Word of Mouth
	When a customer complains about your product, service, guarantee, or Web site, it\'s not always because the quality was lousy. It may have been because you didn\'t manage that customer\'s expectations.
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	Smash Your Navigation
	Can your navigation survive being smashed? It is an interesting exercise, which removes a logo-fixated mindset and brings you closer to a philosophy valuing all elements that create the brand that it is. Ask any Nokia user and they’ll agree that one of the primary reason why they love their Nokia is not because of all its features, better reach or battery time – its something as simple – yet important as the navigation. Once you’ve used the Nokia cell phone a couple of times you’re hooked on the Nokia way of navigating. In fact most Nokia users loyalty with the brand is not with the brand but with the navigation making you wonder how important less traditional branding components like the navigation in fact is to generate a loyal audience.
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	Sensory Branding
	Most marketing plans appeal to only two senses: sight and hearing. Why so limited? How come almost all marketing and brand building concentrate on two senses when we know appealing to all five is likely to double brand awareness and strengthen the impression a brand leaves on its audience? Several surveys document our olfactory sense as probably the most impressionable and responsive of the five senses. Smells invoke memories and appeal directly to feelings without first being filtered and analysed by the brain, which is how the remaining four senses are processed. We all recognize and are emotionally stimulated by, say, the scent of freshly cut grass, brackish sea air, or the perfume of roses. I\'m convinced any car lover drinks in the smell of a new car.
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	Is Harry Committing Suicide?
	A quick quiz: What do toothpaste, toothbrushes, chocolate, CDs, hair gel, building blocks, games, calendars, films, chewing gum, cups, and... (could I forget?) four books have in common? You guessed right. Harry Potter! I\'m sure neither J.K. Rowling nor any of the rest of us expected Harry Potter to become, within only four short years, one of the most sought-after kids\' brands ever, competing head to head with venerable names such as Disney, Nintendo, and Sony. The amazing and positive fact is that a book, for the first time in over a decade, has managed to become the key attraction for kids all over the Western world, despite the competing presence of computer games, the Internet, interactive television, and mobile phones. But a shadow is looming, one that\'s likely to cast a pall over the amazing brand story.
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	Cross Channel Branding
	Five years ago, you were likely to be asked, \"What\'s your Internet strategy?\" Today\'s question is, \"What\'s your channel strategy?\" If within 30 seconds you can summon up a reasonably sound answer to this question, forget about reading the remainder of this article. If you can\'t, reading on might be worth the effort. One of today\'s realities is that new communications media are hitting the market every year. I don\'t need to name the plethora of choices already on consumers\' plates -- the Internet, the personal digital assistant (PDA), WebTV, the wireless application protocol (WAP) phone -- all of which appeared within the last decade.
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	Country of Origin as a Branding Statement
	Imagine that I told you of a product that I knew nearly nothing about. I didn\'t know what its price was, what any of its unique features were, or even what type of product it was. But I did know the product\'s country of origin… Let\'s say the product is from Switzerland. Now what would your impression of this product be? Even though this is a hypothetical scenario, I bet that you\'d be able to tell me something about the mystery product\'s price, its quality, and the reputation it most likely enjoys. Such assumptions would be inspired by the preconceptions you, as a consumer, hold about the country in question.
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	Contextual Branding
	When I first surfed the Net, some six years ago, I clicked on every banner ad that came before me. I reckon this was, not so much because I was in desperate need for home loan advice, fly fishing equipment or wedding dresses, but because I was curious to see what a banner ad was all about. I can promise you, I\'m not curious any longer! But I am still curious about ads that appear in logical contexts. In these cases, the advertising message makes sense and, piquing my curiosity because of this fact, encourages me to revert to my earlier discovery-oriented behaviour.
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	Brand Your Navigation
	Back in 1915, Earl R. Dean, who was working at the Root Glass Company, was asked to design a bottle. The brief required that Mr Dean produce a design which could not only be recognized in the dark, but which, even broken into many pieces, could be identified at a glance. Taking his inspiration from the pod of the cocoa bean, Dean produced a bottle with ridged contours. And the design he came up with fulfilled the brief beyond all expectations. The Coca-Cola Company’s distinctive bottle had been born and the contours that defined it became synonymous with the brand. The contouring became a design strategy, which spoke for Coca-Cola’s identity, and the bottle became a design icon. Still in service and still recognizable, the bottle has been passing the dark test and the smash test for over 80 years. This design story is revealing from a brand-building perspective because, in theory, all brand identifiers and vehicles should be able to pass these sorts of tests. Let’s consider this proposition in the most literal of terms. If you removed the logo from your brand identifiers and vehicles – livery, stationary, products, vehicles, signage, and so on - would people still recognize those items as being representatives of your brand? Let’s look at your packaging. What’s left once the logo disappears. Copy: would it speak for your brand? Colours: would they invoke recognition of your brand? How about your design – graphics, font, spacing – would they convey your brand’s identity?
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	BRANDchild
	You may be surprised to learn that close to 80 per cent of all brands purchased by parents is controlled by their offspring. But what will undoubtedly startle you are the figures that show a whopping 67 per cent of all car purchases is also determined by the children of the home – and not by the parents. Tweens (8- 14 year olds) are an increasingly powerful and smart consumer group, which in 2002 alone, spent and influenced an astounding €1.88 trillion. Did you know that an average British kid between 8 and 13 years of age is exposed to 22,000 television commercials a year? In fact these kids are exposed to more than 300,000 commercial messages each year if we include radio, television, print ads, billboards, and the Internet. These figures are from project BRANDchild – the world’s largest study on tweens and their relationship with brands.
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	B2Branding
	Let\'s discuss a product category that\'s excruciatingly boring: rolling bearings and seals. I want to look at SKF, one of the world\'s largest manufacturers of rolling bearings and seals. I don\'t know about you, but I couldn\'t think of a less sexy and uninspiring product line. If you didn\'t know this business or the brand, you\'d think (when you visited SKF\'s site) you\'d arrived at the wrong URL. SKF not only tells you about the company\'s support of one of the world\'s largest rock shows and how SKF products help their clients make delicious biscuits, it also has a special postcard section. The SKF postcard facility allows you to download cute love letters or birthday postcards that you can send to your friends. For example, one of the postcards illustrates a couple who have just been married and are now kissing each other. The text reads, \"We reduce friction to help you move the world forward.\" Another postcard bears two hearts created with an assemblage of rolling bearings. The title on this one reads,
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