I’ll be taking a pseudo-serious look at brands performance on a weekly basis. This is more Cindy Adams than Forrester’s, but after branding companies and people for 15 years, design and branding is my outlook and how I measure things.

While I usually opt for a local coffee shop over Starbucks, I have to give Starbucks the best-dressed brand of the week for their “Starbucks asks Are You In?” campaign featuring MC Yogi. They offer a free cup of coffee in exchange for 5 hours of documented volunteer service in your community. How cool is that? They didn’t say, buy 5 coffees and you’ll get one free. They said do 5 hours of community service and you’ll get a cup of coffee. They can’t make me say “Grand-ay,” but they can make me go, “wow,” in a good way.

Then there other things that make me go “wow,” in a bad way. It’s the Obama memorabilia. We really need to reconsider this stuff. I mean this is The Historical Moment since the beginning of women’s suffrage and there is so much dreque (left).

But there is one person who got it right: Shepard Fairy. he designed an amazing poster (right). Thank you Shepard for spotlighting your otherwise underground talent for the benefit of one of the most historic moments of our life.

Orange you going to ask Tropicana why the heck they redid their packaging? Who are they marketing to? What happened to the good old loud orange and green? Supermarket brands need to have a degree of ugly. We put this stuff IN our bodies, so information and reading is important. It’s too pretty to read. Ask Milton Glaser, he’ll tell you the same. The new packaging is quiet. It whispers. It should have perfume or lotion coming out of it, not juice. Bad idea guys. Bad idea.

Let’s not forget the CNN/Facebook partnership. Bravo both of you. Convergence in such an intelligent way. We back projected the inauguration from our laptop onto the storefront screen. It was a little hard to type and keep the screen from shifting, so maybe a wireless keypad would have been a good recommendation for this to really work.

And Time Warner Cable, you get the worst. Absolute worst brand of the week. You’ll probably be on this list for a long time. You still think it’s ok for customers to put in multiple order numbers and for no one to get back to you. And then when you call to find out status, you don’t have record of any orders. It is unacceptable. Totally. We are tired of your monopoly. TWC policies and decision trees are outdated. They need to fix this. The consumer and people, in general, are getting their **** together. “Yes we can,” also means “Oh No You Don’t” to those big companies long ripping us off. They don’t even get an image.

And finally, let’s end on good note. Epson, we love you. You never over do it. We love your new Epsonality campaign. It’s very customer focused and link builds with other communities. That means you are selling your product by supporting our hobbies. Very smart.

Until Next Week….

Alona Elkayam.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.