Branding

As social media and word of mouth marketing slowly mature as disciplines, I'm glad that more and more people are writing books on the subject. Because as much as I love the stream of consciousness info flood that I get through my blog reader every morning, it's also nice to explore a subject in a more deliberate way.

It seems to me that the only thing better than being a toy maker might be being a toy marketer. For this podcast, I decided to test this theory by chatting with an expert in toy marketing, Ted Mininni, the President of Design Force Inc, a branding and design agency that specializes in the toy/entertainment industry.

Pitching, proposals, business development and, even, gasp, sales are part of every surviving agency or consultant's life. We all accept that it must be done but, if you're like most, you have a major love/hate relationship with it. In this podcast, I chat with Blair Enns, a consultant who has built his business around teaching agencies to WIN WITHOUT PITCHING. That's potentially a little slice of heaven if you ask me.

XBOX is one of the amazing launch stories of the last five years. From a standing start, Microsoft, has launched a gaming platform with amazing market share and brand awareness worldwide. For this podcast interview, I connected with Eli Friedman, one of the smart marketers driving the XBOX brand.

Listen in as Eli discusses the challenge of global branding, how he manages that complexity, one of the most innovative branding efforts the XBOX team implemented and more.

Enjoy!

For this Jenerous podcast interview, I connected with the resident WOM guru, Geno Church, of Brains on Fire, a leading identity agency from Greenville, SC. Geno Church was nice enough to chat with me about how BoF views branding and identity, the current state of WOM, the biggest misconceptions companies have about word of mouth marketing and more.

Great stuff!

Enjoy:

Geno Church

Scott Ginsberg is man with a strong personal brand. Everyone seems to know his name. Of course, it might be that he's been wearing a name tag for the last 2,119 days.

Scott and I chatted about marketing, personal branding, approachability and more.

Scott has a blog, podcast, and some great articles at his website.

Branding is an often overlooked, frequently screwed up and extremely important marketing skill. Last Friday, I was fortunate enough to get to pick the brain of Tom Asacker, a leading expert on branding in order to find out why so many companies get it wrong.

Right after interviewing Josh, I sped west (via Skype) to Colorado to talk with John Winsor. John is an author of two books (Spark & Beyond the Brand) and CEO of Radar Communications - a market research and branding firm with a unique twist.

I love the passion, the ideas and the pictures that this interviewee brings to his blog posts. Olivier Blanchard is a brand-building consultant and entrepreneur from the East coast of the US.

For this podcast, I started off by butchering Olivier's name (sorry!) and then chatted with him about his background, how customer service is a great branding tool, the importance of customer touch points, the experience as the brand and more. I was feeling vocal so you'll hear more of my opinions in this podcast than usual.

I love talking to innovators. It really gets the adrenaline flowing.

Today, I chatted with Michael McDerment of 2ndSite and the vp of marketing behind BrandMurder.com. As part of their re-branding effort, 2ndSite is killing off their brand in murder mystery format. Take a look today so that you can get your prediction in for who killed the brand before the final episode comes out.