We write a lot here about brands and branding, so I thought I’d pull together a compendium of some of our better pieces on the subject to make it easier for you to find.

Colorful Brands - We talked sometime back about the use of color in your branding efforts.  My Creative Team uses orange as our dominant color. Orange is considered an energetic color, connoting excitement, enthusiasm, playfulness and value.

Brands Out Of Control – Are you placing your brand in the hands of others? Better place your hands on the wheel and start steering.

Branding The Fortune 500 Way - The recipe for success: run the business on the basic principles of lean management, innovation, environmental stewardship, and last – but not least – a commitment to employees. Employees, after all, bring your brand to life.

Stand By Your Brand - With apologies to Tammy Wynette, who warbled the song, Stand By Your Man, now is the time to stand by your brand. If you don’t, someone could hijack it or do it irreparable harm.

Building Brands One Touch At A Time - So much of what we do as marketers involves communication with digital media that we forget how powerful the human touch can be in building a brand.

Branding Lessons From Santa - Every Christmas Eve, a burglar named Santa busts into homes around the world, but he has never been charged with B&E. He has one of the best, most positive brands around and it continues to inoculate him against any hint of impropriety, as it has for generations.

It’s About Experiences, Not Logos - Smart marketers, however, know that the brand is the sum total of what people think about your organization, and that it is expressed in every contact customers have with you.

Other Posts You Might Like

• Brands Still Matter
• Top 10 2011 Posts
• Brands Need A Home
• Netflix’s Corporate Seppuku
• A Time For Print

Since My Creative Team works with Fortune 500 firms, we often like to share the marketing techniques of these big boys with you. Many of these techniques can be replicated by marketers in any size business. So, let’s see what the big boys have been doing.

Eight Fortune 500 Marketing Techniques - Although red tape often slows down the big boys, they do a few things very well. Here are a few of these that any small business could put in place in their marketing effort.

Wal-Mart Accelerating Growth At Market Concept –  Wal-Mart has determined that their smaller footprint stores are delivering returns on par with their supercenters. The lesson here: consider changing the size of your product to reach a different audience.

New Marketing Approaches For Ford - You can no longer follow the traditional model of ‘announce, launch, abandon’ and then prop it up again when sales tail off. You have to keep listening, and keep responding.

Verizon: A Case Study In Marketing Done Wrong – Poor customer service, inept pricing and deceptive communications: that’s Verizon’s prescription for bad marketing. A small business who had done this would be belly up.

Coca-Cola Employs Music & QR Codes in Marketing - Coca-Cola has finally come up with a game plan to catch up and tap into Pepsi’s target audience and hopefully gain the patronage of a better chunk of soda consumers. And this game plan also involves the use of music to connect to people, albeit in a different manner.

Other Posts You Might Like

• Top 10 2011 Posts
• QR Code Naysayers
• All Branding, All The Time
• Brands Still Matter
• LinkedIn For B2B – The Series

UPDATE: With Christmas behind us, this Lowe’s tool is offline.

We’re proud to be launching today the Lowe’s Gift List Builder that we just completed.  It’s an online holiday tool catalog that allows you to build a gift list, save it online and then share it with friends via email and your Facebook account.

We had some fun with the email sharing feature, allowing you to select avatars that represent your personality. Or, if you have no personality, that’s OK, too.

So, I hope you will visit Lowe’s and build your Gift List today.  Please tell your friends about it, too.

Other Posts Of Interest

• Write On
• Brands Still Matter
• The Ads Are Coming!
• Social Media: Nothing New To See Here
• We Care. No, Really!

Some Fortune 500 company marketing highlights:

Fortune 500 2010 List - Here’s the current list of Fortune’s top companies.

Verizon To Sell iPad October 28 – Smart move by both Apple and Verizon to team up on the sale of the iPad, setting the stage for the rumored 2011 iPhone partnership between the two companies.

Wal-Mart’s Mixed Message – Analysts say Wal-Mart’s mixed marketing message and its push into urban markets are reasons its stock price is floundering.

