Category Archives: branding

The author, who has worked on the internet since 1990, and used social networks such as Facebook and Twitter soon after their inception, looks at how these new media can impact on branding strategies and transparency.

What is a conscientious brand? This article explores the key features of a conscientious brand and the implications for brand management.

Happiness is an illusory ideal which is neither the basis for working in an organization nor for managing it. It is more about the quest to find meaning in our lives and to attain a sense of fulfilment.

For many, CSR has been seen as a sticking plaster that could heal a company’s reputation and improve its appeal. How can we make CSR a core idea inside companies?

Everyday people are stepping up to the plate in creating apps about brands or events that resonate with them. Brand owners need to do their share if they are to maintain a means of engagement with their audiences.

In January 2011, the Medinge Group’s annual Brands with a Conscience (BWAC) awards will be announced for their eighth consecutive year. What does this term represent? What are the awards, how were they created, how are they decided, who has won in the past and how can they be viewed in retrospect?

An English-language version of d’Huy’s article ‘Nul ne peut se jouer des signes’.

Harris introduces the technique he calls a visual Mind-Map via a supporting audio file. This alternative to the conventional PowerPoint presentation allows all the key points of a talk to coexist on a single page, and personalizes the process. Harris says he sometimes begins with a blank page, filling it in with participants in an interactive scenario.

Ultimately, change is simply what happens to us all, all of the time. The lesson is not in the amount of change we can handle, but in the way we manage that change.

In 1931 a young P&G executive wrote a document which proved crucial to the formation of ideas about contemporary brand management. But attitudes about branding have since grown up around the memo’s opportunistic policies. This article deconstructs McElroy’s directives, reassessing our perspectives on how brands need to be viewed in today’s post-globalisation strategic universe.

Detroit has not ever used a brand orientation in its automakers’ marketing strategies, and it talks of trimming brands and numbers to allow it to compete. The author believes in being more focused on brands and not losing economies of scale, and building more of what consumers want. The tools are there, such as consumer-targeted blogs, but manufacturers need to use them.

This article introduces the argument that Swedish brands have moved beyond other countries’ positions on sustainability.

The real power and opportunity for using stories in organizations is in listening to stories, helping others to create their own authentic stories and making sense of the stories told.

The argument of this paper is a simple one: creating value for customers is an organization-wide responsibility. The author reconsiders the market orientation papers of Narver and Slater and Kohli and Jaworski and introduces the concept of Participatory Market Orientation.

This paper tries to answer critical questions by describing the criteria and factors that contribute to successful place branding. By assessing the place, the players and the plans they make, it is possible to predict the likely success of a place branding initiative.

The rules are different for chartered bodies. Not the fundamentals of brand strategy, clearly, but the processes and procedures of development and execution, as the author reveals.

This paper considers the importance of employees in the process of building customer experience. It states that internal investment is rewarded with consistent, quality customer exchanges. Brand values are presented as the currency to measure the worth of exchanges between organizations and their customers. The paper concludes by presenting a case study of the mobile operator, Orange, during the period 1994–2003.

Places—countries, regions and cities—are increasingly developing strategies for brands. This is because they find themselves in competition with each other to retain and attract talented and creative people, innovative businesses, investors and consumers. The goal: offer valuable services and meaningful experiences to those they seek to influence.

In the world of Web 2·0, the process surrounding vision, research, exposition and image differ slightly, even if the ingredients of brand equity remain the same. Loose vision, informal research and tapping into consumer advocacy all play a critical role.

Organizations often experience failure, either because of a flawed vision, or a shortfall of values. How then do we align internal and external communications to create sustainable competitive advantage as a route to a strong brand reputation?

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007 Ava Maria Hakim  IBM Global Solutions, Business Transformation Outsourcing hakimava@us.ibm.com Microsoft Word version Thomas Watson, who helped grow one of the first truly global organizations, is quoted as saying ‘Good design is good business’. For the maverick of IBM, ‘Design must reflect the practical [...]

An historically significant article written in 2004 examining the intellectual and semiotic underpinnings of brands with conscience. It is published with the permission of the estate of Colin Morley; his vision helped shaped Medinge’s yearly Brands with a Conscience awards, inspiring our yearly presentation to an NGO, named in his memory.

This paper argues that rather than relying on the abstraction of research to get close to the customer, brand managers should work at building genuine relationships with customers by opening up the boundaries of the organization