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Owning your brand name is critical for your business, but what many people don’t realize is that owning a trademark on your brand name is not the same as owning a unique name.
Facebook raised a ruckus last year when it applied to trademark “face”–yet there were hundreds of “face” trademarks granted before Facebook [...] Most people don’t think of Al Qaeda and marketing in the same sentence. But marketing is important to Al Qaeda and so is the strength of its brand. It is the key to raising money, recruiting jihadis and motivating them to attack. The Al Qaeda flag features the Shahadah, the Muslim declaration of belief “There [...] The Hurun Report covers new ground with its release of the Most Valuable Chinese Home-grown Brands List 2011. As we posted earlier this year, creating brands is official Chinese government policy. Chinese leaders recognize that the big profits are in selling brands, not making products. Since opening their markets in 1990, the Chinese have made [...] The most basic brand elements are a name and a logo. But these alone are not enough to communicate a rich brand identity. Your own personal identity is more than your name and your face. Your identity includes personal data like your birthday, place of residence, where you work, and your phone [...] Congratulations to E Ink on their new logo. The company was a spin-off from the MIT Media Lab back in 1997 and pioneered the concept of electronic paper. Old Logo New Logo
Originally marketed for electronic signs, the company has enjoyed better success as a maker of mobile electronics displays. Paper thin and lightweight, the technology [...] At Merriam Associates, we have been honored to work with some truly great companies large and small. Occasionally, we get to work with a company which does something truly heroic. We renamed and repositioned Proxios, which manages companies’ information technology through cloud computing. It is a nifty company with great people and a service that is [...] Advertising Age reports this week on a growing advertising trend–the increased use of goats in ads. It’s an odd aspect of our creative industry that copying is so common. One area where follow-the-leader is rampant is in naming. Brand names should be distinctive above all, but I often get naming project requests like: “I want [...] “Brands are how we sort out the cesspool.” This famous quote from Eric Schmidt, President of Google, gives us insight into the importance of brands when determining what search results to offer in response to customer queries. How do you know a word is a brand? Google codes up the clues into mathematical algorithms. Google’s advanced and interlacing [...] Fast growing, innovative companies can sometimes outgrow their brands. “Our name became constraining,” said Frank Butler, CEO of Proxios, a fast-growing company using cloud computing technology to create affordable and reliable alternatives to traditional in-house information technology and phone systems. “Our old name Super-Server did not have broad appeal and it was dated.” Merriam Associates gave this [...] Outgrowing the Brand |
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