An achronological compendium of brand and brand-adjacent pieces written for Bloomberg Opinion.
BLANDS
SLEEP
What makes a brand a bland is duality: claiming simultaneously to be unique in product, groundbreaking in purpose, and singular in delivery, while slavishly obeying an identikit formula of business model, look and feel, and tone of voice.
If you thought humans deserved at least seven hours free from marketing’s grasp, think again. How a new breed of brands is selling sleep to the exhausted.
BRANDTER
By swapping golden-age advertising humor
for “brandter” — bantz, LoLz and trash talk — companies risk alienating the consumers
they hope to attract.
FUNNY
Is the golden era of humor in advertising over?
Brands have aspired to stand-up comedy for more than 200 years. But advertising may have reached a mic-drop moment.
SCENT
From bacon-scented dental floss and KFC firelogs to Hummer perfume and aroma-enhanced VR porn, companies are doubling down on the sweet smell of excess.
ANIMALS
In an age of technoscience rationality,
brands are relying ever more heavily
on the attractive power of animals.
007 & Dr. No
“Dr. No” is a simple movie shot on a poverty-stricken budget, starring a relative unknown, based on the sixth book in a series and released 60 years ago to a mixed critical response.
So … how did it create one of the most valuable
and venerated brand franchises in history?
VERNACUALAR
From sneakers and supermarkets to pop stars and politicians, billion-dollar brands are subverting professional polish to claim a fake authenticity.
SCHOOLS
Hardened doors, bulletproof backpacks and classroom panic rooms — how companies are filling the school safety void of gun control.
BOOZE
Alcohol brands are thinking outside the bottle to fuel and gratify a new drinking culture.
GOLF 6.0
Millennials are saving golf by rebranding it
WEALTH
Branding wealth management
for the averagely affluent
(… your robo-advisor won’t see you now.)
AGITPROP
ALPHABET
From Ukraine to Auschwitz,
a single letter can damn or defy.
METAVERSE
BRANDGRAB
Is the metaverse a truly novel terra nova — or just the latest way for companies
to pervade every click and pixel of
your online presence under the
guise of gamified immersion?
COLLABS
Brand partnerships used to be sparing, targeted — special, even. But as subcultures flourish, no new collaboration is too zany.
MERCH
What the ugly Christmas jumper
tells us about the avalanche of
modern merch marketing.
BRAND &
DELIVER
Branding the billion-dollar “dark stores” of “quick-commerce.”
BRANDSPERANTO
From Nike and Apple to Target and MasterCard, today’s wordless silhouette brands are tapping into a wider trend of universal symbolic communication.
META
Meta’s Mediocrity Is the Message
Avoiding catastrophe was the bar
for Facebook’s rebranding, and
Mark Zuckerberg cleared it.
NATION
STATES
Given the scope of their ambitions and our dependence on them, behemoth brands should be treated, and held to account, for what they really are: commercial superpowers.
BRAND
LONGING
Can the increasingly sophisticated gimmicks of “brandlonging” turn fickle consumers into faithful members?
PRODUCT
DISPLACEMENT
Welcome to the wild world of product displacement, in which no brand is safe from "hatejacking" and other threats.
MOUSE
orMULE
What to do when haters come
gunning for your brand
CREATIVE
CATS
A guide to fostering more fruitful collaborations between
corporate canines and creative cats.
SONIC
BRANDING
Why more and more brands are elbowing their way into your ears
DEBRANDING
Why, in a world of unparalleled possibility, are some of the world’s
biggest brands going flat to the future?
BLENDS
A small vanguard of companies
are harnessing transparency
and personalization to integrate themselves into our lives.
ADORKABLES
While blands seduce millennials with an ever-receding mirage of self-actualization, adorkables double down on Gen Z’s internal conflict between self-consciousness and self-promotion.
EASTER
EGGS
What every company can learn
from the humor and humanization
of hidden gems.
DAZZLE
“So-called invisibility against submarine attack is not only impossible, but dangerous, and consequently if a vessel can be seen at all, it does not matter how visible she is, providing her course remains a matter of question for the attacker.”
ESPIONAGE
In his 1974 spy classic, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” John le Carré wrote: “Haydon also took it for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.” What, then, are we to make of agencies like the CIA rebranding?
B.L.M.
The response of the world’s biggest brands to the shocking killing of George Floyd suggests that the corporate social media crisis playbook has yet to be written.
INDULGENCE
The power of user indulgence lies in its recognition of our whims, weaknesses and inherent contradictions. Indulgent design allows products and services to dovetail with life as it is actually lived which, in turn, enables brands to form genuine and lasting customer connections.
COVID
Nostalgia aside, however, the improbable longevity of “Keep Calm and Carry On” owes much to the poster’s messaging clarity and design elegance — two attributes glaringly absent from the current government’s Covid-19 communications.
DASHBOARDS
The deadliest pandemic of the digital age has supercharged the rise of the dashboard, and illuminated the promise and peril of “dashboard thinking.”
TRUMP
The tattered catalog of Trump brand flops, scandals and failures is almost comically absurd: Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, Trump University, Trump Ice, Trump Model Management, Trump Vitamins, Trump Shuttle, Trump: The Game … to name but a few. Now to this list comes “Trump: The Presidency” — a four-year farrago of graft and malice that ended, all too predictably, in insurrection, impeachment and ignominy.
In recent months, without warning or design,
city streets across the world have undergone transformations unimaginable to the giddiest
of urban planners.
A comparison with global development indicators suggests that Americans
of different races inhabit all but separate countries.