Image & Reputation

Implicit Complicity and “Negative Spillover”: Reputation Damage from BP’s Oil Spill Crisis

June 30, 2010

What do birds, beaches, and Chevron have in common? They have been “tarred by the same gush” of “negative spillover” from BP’s Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. In one of the weirder cases of a collision between literal and figurative language, the “negative spillover” of BPs Deepwater Horizon crisis is soiling not only birds and beaches, but [...]

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Fronting for “the Man”: Can BP disarm our anger by using a Black “Teddy-Bear” Spokesperson?

June 24, 2010

[Trigger alert: This post is about racism.] There is no more incendiary question than the implicit and unspoken question that often follows the promotion of non-white and/or non-male employees: Did s/he get the job because s/he’s qualified, or did s/he get the job because s/he’s (fill in the diversity criterion here)? Corporate American is seldom [...]

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BP’s Bravest Brandividual: What could be motivating Darryl Willis?

June 22, 2010

If you’ve been paying attention to BP’s “Making it right” newspaper advertising, or if you’ve seen BP’s recent television advertising, you’ve seen BP’s new Brandividual Darryl Willis. Aside from Tony Hayward, BP’s walking PR disaster CEO, Darryl Willis is the only person with a name shown by BPs own advertisements as being in charge of [...]

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The Best PR that $1.6 Million Can’t Buy: Authenticity in Action at Zappos

May 25, 2010

Gotta love those folks at Zappos. They screw up, they explain, they apologize, and they fix it. And we applaud. Why? Because Zappos’ actions support the company’s stated purpose, and Zappos’ actions support its claims about who they are as a company. It’s Authenticity in Action. The Zappos’ Mistake Story in a Nutshell An online [...]

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Rebranding Pompeii as a Living City

May 4, 2010

It seems that you can’t escape the demands of rebranding, even if you go back 2282 years. In one of the more intriguing examples of rebranding I’ve seen in a while, the world historical site of the City of Pompeii is currently engaged in its own rebranding campaign. The ‘old’ brand of Pompeii To appreciate [...]

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Will Newsweek Respond to Claims of Sexism?

March 23, 2010

I would love to have been in the room when three journalists at Newsweek proposed that Newsweek publish their article criticizing Newsweek for gender discrimination. Why? You know you’re getting close(r) to authenticity when you can have a recursive sentence like that one written about changing things that are wrong at your organization. Here we [...]

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Social Media Risks: Restoring trust when your brand mascot is a killer (whale)

March 2, 2010

The challenge of being authentic on social media can be scary. Many organizations are afraid of being ‘on’ social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, where they (or their representatives) are accessible and active in real time. They worry that participating in real time on social media platforms will expose them as unthinking, out of [...]

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Why So Much Anger at the Girl Scouts?

February 22, 2010

Ever since I poked the beehive back in August with my post about Walmart and Girl Scout cookies, my blog and I have been receiving angry comments from people who just hate the Girl Scouts. It’s one thing to be angry at Walmart, but the Girl Scouts? I don’t understand… Why is there so much [...]

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Fix the Brand of Men’s Figure Skating: Send Out the Clowns, and get me Johnny Weir

February 19, 2010

The ‘Brand of Men’s Figure Skating’ is broken. The brand lacks coherence, it isn’t compelling, and sometimes it isn’t even attractive. And it’s all because of what those guys wear. In an ideal world, the Brand of Men’s Figure Skating reflects a hearty frisson between between the brand’s two defining attributes: Athleticism & Artistry. Althleticism [...]

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Does the iPad Signal a Change in Apple’s Core Brand & Identity?

February 2, 2010

If products reflect an organization’s values and an organization’s identity, does Apple’s new iPad tell us something about where Apple as a company is headed? And, if that’s where Apple is going, do we all want to go there too? Here’s a proposition: Apple as an organization is changing, from an organization that’s “about” creativity [...]

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