TIAA-CREF Urges: Become Your Future You – The company financial services provider to the academic, government and non-profit fields is seeking to “fight the inertia” surrounding retirement savings by asking viewers to imagine their futures.

Other Posts Of Interest

• Contact
• My News Round-Up 2
• Woo-Hoo! It’s National Creativity Day
• Your Eyes Are Getting Heavy…
• Creativity 2010 – Week #38

Today’s Fortune 500 Friday is about Nucor, #206 on this year’s Fortune 500 list, & one of my clients. I have been in marketing since 1983, and in my experience, Nucor does a better job of branding than any other company I’ve ever been around. It doesn’t waste time or money on promoting itself outside its niche. The people who need to know about them, know who they are.

Your organization could take branding lessons from Nucor. The recipe for success: run the business on the basic principles of lean management, innovation, environmental stewardship, and last – but not least – a commitment to employees. Employees, after all, bring your brand to life.

Nucor hires the right people and immerses them in its corporate culture. The poster above that we produced outlines the Nucor way. Walk into a Nucor facility and you’ll see posters like this. This is not just empty talk. I’ve seen the culture in action.

Recently, I was producing recruiting videos for Nucor. Everyone I interviewed clearly understood and brought the corporate culture to life. It was truly amazing that they all told me stories that supported Nucor’s four employee relations principles:

Management is obligated to manage Nucor in such a way that employees will have the opportunity to earn according to their productivity.
Employees should feel confident that if they do their jobs properly, they will have a job tomorrow.
Employees have the right to be treated fairly and must believe that they will be.
Employees must have an avenue of appeal when they believe they are being treated unfairly.

When the video is completed, I’ll share some of the Nucor employees’ stories.

Are your employees part of your branding effort? Tell us about it.

Other Posts Of Interest

• You Want Fries With That?
• Web 2.0 Evolution
• Most Memorable Ads
• Fighting For The Middle Ground
• LinkedIn For B2B – The Series

My Creative Team works for a number of Fortune 500 companies, so we wanted to provide a service to our client contacts that helps them stay current on what their peers are doing in advertising, PR, marketing and social media. That’s how the idea for Fortune 500 Friday came into being. If you have written about Fortune 500 companies or know of good articles on them, please let us know. Here is our first edition.

Apple Makes A Run At The Enterprise - Consumers love Apple and have for years. Big business has resisted Apple’s advances – until now. What did Apple do to break into this virgin territory?

Pink Hardhats? – The macho construction industry is the last place you’d expect to find pink hardhats, but EMCOR employees are doing just that to promote breast cancer awareness.

Corning Goes Social – Corning uses new media to deliver instant information on such topics as its financial performance, its products, its history and its charitable activities.

Your Google Adwords Budget Was What!!? – Some of the Big Boys are spending a lot of money on Google Adwords to shill products and to control spin around bad news.

3M Gets Back Its Mojo – Some say 3M lost some of its creative juice under James McNerney, the acclaimed GE alum who led the company from 2001 to 2005 because he preached focus and control over creativity.

Other Posts Of Interest

• Creativity 2010 – Week #31
• Activate Your Customers With Email
• Subscribe To THINKing Via Feedburner
• 7 Tips To Bust Writer’s Block
• Blogging Lesson 3 – Content Is King

Big Boy Marketing – Part 1 – In working with our Fortune 1000 clients I have come to see that we all can learn a few things from these Big Boys. They may miss the boat on some things, but they get a lot right.

Big Boy Marketing – Part 2 – Ask Your Customers. Big Boys do the necessary research.

Big Boy Marketing – Part 3 – Choose Partners Strategically. The Big Boys know how to find a partner who fits their needs. 

Aligning Metrics – Years ago, I worked with a Fortune 500 company on an integrated marketing communications program. It was integrated everywhere except with sales. And therein lies the rub. 

