Living life as an Olsen twin and as Co-Presidents of the Olsen Twin empire can have twists and turns but can be very beneficial. As you look at how the Olsen twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley, have built their brand, one will see that it has been many years of hard work and smart moves to keep the brand image in the public eye. If you don’t know who the Olsen Twins are, then visit Hulu.com to checkout the video about them and their branding.

Since they were babies, Mary-Kate and Ashley have been building a brand that has lasted through the young years in Hollywood to the teen years which is a rarity. Many childhood stars have experienced problems when transitioning from being a childhood star to a teen star and then on to an adult star. Now that the Olsen twins are adults, they still have proven that their brand identity is very strong. Part of the ways they have branded themselves is by having recognizable products such as clothing line, DVD videos, accessories, and many more items.

When it comes to branding your business, how have you made your business standout from the rest? What lessons can you learn from their success in branding their business? Checkout the list below and feel free to share your own views about what lessons can be learned from the Olsen Twins branding machine.

• Continuously makeover your brand over time but keep a consistent central theme.
• Don’t stop growing your brand when you hit a roadblock.
• Understand all aspects of your business branding so that you will know what needs to be done to renew the brand occasionally.
• Take chances to grow your brand in new directions that may seem strange.
• Be prepared for growth when you rebrand.
• Don’t be afraid to protect your brand from competitors.
• Make sure that you manage your brand’s reputation online and offline.

There have been so many lessons that a business owner can learn from the Olsen Twins’ branding machince. Please feel free to share what you have learned from their branding success.

Image: ZumaPress.com

Millward Brown Optimor released the 2009 BrandZ Top 100 and Brand Curve recently posted the highlights from the findings.

Jeremy Bullmore, author of Behind the Scenes in Advertising, columnist of ‘Dear Jeremy’, chairman of J. Walter Thompson Co. and subsequently of WPP Group, and Director of the Guardian, provided an introductory commentary for the BrandZ 2009 report. 

Bullmore argues against the notion that brands were invented by manipulative marketeers to pursuade consumers into purchasing high-priced but otherwise “unremarkable” commidities.

He claims that we’ve been building brands since 1955 when Sidney Levy and Burleigh Gardner’s The Product and the Brand was published by the Harvard Business Review. But that “brands had been around for a very long time before the Harvard Business Review brought them to our attention.”

He asks us to think back to our school days to understand the relationship between brands and individual perception of those brands:

“When you first started thinking of that school down the road from your own – the one that always beat you at games – you invented your first brand. It had a name – and it had a very clear personality. You couldn’t say exactly why you hated it – but you did. And what’s more, so did your friends. But if you’d asked the boys and girls from the school down the road what they thought of their school, you’d have got a very different answer. How puzzling. Exactly the same school, yet two totally different reputations.”

He explains that the observer creates the reputation of the brand - it can only exist in their minds and as each observer is different, so too are the reputations. And so, there would be a million slightly different versions of a brand’s reputation. He writes that, “Gardner and Levy drew our attention to the fact that the personality of a product, as created in the head of each observer, could be as important to its users as its function.” And so, the marketers must create and supply what Bullmore calls the raw material that real people can take to subjectively compose the brand image.

This is exactly what the Millward Brown researcher take into consideration. Strong brands enjoy what they call a favourable consensus of subjectivity. He concludes that the brand managers, “didn’t build those brands themselves; but they fed such enticing titbits to their audience that their audience gratefully did the rest.”

Time to feed the masses what they’re craving!

This week, Millward Brown released the 2009 BrandZ Top 100, the world’s largest brand equity study. “Millward Brown Optimor created the BrandZ Top 100, a ranking that identifies the world’s most valuable brands measured by their dollar value.”

The value of the top 100 brands has seen a marginal increase of 1.7 percent. Given the economic climate, this is a big deal! BrandZ reports that “when every key financial indicator plummeted, the value of the top 100 brands increased by 2 percent to $2 trillion.” In the BrandZ press release, Joanna Seddon, CEO of Millward Brown Optimor said that, “In the current environment, where the value of many businesses has fallen, brand has become even more important because it can help to sustain companies in tough times. Those who continue to invest in their brand will be better positioned for business growth as the economic situation starts to improve than those who have cut spend.”

