In yet another installment of our peculiar branding version of Survivor, we pit Al Ries’ unassailable bestseller on branding, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, against another popular and successful brand, Gucci, to see if these laws are as immutable as Ries claims.
Al Ries’ central argument is that one brand must always and ever be [...]

And what a soggy mess we get.
We continue our full frontal assault on Al Ries’ famous tome on branding, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. It’s a wonderful book, but reality, it turns out, is a bit more complex. In an effort to make the book more useful for the messy complexity of real life [...]

The good news first: the bad news is not as bad as we thought.
Revised commerce department figures showed on Friday that US gross domestic product declined by an annualised rate of 5.7 per cent in the first three months of the year, compared with last month’s estimate of 6.1 per cent. The decline was less [...]

Product and company naming is one of those odd and portentous events in a business. Some folks just do it and get on with their lives and others spend millions coming up with just the right name. I’ve been involved in both types of projects. But, as we say in our little discussion of naming [...]

This, in my opinion, is the must-watch video for anyone in the product development or invention line. Our book, The Startup Bible, has a lengthy chapter on product development, but I have never seen anything that so perfectly embodies what makes an invention great or how to go about it: game-changing, useful, inexpensive, and, to [...]

Remember “Bob”?
Bing, the name Microsoft gave to the new search service it unveiled Thursday, is its answer to Google . . .
Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” [...]

Our weird, wonderful, and wacky review of Al Ries’ The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding continues to smart up the slim volume by using brand case studies to paint a fuller picture of branding opportunities. We’re now in the process of totally revising the Ries framework and today, after a whopping dose of Extra Strength [...]

I have been assembling material for my customer service books for years now. I have — I’m not joking — seven three-ring binders full of customer service encounters both good and bad. I am, if such a distinction is an honor, the world’s most prolific collector of customer service experiences. As you can imagine, I [...]

On Friday, President Obama signed legislation that seriously impacts how credit card companies can market and manage consumer credit cards. The legislation introduces new and far-reaching protections for credit card borrowers, but these protections aren’t “free,” at least in economic terms. They will, in fact, be purchased by substantial revisions of how credit card companies [...]

Faithful readers of our blog have followed with baited breath as we throw one case study after another at Al Ries’ formidable branding bible, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. So far, we’ve managed to qualify Ries’ central dictum — that one brand should always be one thing and always associated with one and only [...]

We’re just having too much fun reviewing Al Ries’ The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by randomly throwing brands at the book and seeing if they stick. Help! We can’t stop!
Well, talk about sticky, today we throw a gooey jar of Vaseline at the book and . . . wait! Al Ries already threw [...]

“You know what my father said to me?” “Get out?” “No, before that.” “You’re going bald?” “No, no, land, everyone will always need land.”
African countries are giving away vast tracts of farmland to other countries and investors almost for free, with the only benefits consisting of vague promises of jobs and infrastructure, according to a [...]

In yet another installment of our endless review of Al Ries’ The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, we explore a more delicate and feminine side of Ragin’ Ries as we lightly take him to Tiffany’s. Will his immovable, straight-from-the-mouth-of-god tawhid-like doctrine of one brand = one thing = one word hold up at the retailer [...]

Tight times seem to fit well in tight jeans.
While consumer spending remains woefully depressed, expensive designer jeans have been one of the few bright spots for manufacturers and retailers, according to NPD Group Inc., a market research company.
Sales of premium brand jeans grew by 17% during 2008 and eked out a 2.3% increase in the [...]

Faithful readers of this blog know the drill already. We’re reviewing Al Ries’s The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by throwing a random collection of major, successful brands at his book to see if Al is right when he forcefully claims that one brand must always be one thing and one word. Break that rule, [...]

I have been a student of leadership since my salt mine days as university faculty. I’ve seen a lot of good and bad ideas come and go, but the research shows that there’s really no such thing as a personality type all great leaders are made of. Extroverts, introverts, highly charismatic, unassuming — great leaders [...]

Acknowledgements are the rarest and greatest privilege we professional writers enjoy. Although all of us carry around in some form or another the thoughts, habits, and wisdom of the greatest people in our lives, we writers are often afforded the incomparable opportunity to sort them out and distill from the noise of the everyday the [...]

Faithful readers of this blog know that we’re taking on the formidable and legendary Ragin’ Al Ries and his popular bestseller, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, by throwing famous and successful brands at him totally at random. Since no-one here at Shoestring Venture likes to play by anyone’s rules — and since we’ve never [...]

Didn’t I say this would be how Car 2.0 would work? Huh? Didn’t I?
The deal marks a further bet on battery-powered cars by the maker of Mercedes-Benz luxury vehicles and a vote of confidence in Tesla. The electric car pioneer has struggled to raise funds and realise expansion plans during the credit crunch. . . [...]

Unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool tech geek with an ear to every railroad track, you’ve probably seen or heard the word “Wolfram/Alpha” in only the most fuzzy way as some kind of Google competitor or next-generation something-or-other-maybe-a-search-engine. You may have heard hints that Google plans to take on Wolfram/Alpha at its own game.
What’s this new player [...]