June 19, 2024 A quick hate take on American Gothic in Béziers This ad campaign featuring American Gothic with a few words pasted on, like edited on the fly with WhatsApp or Canva, is all over…
June 18, 2024 Ambiguity and brand strategy utopia By definition, developing a strategy for a brand involves thinking about the future: ideal results, possible problems to solve, and also ambiguous outcomes. I…
June 11, 2024 Invest in beautiful web design for your brand value Musing about The Favorite Website Awards (TheFWA), and beautiful web design as owned media for brands. I began my strategy career on the digital…
June 10, 2024 I’m not a [buzzword] expert I have frequently battled with the idea of advertising I’m a [buzzword] specialist. Today, I could be an AI strategist, whatever that means. Friends…
June 5, 2024 What’s the best compliment you ever received? People are people, and it’s mystifying to figure there are 8 billion of us around. And yet, we all have our own unique combination…
June 4, 2024 Alleviating feelings of uncertainty As an independent consultant, I tend to have quite a bit of uncertainty over the frequency of my work and income; those famed feast and…
June 3, 2024 Asymmetric strategy challenges I like thinking of analogies and parallels between brands, marketing, game design, and developing successful strategies. Most tabletop board games are played as a…
May 14, 2024 Details layers of a strategy highway I had the pleasure of attending Will Humphrey’s APG online conference yesterday, set to Talking Heads’ song Once in a Lifetime questions. The talk…
September 26, 2023 Social media followers aren’t equal to audience I read Stephen King’s 1977 paper titled “Improving Advertising Decisions” again and talked about it with students today (that’s the marketer by the way,…
September 20, 2023 Introduction to semiotic brand analysis I started teaching a graduate course at the American University of Paris titled Brands & Belief. I’ll do my best to share content from…
