vivid shining brands

“You should resign. You should give back the money you took while this scam was going on and you should be criminally investigated.” Ouch. Imagine if that was a public official leveling such a charge at you, the CEO of a heretofore well-respected financial services institution. Think of the damage done, not only to your personal reputation, but to the brand value of your company and the morale of your people. Yet this is exactly what John Stumpf, CEO of venerable Wells Fargo Bank, had to endure at the hands of Senator Elizabeth Warren this week. This Senate hearing came on the heels of a scandal in which bank employees, under reportedly intense pressure to cross-sell products to make their numbers, fraudulently opened new accounts for customers without their permission. To make matters worse, Stumpf appeared to blame the proverbial “few bad apples” for the trouble, although it appears as though the number of apples fired as a result was somewhere north of 5,000 and none of them, oddly...

From a recent article in the New York Times  Food & Wine section: “It’s part of the pioneer spirit to try to do something by putting your own signature on it,” he said. “I’m not trying to make someone else’s product.” Those words, which perfectly capture the ethos of what I call "Innovator Brands," were spoken by an American craft distiller, Richard Stabile, one of a new generation of whiskey makers who are disrupting the "Quo Brands," staid, old-guard companies that have been doing the same thing for so long, they've forgotten what the word "innovation" means. Chip Tate, another of these rogue master distillers, puts it this way:  “A lot of what we do is riffing on old traditions in new ways,” Mr. Tate said. “It’s like fusion cooking.” It's actually much more like category disruption in the new tradition of Silicon Valley.  Pretty much forever in the world of brands, malt whiskeys have been the exclusive province of Scotland. Na...

From NYTimes.com : “Banks aren’t doing a good job at innovating for consumers,” said Robert Dighero, a partner in the London-based venture capital firm Passion Capital. “Start-ups are nibbling away at some of their most profitable businesses.” From FastCompany , Robert Anderson, Creative Director of the payment processing startup Square, notes: "Well frankly, this industry has been neglected for so long that even putting in a modest amount of thinking in terms of modern user experience makes this stuff way better," In the wake of some of the most inexcusable scandals, after significant fee increases during the worst recession since the great depression, after generous taxpayer bailouts were gobbled up by financial services companies without so much as a thank you,  (except for AIG, whose thank you almost became a f*** you) is it any wonder entrepreneurial Innovator Brands see the big brands as vulnerable? London’s fast-growing start-up scene is trying to dis...

Another banking scandal unfolds, courtesy of nytimes.com: The global bank   HSBC   has been used by Mexican drug cartels looking to get cash back into the United States, by Saudi Arabian banks that needed access to dollars despite their terrorist ties, and by Iranians who wanted to circumvent United States sanctions. What's astonishing, especially in light of the recent unapologetic testimony by bankers such as Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and Barclay's Robert Diamond is this statement by the bank: The company said in a statement on Monday that “we will apologize, acknowledge these mistakes, answer for our actions and give our absolute commitment to fixing what went wrong.” But Senator Carl Levin, who leads the banking subcommittee, was not impressed.  “While the bank is saying all the right things, and that is fine, it has said all the right things before,” he said. Clearly, HSBC's brand is severely damaged in the eyes of the senator, but what about it'...

According to Ben Protess of NYTimes.com : WellPoint , one of the country’s largest health insurers, has agreed to buy Amerigroup in a bid to bolster its  Medicaid business as the industry undergoes an overhaul....“We believe that this combination will create an industry leader in the government sector serving Medicaid and Medicare enrollees,” Angela F. Braly, the chief executive of WellPoint, said in the statement. “This is an opportunity to capitalize on the strengths of both companies to better serve our members and position our companies for future growth as the health insurance industry changes,” she added. An opportunity in many ways, not just in the business sense, but also in the branding sense. WellPoint has been on an acquisition tear under Braly's leadership, scooping up 1-800 Contacts, a contact lens direct retailer, as well as CareMore, a provider of managed care for the elderly (a company we pitched several years ago...and didn't land, alas. Their branding is sti...

Ants are small. But they are remarkably strong for their size. They are also able to adapt to almost any environment, including the man-made one. Elephants, on the other hand, are remarkably strong but not in direct proportion to their size. In fact, they have innumerable weaknesses due to their prodigious presence, and can only survive in an environment that is kept intentionally free of human intrusion. What, oh what does this have to do with branding? In mergers & acquisitions, a lot of time and effort is spent in valuation of the business assets of the company being acquired. Almost always the company with greater tangible assets (the elephant) is acquiring one of lesser (the ant), which makes obvious business sense. The bigger company then goes on, in an almost perfunctory manner, to swallow, digest, and eventually eliminate the brand of the smaller company that has been acquired. This does not always make the most sense. What if the smaller company actually has fa...