Management

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How to cut your marketing budget without hurting your brand image.

When it comes to belt tightening, most marketing managers have it all wrong. The minute the boss gives them the bad news… “gotta cut your marketing budget”  they go straight to the list of tactics and start chopping off the bottom of the spread sheet. Not a stylish trim around the ears, more like a …

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Garbage In, Garbage Out — How to avoid waste in advertising

I took a load to the local dump the other day. As I hucked yard debris and unwanted consumer goods out the back of the truck, I got to thinking about waste in advertising… There are mountains of it. Despite all the analytics that are available, the digital targeting and the plethora of specialized channels, …

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Brands and corporate mergers — F15 Fighter vs. the 787 Dreamliner

In 1997 Boeing and McDonnell Douglas agreed on a merger.  That marriage looked great on paper…  Boeing’s strength was McDonald Douglas’ weakness. And vice-versa. A match made in heaven, or at least in the clouds. But the Boeing deal demonstrates how brands and corporate mergers usually butt heads. Boeing’s shortcomings on the military side would …

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What business owners can learn from political advertising

Every election year there’s a deluge of dumb, annoying political ads from both sides of the aisle. And as much as we love to hate them, there’s a lot that business owners can learn from political advertising. From a creative standpoint it’s rare to find any political ads that are noteworthy. As a genre, they …

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Managing a small-business through thick and thin

You probably heard this cliche a thousand times back in 2020…. “In these unprecedented times… managing a small-business is harder than ever…  Blah blah blah.”  I’ve seen my share of  “unprecented times.” I vividly remember how the business world came to a screeching halt in 1990 when we fought the first Gulf War. Then there …

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A new approach to website design – What’s the big idea?

I grew up on the creative side of the advertising industry where big ideas are the currency of success. Didn’t matter if we needed an ad or a new approach to website design, we’d toil endlessly to come up with the spark of an idea that could be leveraged into a giant, category-busting campaign. Because …

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Need to improve your marketing? Start with your P.O.V.

How you see things — your unique point-of-view — skews everything you do. You can’t escape it. Whether you need to launch an ad campaign, build a brand, make a video, or improve your marketing overall, your P.O.V. can make all the difference. In Hollywood “POV” is a common technique used by directors to add …

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5 Things all iconic brands have in common.

Simon Edwards, former Brand Manager at 3M, started a lively online discussion around this question: “What are the common attributes of iconic brands? He opened it up on a LinkedIn Group that includes 4,363 branding consultants, practitioners, creative directors, gurus and wannabes. It was an intelligent, worthwhile discussion that hit all the hot buttons of …

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Catching frogs and campfire songs — Branding lessons from summer camp

I find branding lessons in some pretty funny places. Like on a wart, on a frog, on a log at summer camp. Every summer when I roll up the sleeping bag, pack the bug spray and make all the preparations for another camping trip, memories of my childhood summer camps come flooding back. We sang …

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Ski Industry Marketing — New product launch vs. the birth of a brand

  It was the kind of day ski bums live for…  10 inches of new snow, calm winds, and the sky was clearing. It’s also the type of bluebird day that ski industry marketing revolves around. Queue the videographers! The experts with their GoPros were queued up before the first lift, chomping at the bit …

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The DIY mentality and small business marketing (2 clearly different paths)

Small-business owners are naturally self-reliant. We’re all in business for ourselves because we have that classic, American mentality that says we should get our hands dirty and pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. Damn the torpedoes! According to the SBA there are 27.9 million small businesses registered in America and  22.5 million of those are …

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Brand Insight Blog Apple's new HQ

Class A office space, Class A brand — Brand alignment with your location

Moved into a swanky new office building last week. (Great views of Mt. Bachelor, Broken Top, Three Sisters and the Phoenix Inn parking lot.)

The Alexander Drake Building, Downtown Bend, OR As I was unpacking boxes, lifting heavy furniture and contemplating the feng shui, it occurred to me that professional service firms spend a lot of time and money on their office space. And rightly so.

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Brands that are built to last. (Jim Collins on brand values)

Built To Last, by Jim Collins, is commonly known as one of the most influential business books ever written. It’s on every consultant’s bookshelf and should be required reading for any executive, business owner or budding entrepreneur who cares about brand values. It’s also one of the best branding books you’ll ever read. You have …

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The secret to success: Clarity in business communications.

Clarity is the key to many things… Marriage, international relations, politics and parenting would all benefit from more clarity. But let’s stick to the subject at hand; Clarity in business communications. Business owners and marketing people face an ongoing war of clarity vs. confusion. Simplification vs. complication. Persuasion vs. nonsense. Straight talk vs. bullshit. Doesn’t …

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“Brand” Trumps Managerial Incompetence.

I need to stop being surprised by managerial incompetence. Honestly. I need to reframe my expectations and just be pleasantly surprised when I encounter an exception to the rule. Because everywhere I turn, knumbskulls, nuckleheads, nitwits and nincumpoops seem to rule the world. These are just a couple examples of managerial incompetence that I’ve encountered …

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How to hire the right marketing person — the first time.

Most business owners have no idea how to hire the right marketing person. I’ve seen many good, stable companies churn through dozens of people before they find a match. The revolving door gets costly. The companies I work with rely on small, efficient teams of people for all their marketing needs, and without good leadership …

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Branding firm BNBranding

Effective Personal Branding — The corporate head shot is not the ticket.

Recently we had a client who didn’t like the photos we had taken for her website. She didn’t appreciate the fact that we had done something different than the usual, corporate head shot. She said they didn’t look “professional enough”  — didn’t think it was good personal branding. The problem is, her idea of “professional” …

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Branding firm BNBranding

Death in a small business — Brands outlive their founders.

If you got hit by a bus, what would happen to your brand? Nothing derails a small business faster and more dramatically than death. In many cases, death IN a small business means the death OF the business. No two ways about it… When a partner dies, or experiences a death in the family, the …

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Marketing for financial advisors – beyond gift baskets

It was one hell of a gift basket, piled high with a delicious assortment of treats… Not unusual for the holiday season, except it came from my financial advisor. First gift ever from a planner who I’ve worked with for more than 10 years. Apparently, the stock market’s rise inspired her to do a little outreach. …

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Judge Not. (And make good marketing decisions.)

Marketing is a very judgmental business. Business owners, CMOs and marketing managers are constantly judging their marketing efforts, and it’s almost always on subjective terms. Only a tiny portion of their overall branding efforts can ever be judged objectively, so it’s no surprise that so many people fail to make good marketing decisions. Ad agencies …

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How to survive when the economy tanks.

 There’s a lot of economic doom and gloom in the news these days; Unless you’re living in a cave somewhere, you’ve heard about the housing market, the unemployment rate and the rising price of groceries and gas. For many business owners, it’s frightening. The fortune-teller economists are predicting even more “belt tightening” as the year …

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Take your next agency for a spin.

You wouldn’t buy a BMW without getting behind the wheel. You have no idea what it can do. Same with BN Branding. So let’s go for a test drive… just one small assignment to prove how well we handle whatever you throw at us.

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