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May 2020 - Branding Strategy Insider

Brands Without Meaning Are No Longer Essential

Retailer J. Crew announced a bankruptcy filing last month that will potentially close its nearly 200 stores and those of sister company Madewell. Problems for the company have been racking up for years: unsustainable debt, fit and quality issues, a misguided push toward higher income consumers (which alienated its core customer base) and extreme discounting. But J. Crew’s real problem is that the company doesn’t mean anything to anyone. It has no thematic reason for...

Identifying Business Winners And Losers

The differences in the performance of Apple and Amazon versus Radio Shack, Toys-R-Us, and Blockbuster in the same economic environment raise the question of what made their fate so different. Why would a cash machine like Blockbuster go under while a thousand-dollar investment in Apple in 2008, at the beginning of the great recession, would be worth more than $7000 in 2018? Toys-R-Us, an established, innovative retailer, fell apart in this period. Meanwhile, a thousand-dollar...

Empathy Emerges As The New Marketing

When I was approached by a commissioning editor two years ago with the idea of writing Brand Storytelling: Put Customers at The Heart of Your Brand Story, I would have never imagined how the very topic I’d been writing about and trying to evangelize on a public stage would become a leading innovation during one of the most cathartic moments in modern day history.

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