Alex Woodruff Biz Buzz

Naming brands is never easy, but if you’re a regional ice cream maker and hit upon an idea that works in your country, you’re probably not thinking about words and meanings beyond the borders of the domestic market. Bum Bum in the UK? I met someone who worked for Schöller ice cream, based in Nuremberg. [...]

Can brand managers not even get some of the basics right? Or is Nestlé governed by so much bureaucracy that no-one remembers what the corporate design is any more. Here we see ex-Rowntree Mackintosh brand, After Eight, being subjected to a bit of Swiss savagery. First the brand with a coherently designed Nestlé logo (though [...]

Nestlé does it again. KitKat takes on the Nestlé stamp In the late 80s they bought the traditional York-based English chocolate company Rowntree Mackintosh. One of their biggest assets: KitKat. So over time it was inevitable that the Nestlé owners would roll out their “Nestle on the front of all packaging” strategy in this core [...]

Some years ago Mars decided its international brands were now streamlined enough for the same names to be used in different countries. They had the big brand Mars, but also Snickers & Marathon (one and the same product, the chocolate bar with peanuts) and Twix & Raider (also the same product, two thin bars with [...]

When a company grows internationally and launches its brands in other countries or buys up brands to complement its range, it then has to work out – retrospectively – which brands to keep, combine or kill. Unilever faced this issue with its deodorant brand Sure – or Rexona to you if you’re outside the UK. [...]

Fujitsu as a stand-alone brand If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Executives in Germany and Japan obviously concluded around the same time towards the end of 1990s that what sleepy Siemens needed most was a shot in the arm of Japanese inventiveness, and the thing Fujitsu needed most was a hefty slug of German [...]

New York New York, fondly known as The Big Apple since the 1970s following a promotional campaign by the New York Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, has rebranded. Gone are the allusions of juicy cosmopolitan razzmatazz, gone are allusions of grandeur, gone are the sky-scraping daredevils and high-rise high fliers. Classic New York NY is differentiating [...]

When your pricing strategy is like Aldi’s – low price, always low price, but good reliable quality – you’ll be pigeon-holed as a “discounter”. There’s nothing wrong with this strategy, as long as you sell products in high volumes. Which is precisely what Aldi does – it’s the No1 in Germany apparently (though it would [...]

This scan from a German magazine is instantly recognisable to most Germans as advertising for the cigarette brand Lucky Strike. What it demonstrates is that campaigns that stick consistently to the same format get remembered. The brand is almost no longer needed, it stands in the room like a ghost. The ad was placed by [...]

Brand symbols last and, if used consistently over time, take on meaning as an icon for the brand. Eventually it’s no longer necessary to mention the brand. The symbol does the job for you, laden with symbolic expression and the whole brand equity. Some brand symbols, or mnemonics, that in my opinion really hit the [...]