by Marc H. Rudov | January 23, 2015 | Article
AT&T plans to acquire DirecTV by May 2015, barring any regulatory snags, for $48.5B. This unwieldy combination will create organizational and branding indigestion. Will the DirecTV name survive? Should it? How will AT&T differentiate it from U-verse? At 20M+...
by Marc H. Rudov | January 19, 2015 | Article
A big part of Apple’s brand is ease of use. Successful suppliers like Apple simplify customers’ lives and never ask them to perform heavy lifting. Simplify and ease. What a concept! Long before YouTube and the iPhone, everybody owned a VCR. Comically, most...
by Marc H. Rudov | October 24, 2014 | Article
Recently, a venture capitalist, who had read my book on branding for CEOs, asked my opinion of Amazon’s brand. I couldn’t fathom it. Amazon’s sell-everything-to-everyone model, I averred, is unbrandable, not to mention, unsustainable. When trying to...
by Marc H. Rudov | May 12, 2014 | Article
Why does Apple want to buy Beats Electronics, the headphone company owned by Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, for $3.2B? One word: Millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000). Anyone who thinks Apple is about products and product features doesn’t get it....
by Marc H. Rudov | August 6, 2012 | Article
Blind to Folly Silicon Valley has OCD: obsessive cloud disorder. No jargon occupies the Silicon Valley lexicon more than cloud computing — except social media and mobile. Cloud has become an absolute obsession, and a ridiculous one at that. The danger with...
