“We started in spring 1997. We had roughly six weeks to create a name and an identity. It may be hard to believe, but we reviewed probably 1600-plus name alternatives, seriously considered over 800 names, and presented over 100 strong candidates to the team. This might seem like an arduous task but those meetings were filled with fun, laughter and confidence that we would get the right answer.”

“A virtual road trip through the country shows their varied efforts to lure tourists with interesting branding through their flag, logo, and license plates.”

“A good brief is half success with an identity project. If you have all the information and an in depth understanding of your client’s brand you will have the basis for a great logo and striking identity. Without it you’re just shooting in the dark and can only rely on your luck to find the right solution. A good brief also simplifies your work by giving numerous seeds of ideas to work with… This is why I developed and fine tuned over the years a client questionnaire to use as a guideline to interview the client and now I’m giving it to you hoping you can make a good use of it for the next identity project you will work on…”

“The biggest problem, of course, is that new names seldom sound good at first. Advertising executive Ron Holland thought that Xerox was a horrible name for their client’s up-and-coming duplicating company. ‘They’ll call it Ex-Rox, the famous Japanese laxative,’ he told his partner, George Lois.”

“This month’s Wired has a stunning article by James Surowiecki about the failing currency of brands as a form of intangible corporate asset. This is a timely piece because the rhetoric of branding has been used to make unprecedented incursions against privacy, competition and speech.”

“I thought I should just give you a little explanation of why I made this site and what it’s all about. Well as you could of figured it this is a blog (short for Web Blog) and I intend to just update it with news and views about the Virgin Group. I really like the brand, and from a younger age I’ve appreciated its versatility and just generally how ‘cool’ it is.”

“Taglines used to be called slogans, and in the days of hard sell advertising mavens like Claude Hopkins and Rosser Reeves, they summed up the product and the promise in one viciously efficient little package: Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. Somewhere along the way, though, slogans turned into taglines, vague bits of poetry that sought to transcend the mundane commercial world and commune with the divine.”

“How we beat Eastman Kodak and its little yellow boxes at point of purchase despite a clunky product and an irrelevant corporate name.” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)

“Whether marketing a corporate brand or a branded product or service, success increasingly demands proactive brand management. This site is dedicated to examining all issues relating to branding to assist you in this task.” (Thanks Antenna!)

“We created the Igor Naming Guide in order to demystify the naming process. In it we show how and why great product and company names work, when focus groups and standard ways of thinking about them might have predicted otherwise. Igor’s own naming process is presented in excruciating but logical detail.”

“Contrary to conventional wisdom, the most popular ways of selecting a company name or a product brand are the worst approaches, and they often spell disaster. You want to coin the most motivating, memorable moniker possible that nobody can copy or imitate, a name that will gain you a loyal customer base and may even provide you with a new and independent source of income. In other words, avoid the wildly popular routes for selecting a commercial identifier.”

“It would come as a great surprise to the bulk of the philosophers surveyed in this book that their ruminations form a philosophy of branding, one that offers counsel to marketers. Summarizing, or at least skimming over, the main points of thinkers ranging from Heraclitus to Popper, Thom Braun, director of the Marketing Academy at the Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever, argues that their insights on grandiose matters ó existence, say, or truth or God ó serve well for evaluating products and consumers’ responses to them and their marketing.”

“While we hold fast to the belief that every one of the six steps outlined in our process, from an initial competitive analysis to final company or product name and tagline, is vital to all naming projects, we understand that your marketing people may well have worked through some of them before contacting us.”

“There has often been speculation about the names of IKEA furniture (especially about the desk Jerker and the bed Gutvik). An article in German in Stern reveals a surprising amount of planning. Thus bathroom items are named after Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays; sets of bookcases after occupations; dining tables and chairs after Finnish placenames; carpets after Danish placenames; and much more…”

“Our project is an ongoing attempt to write a multimedia Web-based book dedicated to studying how corporate television commercials portray a world shaped and defined by global capitalism during the last years of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st. Drawing on a set of over 800 TV commercials sponsored by corporate firms from 1996 to present, we try to map conceptually the landscapes and narratives of Capital, Technology and Globalization as seen in corporate television ads.”