Branding

Starbucks has created a new brand. In the minds of consumers, vintage brown is (hopefully) bonded to service, and bright green is attached to convenience.

The average person has seen how he or she can demand more from brands, and become more a part of that conversation, and that is now influencing their perspective on their work situations.

In order to stay one step ahead of today's consumers, a brand's management team must be able to connect seemingly disparate dots from politics to psychology to art, and everything in between.

The best brands are waking up to the fact that the way to establish an enduring connection with customers is not to push their own stuff, but to introduce them to new things, make them smarter, help them feel more connected to the front edge of culture.

One of the things a brand, any brand, has to be very careful of, in this era of consumer-expected corporate transparency, is just what happened to Lululemon in this case.

In China, brands are surrogate indicators of quality. In a land of shoddy quality, mass market consumers do not take basic safety for granted.

Call it anti-branding. Dove is engaging customers by taking aim at its own industry.

The "naughty" of Axe may be a significant p.r. detriment to the hard-won "self-esteem" of Dove. But Unilever isn't the only company that will face this sort of conflict.