In the early 1970s, Levi's ran these fantastic psychedelic TV commercials with narration by Ken Nordine, the beat creator of the pioneering Word Jazz albums of the 1950s that melded far-out poetry with hip musical accompaniment. Far fucking out.
Beth Swarecki trained a neural net on the names of products from Gwyneth Paltrow's spiritual hygiene wellness lifestyle shop and its creations are surely good enough to brand. Read the rest
A popular conspiracy theory about millionaire presidential candidate Donald Trump is that his campaign is really just a big advertising effort for his "brand": the Trump name he licenses out to anyone who will pay for it. If this was his plan, Alexandra Bruell writes in the Wall Street Journal, it was a bad one. The tape of him boasting about sexually assaulting women hits particularly hard.
As of June 2016, when Mr. Trump was already the presumptive Republican nominee for president, the added value of the Trump brand in entertainment was as high as 43%.
But that added value has been significantly diminished since the video surfaced. The perceived added value in TV and entertainment, a category with which he’s closely associated after “The Apprentice,” fell 13 percentage points as of Oct. 9, while the value of the Trump brand dropped 8 percentage points in real estate and 6 percentage points in country clubs and golf clubs, according to Brand Keys.
“What we know for sure is that these brand engagement numbers correlate very highly with consumer behavior in the marketplace,” said Mr. Passikoff. As the Trump brand becomes more toxic, “consumers will be distancing themselves from Trump-branded products as well.”
Even if his remarks subside in the public imagination, he's in it to the end, and "Trump" could end up signifying bigshot losers. Not great for any business, but bigly so in hospitality and entertainment. Read the rest
The company formerly known as Siemens Healthcare, as august and sterile as they come in the German healthcare business, is being rebranded as "Healthineers" in advance of a public stock offering. At best, it's cringe humor, right down to the Teletubbies-style dance music (above, described by the Financial Times as "writhing spandex horror") from the launch event. Read the rest
Apple's signaled that its desktop operating system is to be renamed MacOS, making the questionable search string "OS X" a thing of the past. The new brand turned up on an environmental webpage at its site (an official manifestation of hints already found in technical documents), though it was soon replaced by the currently-official name. Read the rest
Caity Weaver spotted that Sure Deodorant had inaugurated a poll in which not a single person voted. Read the rest
According to a survey of 200,000 Americans, Miller High Life is the most bi-partisan of beers. Republicans favor Samuel Adams and, apparently, there are a lot of Democrats drinking Heineken. (Although one might argue that these results are heavily skewed, as the survey did not include either microbrews or microparties. God only knows what the Libertarians are drinking.) There's a chart. Yay, charts! (Via Kevin Zelnio) Read the rest
