In just 96 hours, John Sullivan could be hawking your products. That’s right, John Sullivan. Signed. Sealed. Delivered. No muss, no legal fuss.
Wait a minute. Who’s John Sullivan? Well, for those living under a rock, he’s the first-year starter at center for the Minnesota Vikings, and a California company named Brand Affinity Technologies has figured out how to
"What am I?"
Every invention begs this essential question of identity.
The answer is found in the product’s descriptor. A descriptor defines a thing, categorizing it, framing it, positioning it and signaling its intended future.
A product that doesn’t claim to break new ground adopts its category’s standard convention. For example, a new, run-of-the-mill digital camera would be marketed as a "digital camera".
A revolutionary product, on the other hand, deserves an innovative product descriptor. And, sometimes, a me-too product benefits from one, too.
The trouble is, innovation is easier done than said.
I wrote in this article about the "brander’s paradox": Human instincts make us wary of unfamiliar and different things, yet differentiation is essential to a product’s success.
By definition, an innovation is unfamiliar. How can its product descriptor differentiate without triggering people’s fear of the unknown?
The New York Times gives us an idea in this recent article about product descriptors,
"When people encounter something they don’t recognize, they make sense of it by associating it with something familiar."
The most effective new descriptors combine familiar terms in unfamiliar ways. They make product function or form clearly understood, even upon first exposure. Novel descriptors insufficiently informative should at the very least pique interest.
Descriptors that differ
The products shown below the jump illustrate different approaches:Continue Reading Describe Different
This billboard ad has appeared in various locations around the Twin Cities for some time now.
Each time I saw it, I wondered whether it would be the last, given how vigilant 3M is in protecting its various trademarks and other intellectual property. This time, I had a camera handy to capture it.
Now it’s time for some questions.
Is there any
Trademark Infringement is a sticky subject online. Our first blog talked about Twitter and trademark infringement and today I want to address trademark infringement in relation to affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing is a process that rewards a blog or website for every customer that is brought to the company (the affiliate) that blog or website is promoting. The goal of the affiliate marketer is to bring visitors to the affiliate’s website in efforts to sell the affiliate’s products or services. Affiliate marketers will try numerous things in efforts to market these products or services in efforts to make money. In the past there have been lawsuits brought against marketers like this due to improper claims they were making about a product or service, who endorsed it, and if it worked.
In August, a complaint like this was filed against not only the affiliate marketers but the affiliate as well. The claim is that the affiliate should be monitoring any and every marketing vehicle and message that is used in relation to its product.Continue Reading Affiliate Marketing
Have you ever experienced or observed marketing styles that might be fairly described as high-octane, fast-paced, or perhaps, so hopped-up on Red Bull® or some other energy drink, there is simply no time for meaningful collaboration, much less careful, proactive, strategic thinking or planning? Perhaps a fun, exhilarating experience, but what are the consequences?
If you have, as you might know first hand (or at least imagine), this style can seriously compromise valuable intellectual property rights and protection. You know when the trademark attorney gets the call if this style controls, right? Immediately upon encountering a serious and unfair competitive threat. But in many instances, this will be long after a coherent strategy might have been created, well after packaging is designed and introduced, well after marketing materials are finalized and distributed, long after websites have been launched, and well after all the unknowing, but self-inflicted damage is done. In some cases the resulting damage is manageable and can be repaired, other times it is not, and legal claims that might have been strong and viable suddenly have turned dead-on-arrival.Continue Reading One Risqué of a Bawls-to-the-Wall Marketing Style?
What does Twitter have in common with Kool-Aid, Mickey Mouse, and Spam? Maybe nothing, at least yet, but I predict that it will soon, unless Twitter retains some talented PR help in a hurry. Why?
The Kool-Aid, Mickey Mouse, and Spam brands all have spawned secondary or alternate and negative non-trademark meanings that have become part of the English language, meanings in each case that lack positive brand associations, to say the least. If Twitter is not careful it will find itself “following” the likes of Kool-Aid, Mickey Mouse, and Spam, and be in the similar undesirable position of tolerating language changes that distract from their brands and favorable brand messages, to be left watching others make generic use of their brand names to communicate a variety of ideas and meanings that are neither flattering nor brand building.Continue Reading Is Twitter¬Æ “Following” Kool-Aid¬Æ, Mickey Mouse¬Æ, and Spam¬Æ?
Moore’s Law holds that the power of an integrated circuit will double every two years. That prediction, made in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, has proved remarkably durable.
The continued application of Moore’s Law has taken us in a few decades from crude transistor radios to handheld information devices packing more power than entire rooms of mainframe computers that sent the first spaceships to the moon.
And it’s unleashed an unprecedented burst of creativity, as the reach of the Internet allows people from around the globe to exchange information and build on each other’s ideas at dizzying speed.Continue Reading Thriving In A Speeded-Up World