To avoid partisan potshots, I disclose in advance that I am neither a Republican nor Democrat, nor could I be classified as a liberal or conservative. Thus my following analysis is one purely aimed at examining how brands work in presidential politics. In other words, don’t bother commenting if the analysis annoys your personal partisan political peccadilloes. This is about marketing and not the mayhem of presidential elections. Much has been written in the last year about the destruction of the Republican “brand”. A brand — be it for a PC, politician, or even a PC politician — is what the market (voters) think and feel about the product. Yes, politicians and parties are products that can be bought though the price is too high for the average consumer/voter. Many Republicans felt their party no longer had a brand. Many core Republican/conservative policies appear to have been abandoned by the … Continue reading →

I recently read an interview with Chunka Mui, a fellow with the interesting job of studying business failure. Mui’s book Billion Dollar Lessons may become the next management “must read”. His basic premise is that execution is irrelevant if your strategy is not good. Indeed he notes quite accurately: If you have a plan that’s fatally flawed, perfect execution can get you into more trouble because you dig yourself in deeper and faster. This explains 99% of the dot-com bust. My analogy to Mui’s point would be that of driving. If you do not know where you are going, stomping on the accelerator peddle just sends you spiraling off a cliff quickly. This is one of the many reasons we focus on marketing strategy at Silicon Strategies. Marketing is hard work and during execution it can be very expensive. It is worth every company’s time (even start-ups) to invest in … Continue reading →

If you never had the chance to see Mojo Nixon perform before he retired, then you missed a spectacle. Some claim Mojo was unsavory. Others derided him as the psychobilly messiah. More than a few left his shows laughing in disgust. But he was cool. And one thing he knew was that you can’t buy cool. Which is exactly what Microsoft is attempting to do, which is pretty uncool. I’ll wait to see what disaster the unholy union of Steve Balmer, Jerry Seinfeld and $300,000,000 creates. The stated intent of Microsoft’s next advertising campaign is to blunt the market mind-share created by Apple’s highly viral Mac vs. PC advertising and provide Vista with more any positive brand image. $300,000,000 may not be enough. A central tenet of branding is authenticity. When a company creates a brand it must have some close resemblance to reality or at very least not utterly … Continue reading →