Recognition

You can defend the tagline and the positioning in a brand review. You can't defend a color pair a designer chose from her daughter's birthday party. Dunkin' protected the color anyway, and the trademark filing shows how far they went.

A record executive shortens a kid's name to dodge a bias. The kid cuts a folk song as rock and roll and aims at the same crowd. Two routes to one audience, the mechanism your buyers run on you weekly, and a four-step map to run before you commit.

You're proud of the company and tired of the brand, and you're afraid a rebrand costs you the customers who already know you. A method for deciding what you can't touch, what Cracker Barrel's year proves, and how to tell complaints from confusion.

Everyone says the words brand and branding. A logo is a mark. A brand is the feeling your customers carry, built by design or by accident. What each term covers, where marketing fits, and the books that laid the foundation.

The exec team decided the brand gets fixed, and now you have to explain what that covers. What brand design is, how it differs from graphic design, the four stages, and what it costs when the alignment work gets skipped.

Genericide kills brands that get too famous. The ugly twin kills the rest: brands so careful to fit their category that customers can't tell them apart. A four-question self-test for whether your brand blends in, and what ownable looks like.