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So far benjamin ariff has created 34 blog entries.

(PIZZA) PIE IN THE FACE

Remember last year’s Super Bowl Oreo tweet during the blackout?  This year’s entry for Twitter brand brilliance was during another major contest — the Grammy Awards.  Australian superstar rapper Iggy Azalea earlier that day sent out a tweet to her 4.2 million fans decrying that a Papa John’s delivery person made her cell phone number public, resulting in

By | February 17th, 2015|Brand Mistakes, Twitter and Brands|0 Comments

WHO OWNS YOUR HEART?

Ah, Valentine’s Day. Romance is in the air. And hearts are everywhere. On cards and gift boxes, in tweets and other social media, in emails, on restaurant tables, in print ads, banner ads and as candy and jewelry. But before you rush out to add a heart design to an e-card, an email, a Facebook

By | February 12th, 2015|Content Clearance|0 Comments

SUPER BOWL BRANDMANIA

As we head into Super Bowl LXIX weekend, I thought the following might be of interest. Digiday posted a fun article entitled 5 Super Bowl Myths Debunked (http://digiday.com/brands/5-super-bowl-myths-debunked). Here’s what’s interesting from a brander’s perspective: (1) Super Bowl ads have higher recall than ads in general BUT (2) get them shown by 9PM eastern –

By | January 30th, 2015|Super Bowl Marketing|0 Comments

BRANDS AND BRAINS

When you think of your favorite brands, what is the first word you associate with them? According to psychology Professor Paul Bloom of Yale, the word we all associate with our favorite brands, even if subconsciously, is “pleasure.” We all seek pleasure in our lives. How we define pleasure is of course subject to individual

By | January 27th, 2015|Brand Innovation|0 Comments

BRAND INNOVATION AND EXTENSION: LESSONS ON HOW TO MAKE IT WORK

There are a number of ways to grow a brand from its core product or service (for brevity’s sake, throughout this blog, I refer to both as “products”). Two prevalent forms are licensing the brand and brand extension. In licensing, the brand owner gives permission to third parties to make and market products under the

By | December 3rd, 2014|Brand Expansion, Brand Innovation, Brand Licensing|0 Comments

FACEBOOK, BRANDS AND PROMOTION – A WHOLE NEW SET OF CHALLENGES

  I recently searched the phrase “social media marketing challenges” on Google® and Bing® and got back a low of 44 million hits (Bing®) and 99 million hits (Google®). These results are not at all surprising given the constantly changing social media environment, the diversity of consumers using these platforms, and the overwhelming clutter in

By | December 1st, 2014|Facebook and Brands|0 Comments

THE SECRET(S) OF CHOOSING A GREAT BRAND NAME

There are many ways to describe what makes a great brand. Being a sailor, I often think in terms of sailing imagery. In that context, imagine the marketplace as a dense fog, filled with names, logos, messages, information, content, and massive overload. A deep, dense, grey fog, where nothing is delineated clearly, and everything blends

By | November 20th, 2014|Uncategorized|0 Comments

THE FICKLE FINGER OF FANDOM

During my early professional years, a major studio retained me to police counterfeit merchandise featuring IP from its mega-hit space themed film and television series. Research showed that most of illicit merchandise, much of it hand-made, was created, and traded, by fans of the property, often at conventions where stars of the show made appearances

By | November 10th, 2014|Uncategorized|0 Comments

MILLENNIALS AND BRANDS — SOME NEW INSIGHTS

One of my favorite sources of information regarding the relationship between social media and branding is Digiday (Digiday.com).  In a recent post with the title “Millennial media-consumption habits explained, in 5 charts,” the author presented a summary of findings from two recent studies, comScore, Noise|The Intelligence Group’s Cassandra Report and nScreenMedia’s report “What Millennials Want from TV,”

By | November 3rd, 2014|Uncategorized|0 Comments

BRANDS AND TRADEMARKS: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

I’ve always been fascinated by the disconnect experienced by so many branding professionals and legal professionals over the term “trademark.”  Many branders and marketers believe that trademark is a verb, as in “can you trademark ….”  Many legal professionals believe that a brand is no different than a strictly legal thing.  So here’s some clarity: a

By | October 31st, 2014|Uncategorized|0 Comments