Branding vs. Blending

My Cousin Vinny is one of the best movies of all time. Two college buddies, Bill Gambini and Stan Rothenstein, are arrested in Wazoo, Alabama, for a murder they didn’t commit. Vincent Gambini (Joe Pesci), a lawyer-cousin from Brooklyn with no litigation...

NBC’s Brand: Clear as Mud

I’ve frequently stressed, and posted on MarcRudov.com, this maxim: If the brand is murky to employees, investors, partners, customers, and suppliers, they’ll redefine it in whatever ways suit them — killing revenues, causing wars between marketing...

RadioShack in The Shack

 Ft. Worth-based RadioShack announced that it will rebrand itself simply as The Shack. Lee Applebaum, the company’s chief marketing officer, called it a way of “contemporizing” perceptions of the brand: “Our customers, associates, and even the...

Branding Microsoft

You are driving down a country road with a friend. A few hundred feet away, on the right-hand side, is a billboard. It doesn’t grab your attention, breaking the cardinal rule of billboards. As you edge closer, still unable to make out the message, you spot a...

Branding a Behemoth

While earning an MBA at Boston University’s Graduate School of Management, I wrote a thesis for my advanced-finance course on the value of conglomerates — huge firms, like ITT, composed of unlike businesses. My quantitative analysis proved that such...
 

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