Service: Brand Development
Innovative and Disruptive Brands of 2020 in Dietary Supplements
We’re looking back at some of our favorite discoveries of the year 2020 in some of the sectors we serve. This second post of the series, the health and wellness sector, our focus is on dietary supplement brands and products. With the COVID-19 pandemic making personal health a topic of daily concern worldwide, the supplement… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Innovative and Disruptive Brands of 2020 in Pet
At the end of 2020, we looked back at some of our favorite discoveries of the year in some of the sectors we serve. In this final post of the series, we look at the pet and animal category to find innovative and disruptive brands leading the way in 2020. As it changed so many… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Innovative and Disruptive Brands of 2020 in Food and Beverage
Here at the end of a disrupted and disruptive year, we’re looking back with gratitude at some of the good things of the year. Specifically, in this post and following, we’ll be examining some of our favorite discoveries of the year in each of the sectors we serve, in our second annual series on innovative and disruptive food and… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Should I Build an In-house Agency?
These days, marketing requires brands to be highly responsive and integrated in their approach, able to generate the perfect social post at the perfect time or to push updates to their software on a daily and hourly basis. This challenge, among other factors, has driven an increasing number of consumer brands to shift to an… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Brandcrumbs: Why Brand Naming Fails
(This brand naming post is part of an ongoing series of posts we’re calling Brandcrumbs, which are bits and pieces of branding advice left over from our regular conversations about real-world brand positioning challenges.) Brand naming is one of my favorite things to do at MarketPlace. I love the process of moving alphanumeric characters from… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Refrigerator Marketing: the True Art of Cold
As Brand Growth Partners to food + beverage, pet + animal, and health + wellness brands, we’ve worked with a lot of perishable products: milk, cookies, and sandwiches, to name a few, along with the colors and ingredients that go into them. However, refrigerator marketing was one thing we hadn’t tapped into. How We Entered… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
In snack bars, ingredients tell the brand’s story
Environmental Branding: Carpets, Coasters, and Clouds
What does CVS stand for? If you answered “Consumer Value Stores” or “Convenience, Value and Service,” color me impressed. Someone recently asked if I knew what CVS stands for. I said “murky carpet, oppressive red, and rows of overpriced wine.” This is not about CVS. This could be about why the “aha moment” shouldn’t be… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Color, Food, and the Story of Shrimp
Typically, I’m neither for nor against shrimp. This morning, though, I felt very deeply about them. On my drive to work, I listened to a podcast. The specific episode of this podcast deals with color—its nature, how we experience it, why it matters, etc. As color is a crucial issue for many of our partners… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Brandcrumbs: the “Authentic” Brand Position Isn’t What it Is (is it?)
(This is the first in a series of ongoing posts we’re calling Brandcrumbs, which are bits and pieces of branding advice left over from our regular conversations about real-world brand positioning challenges.) I do not like “it is what it is.” Because “it is what it is” means nothing. Because it means everything. It means that you… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Brandcrumbs: Your Marketing Word of the Year Should be “Culture”
(This is part of a series of ongoing posts we’re calling Brandcrumbs, which are bits and pieces of branding advice left over from our regular conversations about real-world brand positioning challenges.) Like many in the branding and marketing world, we use the word “culture” a lot. We say things like “a successful company needs to create a… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Innovative and Disruptive Brands of 2019 in Pet
We’re looking back at some of our favorite discoveries of the year 2019 in a series of posts covering each of the sectors we serve. In this, the third of the series, we look at the pet and animal market. As Americans have developed higher expectations for pet product brands and services, innovation in this… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Brand Complements for Animal Supplements
Over the last few months, we’ve worked alongside a successful B2B brand with over 45 years of experience in trace mineral animal supplements to launch its first consumer brand: TruCare Trace Mineral Supplements. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed working through the brand development process with them, beginning with brand discovery and market research, which led to positioning and concepting… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>
Three Things Food Startups Need to Know about the Food Industry
Although the food industry has historically been dominated by entrenched major brands, startups and venture capital have begun to move aggressively into food and beverage and agriculture, rightly perceiving the industry to be both exciting and profitable. High-profile food startups like KRAVE and Blue Bottle Coffee have found success bringing an entrepreneurial, tech-centric ethos to food and… Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span>