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Armstrong Debacle: Are Celebrities too Risky for Brands?

Once again, brands that thought they could borrow some magic from a celebrity find themselves swimming in confusion and controversy, like poor Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice . From  AdAge : Within hours, Mr. Armstrong's endorsement empire fell apart as Anheuser-Busch, Trek, Easton-Bell Sports, 24-Hour Fitness, Honey Stinger, Oakley and other firms dumped the cancer survivor, even as some pledged to continue support of his Livestrong Foundation. Nike's livid. The US Postal Service is dismayed. I'm not at all surprised. Celebrity endorsements are a double-edged sword for brands. When the celebrity is hot and you're slicing the competition into prosciutto, life is good. When the celebrity trips and the brand falls on that sword, well, not so good. The foibles of even the most upright-seeming celebrities are eventually exposed and magnified by social media and the Internet, association with stars is a minefield for brands. Eventually someone's ...
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Innovator Brands Disrupt Malt Whiskey Category

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...
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Josef Müller-Brockmann, Swiss Modernist Branding Master

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I am continuously impressed, to this day, by the clarity and ingenuity of visual expression by Swiss designers. A quick visit to  www.helveticbrands.ch  provides a dose of inspiration for any identity designer who is stuck in a rut. And a review of the work of 60s Modernist Josef Muller-Brockmann not only inspires, but provides a whiff of nostalgia at the same time. It's an intoxicating combo. Muller-Brockmann did a lot of commercial work for clients such as IBM, but it's his public service announcement work that really sings the siren song for me. I imagine he did it for either nothing or next-to-nothing monetarily, but clearly his vision for the better world he was helping to create shines through, something all companies should strive to accomplish through the  creative expressions of their brand .
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