I summer in Maine.
Well, at least this summer I do, and I’m darn happy about it especially now that the sun has started to shine. It's a place where fresh air and good seafood and a bunch of other cliches come easy. As for my time here, it's not a WASP-y "I summer in Maine" so much as it's a refuge from DC and its swampy June-August abyss. I'll be heading back in about a month but for now, I revel in the Pine Tree State.
While here, life has thankfully slowed down for a few months and I've had some time to hear myself think. I spent this past year in business school and I finally feel as though I am beginning to make sense of life as an MBA student. I went back to school to learn more about business, naturally, but to hone in on marketing specifically and to transition from a nonprofit-focused career to one based in the private sector but with an interest in corporate responsibility and philanthropy, preventive health/living well, public-private partnerships, and a few other things I'll save for later.
Brands are everywhere, some ubiquitous and others fiercely regional, and I enjoy looking at them under the academic microscope, as an amateur analyst and in my daily consumer life. Sometimes I think of a brand as the center of a bullseye with concentric circles rippling out, because one brand will often trigger notions of others. When you think of "Maine", for example, it's not a corporate or nonprofit brand but most certainly qualifies as a brand in that it conjures words and images in your mind, offers a promise and delivers a fairly consistent product to each consumer that experiences its product or services. Tangibles like lobster, pine trees, salt water and snow pop up, but so do emotions, qualities or phrases --
rugged
nostalgic
classic
'the way life should be'
salty
big tides
all-American
natural
I'd even imagine other brands (L.L. Bean, for sure, and perhaps Stonewall Kitchen, Shipyard, Geary's, Ray LaMontagne, Stephen King) pop into your head and with those names, all of the connotations that accompany them, creating that outward ripple of attributes.
I love to watch brands grow and am always trying to understand why some fly and others fail.
What are your favorite brands? And why?