In the list, 85 brands remain from 2008. The top of the 15 brands entering the ranking are Pampers, Nintendo and VISA, all entering quite high on the list. The 15 that dropped off the list were from categories particularly hard-hit by the economic situation: cars, financial institutions, and insurance.

Check out who made the cut:

See anything surprising? Can you guess the 15 brands that dropped from the list?

Of the list, some are just hanging around, riding out previous momentum, while others are pushing forward, hitting the top 10 list of highest brand momentum and the top 20 risers list.

A good friend of mine is an avid recreational sports player in his community. He plays basketball, beach volleyball and ultimate. Apart from his competitive nature, what he’s most intense about is his refusal to call the sport “Frisbee.”

The game itself (with rules much like football) is called “ultimate” but the act of throwing a round, flat object is called “flying disc.”

So why is it that Frisbee is so much more universally known that “flying disc”?

From The Great Idea Finder:

A baker named William Russel Frisbie, of Warren, Connecticut, and later of Bridgeport, came up with a clever marketing idea back in the 1870s. He put the family name in relief on the bottom of the light tin pans in which his company’s homemade pies were sold.

Sometime in the 1940s, Yale students began sailing the pie tins through the air and catching them. A decade later, out in California, a flying-saucer enthusiast named Walter Frederick Morrison designed a saucer-like disk for playing catch. It was produced by a company named Wham-O. On a promotional tour of college campuses, the president of Wham-O encountered the pie-plate-tossing craze at Yale. And so the flying saucer from California was renamed after the pie plate from Connecticut. Of course the name was changed from Frisbie to Frisbee to avoid any legal problems.

Image: www.sxc.hu

So perhaps the Frisbee - or at least Frisbie - came before flying disc. What about other more commonly known brand names?

• Saran Wrap - Plastic wrap
• Frisbee - flying disc
• Kleenex - tissue paper
• Post-It - sticky note
• Scotch tape - clear tape
• White-Out - liquid paper

Now, the question is, does this pervasiveness help or hinder each brand? Does calling everything in that market as the brand name wash away its power? Buying generic tissue paper but calling it Kleenex doesn’t put any money in the bank.

You know that you have a really successful brand when you see things like this:

This Fuji apple has actually been ‘tanned’ with the Apple logo by putting a sticker on it in the last phase of growth.

There are also apples with iPod logos an ‘Apple hearts’:

It would be an interesting tactic if it was run by Apple, but it was actually the brainchild of a Japanese Apple fan.

So this is what you should be aiming for: a brand which is so involved in people’s lives that they create promotions for you.

Source: Nobon (translated)

Neither Guitar Hero nor Rock Band actually need a brand boost.  Both are incredibly popular video games, but nevertheless, the idea of smacking a brand name as big as The Beatles on Rock Band or Guitar Hero games would be nirvana for either EA Games or Activision (the manufacturers of Rock Band and Guitar Hero).

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Today’s lackluster buzz is all about the new HP TouchSmart Touch-Screen PC, but much of the buzz is actually skeptical based on former incarnations of the touch screen PC by HP.  Those in-the-know are saying the new HP Touch Screen PC is actually very good, but still, a cloud of pessimism and “so what?” is threatening to burst HP’s PR bubble.

The question being asked is this …

What if Apple had released this Touch-Screen PC?  Would the buzz be as big or bigger than the touch-screen iPhone buzz we’ve all been wrapped up in for the past year?

I wonder.  Frankly, I think the buzz probably would have exploded had Apple been the brand name on the Touch-Screen PC rather than HP.  What do you think?

Image: HP.com

Each year, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) releases a list of the most searched for terms throughout that year called the Google Zeitgeist (spirit of the times).  Not only do the lists provide a nostalgic look back at 2007 from the iPhone to Hannah Montana and everything in between, but they also provide a great tool for marketers to learn which brands successfully generated an online buzz in the prior year then take lessons from the marketing tactics employed by the companies (or people) behind those brands to help develop our own strategies for the following year.  Read more