She wants to give her son that extra edge – she wants people to be able to find him quickly on the internet, after he is accomplished. And because searching for his name doesn’t yield good results, it would be relatively easy for him to get up on the rankings.

People can go around giving their kids obscure names all they want, but they need to know that there are other options. Like search engine optimization and Google AdWords.

Giving your son a bad name is just mean.

No, it’s criminal.

Labels: egosurfing, Google, search engine optimization

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posted by Andres Zapata @ 8:43 AM 0 comments links to this post

• A sense of place
• A strong point of view
• Serving a larger purpose
• Integrity
  

There is a unifying theme here: an authentic brand is not a brand that manufactures something that you didn't have before and then sells it to you. Instead a brand is authentic because it encourages the creation of authentic moments in its customers, it is the backdrop for your authentic experiences. Apple doesn't give you authentic injection molded plastic music players, it gives you a music player you can enjoy your favorite music on, a backdrop to the authentic enjoyment you receive.

This final quote helps explain this further:

"Sometimes even the most homogenized of places can evoke a flicker of authenticity. The morning after last fall's congressional elections, the newly elected senator from New Jersey, Robert Menendez, breakfasted at his usual spot, the International House of Pancakes in Union City. Menendez, formerly mayor of Union City, sat in his regular booth, ordered the same breakfast he always orders, and spent an hour catching up with longtime friends.

Few restaurants are more prefab than IHOP, yet there Menendez was, paying homage to a staff that knew his breakfast by heart and to patrons who've watched his kids grow up. On the surface, the Union City franchise is hardly authentic--it's similar to the IHOP in, say, Muncie, Indiana. But the friendships that Menendez has made there are certainly genuine. It's not that Starbucks, Cold Stone Creamery, BMW, Nike, or any other brand is really, really real. What's real are the experiences and the connections that the brands allow us to make--if they give us an honest chance."

A quick look at some authenticity plays from fast company.

Labels: Apple, authenticity, Branding, IHOP, marketing

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posted by Sean Cohen @ 11:23 AM 0 comments links to this post

One of the more curious things about writing a blog like this is looking at the statistics. Sean Carton wrote a small post called Russian Drinking Chess. For some reason it regularly tops our stats for the most popular post. I think this might have something to do with the horrible and bewildering comments, but who knows?

Regardless, to satiate our Russian Drinking Chess Themed readers, I have gone through and found some appealing Russian Beer labels for you to enjoy.

All of these labels are BEFORE the revolution of 1917, so they are un-augmented by the collectivist virtues of thick lines and the color red.

Some things to notice with these labels:

a) the grandiose ornamental label is a great way to get the common man to cough up some money for an otherwise low-end product.

b) art-nouveau style made its way across europe to russia - who'd have thought?

c) the printing quality of these labels is quite good, from what is possible to tell from third hand jpegs.

Many many more pre-revolutionary labels can be found here.

Labels: beer, Design, label design, packaging design, russian

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posted by Sean Cohen @ 8:24 AM 0 comments links to this post