Seth's Blog: The brand formula

This is an article that discusses a couple of ideas on branding. Here is an excerpt:

Fedex is a powerful brand because you always get what you expect, and the relief you get from their consistency is high.

AT&T is a weak brand because you almost never get what you expect, because they do so many different things and because the value of what they create has little emotional resonance (it sure used to though, when they did one thing, they did it perfectly and they were the only ones who could connect you).

The dangers of brand ubiquity are then obvious. When your brand is lots of things (like AOL became) then the expectations were all over the place and the emotional resonance started to fade. If the predictability of your brand starts to erode its emotional power (a restaurant that becomes boring) then you need to become predictable in your joyous unpredictability!

If you want to grow a valuable brand, my advice is to keep awareness close to zero among the people you're not ready for yet, and build the most predictable, emotional experience you can among those that care about you.


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Test

I am checking to see if the bookmark button shows up in my individual posts.

Animated Crying Mouse

This is a test to see if today I can upload the Crying Mouse animated graphic. It did upload. Yeah!

Languishing Tree Fellow

Yesterday, I had a problem uploading pictures but today I was able to. But now the darn text isn't wrapping properly.

The old Digg button

I am also adding the html code for the old Digg button.

Adding a new Digg Button

This is a test. I am adding the code to enable readers to Digg my posts or post to Del.icio.us.



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Web 2.0: Demand Strains Amazon Web Services

Amazon.com's online computing and data storage service is so popular that the company must scale back the beta program.

This is an interesting article. I had never heard of Amazon's Web Services (click to read the article to learn more).

Another thing that was interesting to learn is that similar to Richard Bransons's Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezos (of Amazon) is funding a company called Blue Origin to build vehicles for space travel. Here is an interesting excerpt:

"Bezos noted that Blue Origin, a company he funded to build vehicles that would cut the cost of travel to outer space, used S3 (part of Amazon's web services) in January to handle an unexpected huge spike in demand for access to its Web page. When Blue Origin added video to its site, popular sites like Slashdot.org linked to it, and traffic exploded from almost nothing to more than 3.5 million visitors in a day, he said."

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AOL in the Health Biz

The other day, I listened to a iinnovate podcast interview of Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel and then another Business Week podcast about new directions that Intel was taking. Both podcasts discussed that Intel was moving into the health arena which, with a growing senior population around the world, is forcast to be a very important market.

So it was interesting it see in the The New York Times article this morning, AOL Founder Hopes to Build New Giant Among a Bevy of Health Care Web Sites, that Steve Case is also taking a big stake in the online healthcare industry with an online website called RevolutionHealth.com. The article is interesting because it discusses his competitors such as WebMD.com, NIH.gov, from the National Institutes of Health; Yahoo Health; Mayoclinic.com; and About.com Health, which is owned by The New York Times Company. Google, too, jumping into the frey with searches for medical conditions.

The article also mentions some of the private investors who are bankrolling this venture, which include among others, former Secretary of State, Colin Powell. There is also a discussion about the enormous amount of money that drug companies are spending on advertising on and offline. Here is an excerpt about this:

"Martin J. Wygod, the chairman of WebMD Health, said the pharmaceutical companies were spending about $455 million on marketing to patients and doctors online this year. But that is only about 3.5 percent of the $13 billion the drug industry spends on advertising, he said."

Google makes offline ad headway

Since Google is going to impact all businesses, I have been interested in following it. This is an interesting article about Google's forays into traditional print and radio advertsing. Here is one little excerpt:

Google announced that it signed a multi-year agreement with Clear Channel that allows the search giant to sell a "a guaranteed portion of 30-second advertising inventory available on more than 675 of Clear Channel's AM/FM stations."

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First emailed post!

This is a test. I am emailing this post!

Joy

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