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Showing posts from March, 2008

"Jewelry Central": A Good Brand Name?

Not. Seth Godin rants on generic brand names that append a bland word ("central") to a descriptive word ("jewelry"): Jewelry Central is a really bad brand name. So are Party Land, Computer World, Modem Village, House of Socks and Toupee Town. It's a bad brand name because Central or Land or World are meaningless. They add absolutely no value to your story, they mean nothing and they are interchangeable. "Here honey, I bought you these cheap earrings at Diamond World!" Not only are they bland, but you can't even remember one over the other. This is the absolute last refuge of a marketer who has absolutely nothing to say and can't even find the guts to stand for what they do. It's just generic. In the past, Godin has recommended names that yield very few Google search results. Such names are almost never descriptive or generic.

Innovation Games Class in Austin

Innovation and agilist extraordinare, Luke Hohmann, will be teaching a two-day class on innovation games in Austin . I have a copy of Luke's book, Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play . It contains the "rules" for a dozen games that you can play with your customers and design team to better understand your market and create innovative solutions to their problems. Here are some of the details of the event : When: March 18th-19th, 2008 (Tues/Weds) Where: Renaissance Hotel, 9721 Arboretum Boulevard, Austin TX, 512-795-6006. Price: $1695/person Luke Hohmann, author of “Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play” will be teaching an intensive, two-day class based on the material found in the book of the same name. Used by corporations such as SAP, Rally Software Development, QUALCOMM, Emerson Climate Technologies, Genesyslabs, HP, Aladdin Knowledge Systems, Innovation Games® have been featured in Software