I had a good online discussion the other day about household brand names. I heard the term ‘do the Hoovering’ and wondered if there were any other brands that had achieved the same success. To spawn a whole new verb is quite something but to have a brand name that we all just use by default even though there are plenty of other makes available is pretty cool I think.
Archive for the ‘ General ’ Category
Household Brand Names
Thursday, February 10th, 2011You the brand
Monday, January 17th, 2011Remember when Stuart Baggs referred to himself as ‘the brand’ in the last season of The Apprentice? We are all guilty of being a bit like Stuart either individually or with our businesses and the problem is not really understanding what your brand is or even worse thinking you understand it but everyone else having a different idea. The best description of what a brand is “it’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room“. Stuart’s idea of his brand was hi flying, super cool businessman, yet our idea was that he was a knob.
What’s wrong with this poster?
Saturday, January 1st, 2011My route to the office takes me underneath a railway viaduct and I pass the same advertising billboard everyday. There are a number of billboards just underneath the viaduct and the space gets bought up by smaller local businesses and the larger national corporates. The quality of the posters is generally pretty good and the environment has been been considered.
The future of online banner advertising
Saturday, November 6th, 2010After writing The error in advertising I’ve been thinking about what the future holds for the humble web banner advertisement. The likes of Google AdWords and Facebook Advertising deliver ads to the user based on ‘interest’. i.e. adverts relating to their Google searches, or Facebook ‘liked’ pages etc. While sites like BSA aggregate signed up websites with ad content relating to the site they appear on.
Neue Haas Grotesk
Sunday, October 17th, 2010I finally got round to watching Gary Hustwit‘s movie Helvetica this weekend. If you haven’t seen it yet it really is worth a watch.
A part of the movie that stood out for me was when David Carson was looking at words printed black on white (using Helvetica of course) onto A4 bits of paper that were stuck onto a board. David criticised the font and made the point that the use of font didn’t relate to the word that was written.