Take Market Share Now – Bold marketers know this: an economic downturn is the perfect time to gain market share. Spending marketing money during tough times seems counterintuitive, but time and again it has paid off for some of the best known brands.

Other Posts Of Interest

• Getting Social
• Links – 8/14/2008
• Top Content
• Tightrope To Creativity
• Creativity 2011 – Week #43

We were telling consumers to call the company for a free in-home survey because we discovered that if the company’s representative got into the home for the free audit, they sold – on average – five additional products or services. The program was wildly successful. The media relations part of the program targeted at local newspapers was an incredible success. The morning the story appeared in The Charlotte Observer, we almost broke the company’s telephone system we had so many calls requesting the free survey.

The company’s field representatives balked at doing the surveys because they were being incentivized for selling one certain product. The agency and the company marketing folks did not know this before the program was launched. We had even done a presentation to company managers – sales included – but no one thought to mention this small detail.

Here’s the funny part: each free survey resulted in a nearly 70 percent success rate for selling this product. Didn’t matter to the field reps. If the lead wasn’t for that product, they didn’t want to go on the call. Period.

Did the brand take a beating because of this? Oh, yeah. Did the company change its approach. Not on your life.

This is so typical of large corporations. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

Lesson learned: a well conceived marketing program can fail if everyone is not heading in the same direction.

Other Posts Of Interest

• Please, Please Me
• Top 10 Story Starter Tips For Blocked Bloggers
• Fave This Blog
• Oops, He Did It Again
• Social Media: A Tactic Seeking A Strategy

We are very excited announce our first round of speakers. From left to right above, Jim Deitzel of Rubbermaid, Keith Burtis of Best Buy, and Social Media evangelist Wayne Sutton, Laurie Smithwick of Kirtsy.com, Chris Harrington of @VoteWoz, and Social Media developer Mike Rundle. These experts and panel announcements can all now be found on our Content page. We have many other speakers in the works from Fortune 500 companies, hip new social media companies as well as social networking power houses.

This is a solid group of social media experts. If you want to learn about where technology is going and how social media can be harnessed for business purposes, then you need to attend.

Additionally, we are accepting sponsors for the event. If you are interested, please sign up here and we’ll get back to you to discuss our sponsorship packages.

Keep apprised of more announcements by following us on Twitter @sofresh.  Below is the rest of our contact information. Hope to see you at the first Social Fresh.

Links

Site – http://socialfresh.com
Tickets – http://sofreshclt.eventbrite.com
Twitter – @sofresh
Contact – info at socialfresh.com
Hashtag – #sofresh
LinkedIn – Fresh SM Pros
Facebook – Social Fresh Page

Other Posts Of Interest

• Creativity 2011 – Week #23
• Tap The Crowd
• Top 50 Ad Rankings by Property for June 2007
• Top 5 Tips For Media Selection
• Come On, Show Off Your Creativity

A McGraw-Hill Research analysis three years after the 1981-82 recession found that companies maintaining or increasing ad spending during that period enjoyed 256% higher sales than companies that had decreased their budgets.

There is no better time than a recession to brand yourself as an industry leader and survivor. Consumers avoid lesser known brands during tough times. They want the comfort of knowing they have purchased something from a brand that will weather the storm.

Weak competitors throw in the towel, giving smart, strong competitors an opportunity that should not be passed up. Also, media companies are struggling so the canny marketer can negotiate deals on advertising. Thus, fewer marketing dollars are needed to make the same impact. It becomes easier to reach your audience with less competitive clutter. Your aggressive marketing message now tells consumers that you are stable and strong, perfectly positioning you for a surge in better times.

However, it appears most of the big boys have forgotten those lessons learned in past recessions.  General Mills should be the poster child of every marketer, increasing its consumer marketing spending by 19 percent recently. So, get out there and take the market share that rightfully belongs to you.

Other Posts Of Interest

• Advertising Is Dead. Long Live PR
• 2009 – Back To Basics
• Fortune 500 Friday – 10/15/2010
• Buy Buy Buzz
• Creativity 2010 – Week #31