brands Archives — Kevin Rothermel

Your App is not a Unique and Special Snowflake

February 23, 2018

Technology people will never learn that you can’t win on features alone. Any feature can be copied. And any technology can be surpassed.

See: Instagram Stories.

Snapchat @snapchat: That moment when Facebook comes into your house, eats your lunch, and flips your wife the bird. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I’m only PARTIALLY writing this in response to a Brandcenter student who thinks it’s my fault she didn’t invest in Snap before shares went up last month. Of course, that’s before yesterday, when Kylie Jenner forced grandpa to keep working until he’s 80.

But mostly I’m writing this because Marco Arment, the guy that invented read-it-later services, co-founded Tumblr, and makes my favorite podcasting app, wrote some advice about [Defending your app from copies and clones){https://marco.org/2018/02/22/your-app-was-copied]:

The instant someone else has the same feature or design as you, the public and press see it as a collective checkbox feature, or a “standard” or “obvious” design, that apps in this category just have. It’s no longer yours.

When Legal Departments Build Brands

January 26, 2018

Panera is calling for a federal crackdown on the eggs in its competitors’ breakfast sandwiches – The Washington Post:

…if bakery chain Panera gets its way, restaurants won’t be able to call those yellow patties “eggs” in the future. Last week, the company petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to update its 40-year-old definition of the word to exclude most of the processed egg products that have become popular with fast-food chains and food-service.

Great example of brand being bigger than marketing. Unless of course the marketing department came up with this idea. Or even their agency. But lets just file this under “good ideas can come from anywhere, even Panera’s legal department.”

The Definitive Guide To Modern Branding

May 20, 2015

There’s no question that the business of brands is changing. People have been going on and on about it since well before I ever got involved. Though it seems like there are some agencies out there that are actually getting on with it rather than ringing their hands about it.

Communication Design: Insights from the Creative Industries is a new book that features agencies like Zeus Jones who are inventing the state of the art in modern branding.

Adrian Ho, writing on the Zeus Jones blog:

The original impetus for the book was a recognition that there is a growing gap between the education designers and other creatives are getting at school and the emerging practice being developed in the real world. This isn’t simply true for students, it’s also true for practitioners. Modern marketing has become so complex and so specialized that even if you are on the forefront in one area, you may not know what’s happening in other areas.

Very excited about this one. I ordered it while collecting links for this post.

Remembering the Apple Newton’s Prophetic Failure and Lasting Impact

August 13, 2013

In product lore, high profile gadgets that get killed are often more interesting than the ones that succeed. The Kin, the HP TouchPad, and the Edsel are all case studies in failure — albeit for different reasons. Yet in the history of those killings, nothing compared to the Apple Newton MessagePad. The Newton wasn’t just killed, it was violently murdered, dragged into a closet by its hair and kicked to death in its youth by one of technology’s great men. And yet it was a remarkable device, one whose influence is still with us today. The Ur tablet. The first computer designed to free us utterly from the desktop.

This reminded me of an idea that Gareth had years ago (I think it was Gareth…?) about doing a presentation on everything that Apple has done wrong.

You know, since any deck about how to do anything right generally has an Apple logo in it. Probably next to a swoosh. Adjacent to Coca-Cola.

Maybe, if you’re lucky and IF you’re dealing with an innovator/rulebreaker in the field of slide-based storytelling, you’ll find yourself with a Red Bull logo.

From: Daring Fireball