanwhile, social media continues to gain dominance in marketing, and for good reason.  Humans, and even politicians, are social animals.  We commune for pleasure, profit and procreation (which pretty much describes a day in the life of Eliot Sprtizer).  Even the most sterile of pursuits requires some social aspect.  Every poor blogger, alone in his office, hammers out prose in order to asynchronously connect with other humans. Business-to-business (B2B) activities are thus social interactions.  Oracle commits social acts when it interacts with other enterprises, aside from the select few it eats.  Thus social media should be a component of B2B. The oddest aspect of B2B social media concerns who in the relationship needs to socialize and why.  The failure to think through these two questions have led to various B2B social media catastrophes including … Continue reading →

Brandaid

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When does a brand become detrimental to a company? Ask Google. They are having a relatively rough time with their brand this week. Google encountered trouble during the corporate equivalent of a temper tantrum. When they discovered that someone in China (presumably the government) had hacked into Google’s network and spelunked through dissident emails, Google threw a hissy fit. Executives at the all knowing Google failed to know that the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) remains one of the most ruthless around. Google should have known this since Google helped the PRC censor Internet information in order to (according to the PRC) “Properly guide Internet opinion.” Kinda evil, eh? Google’s brand started dissolving. In Google’s infancy, they adopted an informal corporate motto of “Don’t be evil.” This kindly directive even found its way into Google guiding manifesto “Ten things we know to be true”, a creed that … Continue reading →

Lowly Highs

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“Bottoms up” is not just something you say during cocktail hour or at a strip club. It is a market strategy as well, and Google will implement it with a fist full of dollar bills. News of a Google netbook operating system – Chrome OS by name – has emerged. Targeted for netbooks running ARM and x86 chips, COS centers Google’s Chrome browser as the interface to the world and to Google applications. This latest Linux distro is designed to address the bottom of the commercial computing market (we’ll ignore the One Laptop per Child gizmos that would otherwise win the Barrel Bottom Scraper Award for underpowered PCs). Scott McNealy understood half the equation when in an over-caffeinated frenzy said “The network is the computer.” Naturally McNealy saw the hardware side of the system, being that he was in the hardware business. But as any technology marketing maven will maintain, … Continue reading →