– John Reinan, a Minneapolis journalist and recovering marketer

When news broke a couple months ago that the “gentlemen’s club” Spearmint Rhino would be opening a downtown Minneapolis branch on Hennepin Avenue, I joked on Twitter that I should open a club down the street and call it Menthol Hippo.

rhino

OK, so I’m not really

Laurel Sutton, Senior Strategist at Catchword Brand Name Development

Of all the marketing people in the biz, you’d think a PR firm would have the best instincts for names that appeal, rather than repel, the public at large. A firm in Austin, Texas that specializes in food and drink recently chose the name

Debbie Laskey, MBA

There is an often-overlooked aspect of marketing that can be considered a distant relative. Public relations, also referred to as PR, is this sometimes forgotten but very important component of marketing promotions. At its core, PR can be defined as managing a brand’s image and reputation, but it touches all

Aaron Keller, Managing Principal, Capsule

There was a time, back in the day, when you could just “Google” yourself and that was the best way to assess the value of your personal brand. Simple quantifiable way to see how many mentions you had on Google’s interwebs (the reference is intentional). And, you could

– Nancy Friedman, Wordworking

A few years ago I began tracking a trend in startup naming: names that ended in -ly. Adly, Chirply, Letter.ly, Planely, Shoply, Weebly—my first list included 29 such names, some of them dot-coms and some that used the .ly domain (the Libyan country code).

My initial impression was that this was

Debbie Laskey, MBA

Have you ever spent hours working on a document for work? That’s a silly question because most of us who recognize Microsoft software and SlideShare have spent countless hours working on executive briefs, lengthy project reports, presentation decks, and much, much more.

Normally, we give our work product to our