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Girl Scouts Rebrand Their Cookies: “Every Cookie Has A Mission”

February 18, 2010

The Girl Scouts have been busy with their organizational re-branding efforts. With the start of the 2010 Cookie Season, they have a new branding campaign specifically designed to make Girl Scout cookies meaningful. Back when I wrote the post Wal-Mart Knocks Off the Girl Scouts, about Walmart entering into competition with the Girls Scouts on [...]

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Girl Scouts: Limiting Cookie Sales by Strengthening Their Brand?

February 8, 2010

Good news for you and your Thin Mint Addiction! The Girl Scouts are making it easy to find out where those dang cookies are being sold! (Now I don’t have to drive to Walmart and get the cheaper but less meaningful generic imitations!) The Girl Scouts have an online cookie locator– just type in your [...]

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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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Thin Mint-y Gate: Wal-mart’s Socia Media Opportunity

August 8, 2009

Where is Wal-mart’s social media outreach? This ongoing experience with “Thin Mint-y Gate” is raising a bunch of questions, for the audiences reading and commenting on blogs, for the Girl Scouts and their community, and for me as a blogger & management scholar. I hope I’ll get a chance to address some of these questions [...]

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Wal-Mart Knocks Off the Girl Scouts

August 3, 2009

(Welcome MacLeans Readers… Please join the conversation! ) Just when you think your opinion about Wal-mart might be changing… Just when you think that maybe, just maybe, Wal-mart was learning to be a better citizen… Wal-mart turns around and does something really … despicable. It’s not discriminating against women, strong-arming suppliers, polluting neighborhoods or racing [...]

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When the Organization Wears its Brand

July 31, 2009

The organization itself can wear the brand — it isn’t just the employees’ who can “wear the brand”. The organization’s physical being can (and should) express its brand and purpose. When an organization expresses its purpose through the way it is physically situating itself, I like to think of it as “whereing” the brand. From [...]

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BlogHer 09: Does Swag Pervert the Purpose?

July 27, 2009

Walking into my office this morning, I tripped over a ‘rubber bracelet cum flash drive’ that was part of the swag I brought back with me from Chicago and the 2009 BlogHer. That clumsy move plus a few friends’ Tweets about supposedly free swag costing them money to ship home, made me wonder about how [...]

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Authentic Organizational Partnerships: Organizational Brands, Names, the Columbus Children’s Hospital, and the Abercrombie & Fitch Trauma Center

March 19, 2008

+ = ??? In an earlier post, I mentioned that authentic organizations might find it hard to find appropriate partner organizations, because the qualities of the company you keep are often inferred to be the qualities of your organization itself. And now, in the news , is a great example of this very problem: The [...]

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It’s not that hard to recognize an organization’s authenticity. Even a child can do it.

February 16, 2008

“Mom, this company really shows their believingness.” So said my nine-year-old daughter. She had just noticed that the tag hanging from the T-shirt I gave her for Valentine’s Day was made from “100% post-consumer waste”. She already knew that the T-shirt was from a company called PositiviTee, that the graphic image printed on the T-shirt [...]

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