Brands Behaving Well Round-up

We like Grant McCracken’s recent recap of “brands behaving well,” a list of what he deems as the best examples of companies that have been “smart about the meanings they create for themselves”. His list includes:

Apple: … In a sense, Apple built it’s brand merely by being what Microsoft was not.  (See the post here.)

Google: Google has had this advantage, too.  “Don’t do evil,” the words of the corporate slogan meant, really, Don’t be Microsoft.  But when I wrote this post, the bloom was suddenly off the rose for the Google brand.  In effect, Google was suddenly discovering that not being Microsoft was not enough.   It was now obliged to make it’s own brand meanings.  (See the post here.)

Rachel Ray: We have lots to learn about branding from celebrities.  If only corporate brands were so responsive, so charismatic.  In the case of Rachel Ray, we have another case in which brand building is mostly a matter of pushing off against the competition.  In this case, it meant not being Martha… (See the post here.)

Starbucks: This post was about a funny little accident that gave Starbucks an opportunity to connect with the social networks and one of the great cultural trends of our time.   Let’s call the latter the “kindness of strangers” trend. This ends up as a useful play on the networking theme, and as we now know, this is the great Tsunami now running through the world of marketing. (See the post here.)

McCracken points to brands, as big-name and seemingly staid as they may be, that are using innovative ways to find their meanings (or invent them). While not everyone will agree with his choices, McCracken makes an irrefutable point: “The trick [for brands] is to discover which meanings, in which form, and how best to communicate and claim them.”

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