I once had a conversation with the Marketing Director of a brand that is a household name in which he suggested that no products had updated their brand identities. We were having the conversation because his main brand was so tired that sales were in decline and customers didn’t see its packs on the shelves of their supermarkets: it looked exactly the same as it had a decade earlier (and it was hardly the most relevant product back then). When I used Skoda as an example, he moved the goal posts to FMCG products. Then when I referenced other FMCG products that had dramatically redesigned their brand without disaster he argued that these weren’t in the same category as his product. So his point was, that since none of his competitors had successfully updated their brand identity, he shouldn’t be the first one to risk it. Except, of course, all of […]
Monthly Archives: July 2010
Getting a Book Published: Countdown to Publication
It’s been a while since I updated my series on getting a book published, partly because I’ve been so busy with book-related activity! The publishing industry works backwards. That’s not a slur on their approach, just an observation. They set a publication date based on a number of factors: Is there an event they can associate the book with? If you’ve written a book on space travel it probably makes sense to time the launch to coincide the publication with a large space conference or the intended publication date of the latest Mars pictures, or whatever. There are two reasons for this: firstly, the human brain works by associations and if the media are developing the neural paths to space-related thoughts your book is going to feel more relevant and is more likely to get noticed. Secondly, journalists looking to cover the event will appreciate an angle from you that […]
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