Most of you will be very aware how in recent days Google and YouTube have come into significant criticism for enabling branded advertising to appear on extreme / extremist sites, as well as extreme/ist advertising to appear in turn against branded content. This includes having your ads show up on politically extremist sites like Breitbart, or otherwise having extremist and insensitive advertising show up alongside your own carefully curated branded content - for instance as a pre-roll ad on one...

I often get asked for Marketing Advice by various family members, some more than others obviously, and all understandable since I am indeed a Brand Strategist and Brand Engineer. Branding and Marketing are both a Science and an Applied Art, which means there is a golden best practice standard / model which any and all marketeers can follow / apply.

This article will hopefully set down the markers clearly, to explain the essential fundamentals of scientific marketing.

Let&rsquo...

Branding is forever a full-time and a fully 360° vocation. It’s about seeing all the angles and dealing with them in a scientific and progressive manner. As with many task-oriented disciplines, consideration is everything, and every tiny detail can make a difference.

As both a University and Advertising Industry educated Marketing and Brand Specialist, I will always put the teachings of Abraham Maslow above those of Philip Kotler. The essence of Marketing is discerning and ...

Provocateur! Agitator! Instigator! To get noticed these days you need to break outside the walls of convention, do something different to stand out. However, be aware that it’s kind of a ’Goldilocks’ exercise - meaning that if you move too far from the norm, then your typical customer won’t be able to relate to you any more and you will likely miss your mark.

So you need to be different, stand out, yet maintain your essential relevance. And most consumers these ...

Let’s face it, the world is oversaturated with marketing media - too many ads by too many brands. You cannot go anywhere without being confronted by some form of promotional message - be it a logo or device, slogan, advertisement, endorsement or product placement. It seems pretty much anything and everything has its own promotional merchandise - and the vast majority is generally overt and very in-your-face.

There is so much advertising clutter now that we just cannot process it ...

There are several dimensions to marketing, and much like when you apply a paint brush to canvas, you use a variety of nuances in technique, touch, texture and detail to get your vision across fully dynamically. In marketing we talk about ’Push’ and ’Pull’, ’Leadership’ and ’Influence’. The classic push variety is a bold and brassy advertisement which hopefully visually punches the target audience right between the eyes - to make maximum impact. ...

In the Econsultancy / Oracle Marketing Cloud ’Cross-Channel Marketing Report 2015’ - where the question posed was ’Which three marketing channels are the biggest priorities for your organisation over the next year? The most mentioned ended up being Website, by a clear margin (57%), then Email (48%) and Social Media (42%), with SEO (34%) and Paid Search (18%) rounding off the top 5.

There’s a strange distinction in this survey between first placed ’Website&...

There’s over a billion websites in the world, shared by near enough 3 billion internet / digital media users - whether on desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone. With such an incredible mass of properties, it is more important than ever to be able to stand out from the crowd. The transition to responsive design imposes certain limits on the framework of your interface, which means that your Logo / Brand-look-and-feel becomes more significant than ever before.

We see far too many ...

Here above is a collection of some of my favourite book publisher / imprint logos. Some of these have been nipped and tucked and evolved over the years - like the Ladybird Books logo, while others have been pretty much constant since their inception. I feel all the logos featured are great examples of how logos can really work for your business - both as a mark of quality, as well as a mark of category.

The first three idents - Ladybird | Usborne | Walker Books - are all Children&rsquo...