by Mark O'Brien | Nov 20, 2014
Human psychology doesn’t play nice with the relationships between price, cost, and value. To illustrate the point, I offer this letter to a hypothetical client, a company with no brand recognition in its target market. The company is reluctant to commit to an...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 19, 2014
If you’ve witnessed the fate of successful brands (little fish) after they’ve been devoured by larger corporate entities (bigger fish), you’re aware that, regardless of what they eat, bigger fish excrete the same thing, all the time. Why the...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 18, 2014
Cults of personality are defined as arising from the use of mass media to create idealized images. But that definition is incomplete because it neglects our agency in the process of idealization; that is, without our consumption of mass media — and without our...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 17, 2014
If you’ve been keeping up with the experts (ahem), you’re like to have noticed many of them writing obituaries for branding (case in point). There’s a short list of reasons for which people write such things: They want to be controversial, in which...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 14, 2014
Matilda: Do you think Bigfoot is real? Sammy: Some guy in Texas says he has pictures of him. Matilda: Those turned out to be Photoshopped. Sammy: How do you know? Matilda: I studied photo re-touching in Obedience School. Sammy: I thought that was just for sitting and...
