Belve? Stones? The Shack?
Here’s an interesting article on the benefits and pitfalls of developing and marketing your own brand’s bar call.

What’s in a Nickname? In Spirits World, an Implied Relationship

What do you think? Should brands develop their own nicknames or leave it to consumers? And, what are some memorable brand nicknames that you like or dislike?

Contributed by: Jenna Wise

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Over the past three decades, how many Olympic athletes can you name? Did your memory conjure up images of the medal ceremony or the face on the Wheaties box? “Being an Olympic athlete can be a very depressing experience: You spend four years grinding away for that one Olympic opportunity where you become really huge, if you’re lucky, for 3 or 4 weeks, and then you go back into oblivion,” said Boyce Watkins, a faculty affiliate at the College Sport Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Well, this ill-fated reality for some is far from the truth for those Olympic athletes who find themselves signing an endorsement deal. Continue Reading »

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Kudos to our Visual Design Department who recently was recognized for four brands by American Graphic Design and Advertising.

Carnival Cruise Lines: Drainpipe logo
Carnival Cruise Lines: Twister logo
FUJIFILM Medical Systems: Synapse logo
PPG: VIVATI Collection logo

Kristin Everidge, Manager of Visual Branding for Addison Whitney, commented, “It has been an honor to be a part of ADGA’s annual awards for the past 12 years. The 2010 winners represent a synergy between the core competencies of our organization, which include naming and design work for these clients. Because of our iterative and collaborative processes with these clients, we share the credit for these awards with Carnival Cruise Lines, FUJIFILM and PPG.”

We’ve talked a lot about how brands are trying to add “Green” to their corporate color palette, sometimes with real, valuable initiatives and sometimes with just words. (Green: Who Can Claim It? and Greenwashing) So in honor of this Earth Day, the 40th Anniversary actually, we’d like put some of those brands to the test to “verdify” how green they really are.

Last month, SunChips introduced the world’s first fully-compostable chip bag. The new bags, made of plant-based materials, should fully decompose in 14 weeks (under typical hot composting conditions). A few weeks later, Snyder’s of Hanover announced it too would be using sustainable packaging (on its organic line of pretzels).

I don’t have a compost pile, much less the perfectly mixed 1-2-2-2-1 “hot” compost that SunChips recommends, but I do find the random scrap of trash in my yard after trash day. Would the bags eventually decompose in my yard or on the side of the road? We plan to find out.

For our Earth Day experiment, we have staked one of these composting bags to the ground to simulate errant trash. We will photograph our progress and share the results on the blog.