Companies and products that leapt off the screen. There’s one way to launch a brand that gives people unprecedented abilities to control public perception, make their brand feel real before it actually exists, fine tune their brand story, and have their audience’s undivided attention. It’s called fiction. Many brands have benefitted from having their name,
There are more musical festivals today than you can shake a drumstick at. Most of them have names that are a total bore compared to what’s happening on stage, but the names listed here make us want the festival merch even if we don’t have a ticket. . . . When it comes to live events,
At A Hundred Monkeys we’re no strangers to helping brands find their voice. One of the key components to this process is something we call “brand attributes.” Others call it “brand personality” or “brand adjectives.” I’ll write another piece soon about how there are hundreds of branding deliverables that accomplish the same three or four
A name ≠ a brand. Selecting a name is hard. It’s hard to get two, or four, or seven people to agree on any one thing, especially if that thing is a name. It’s hard because the name needs to work creatively and strategically — but it also needs to work legally. Seeking trademark protection
These are confusing times for cannabis branding. Where is it coming from? Where is it going? What does it look and sound like? We wanted to learn a bit more about what exactly is going on in this space so we reached out to the owners of Mary Joe, a CBD-infused cold brew coffee company
We all have personal associations with names, so which ones really matter? Words take us to weird places What comes to mind when you hear the word “heatwave”? You might think of slow radiating waves of energy rolling across an electric blue sky, those lasers that come out of the Flash’s eyes, a microwave, The
The Problem: Hard to take the name seriously What do you do exactly? When Captain401 first started, the vision behind the name and the brand was a guiding force that steered employers through the muddy waters of 401(k)s. However, this story wasn’t as easy for their audience to grab a hold of. Reactions from new
This is the first chapter of Run Studio Run, a book I wrote about how to manage and grow a small creative studio. I wrote it because I’m tired of creative people thinking that being creative and being good at business are mutually exclusive. The book is available from No Picnic Press here. Look. I’m going to
Philosopher Immanuel Kant has an important lesson to teach us about branding Immanuel Kant was a Prussian philosopher who lived from 1724 to 1804. Among his many assertions he argued that reason is the root of morality and that the human mind creates the human experience. In Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784),
“Naming a company or a product isn’t like naming anything else,” writes Eli Altman in his book, Don’t Call it That. What he means is it’s not like naming a child, a pet, an avatar in a video game, a fantasy football league, an Instagram handle, or anything of the like. As a result, most
