118 800 – A FAILED and hateful piece of opportunism

Posted on July 17, 2009 by John Lyle

I was in the car the other day when I heard about a new service, which was effectively a directory enquiries for mobile numbers in the UK under the name (or number) of 118 800. It claimed to have some 15 million numbers in its database, which whilst not all of the mobiles is an awful lot. It would appear that the system has crashed. Not through the huge demand for the service, but because of the huge demand for people to get themselves off their database!

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Now its Design Week that’s a bit full of shite!

Posted on July 14, 2009 by John Lyle

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about a brilliant new t-shirt that had written on the front ‘Graphic designers are full of shit’. I did temper this by saying that I felt it only applied to some of them. Well, at a star-studded awards presentation on July 8th, the leading magazine for our industry Design Week seems to be trying to prove my point to be just a little bit accurate.

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Speaking on Radio Nottingham about the rise of Twitter

Posted on July 14, 2009 by John Lyle

I did an interview with Tarah Welsh of radio Nottingham yesterday that went out this morning at about 07.45 to all the lovely people of Nottingham waking up to me bellowing at them about Twitter.

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What is branding?

Posted on July 13, 2009 by John Lyle

What is a brand? To me, a brand is a way of being, not just a new style of advertising and packaging

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Innocent Smoothies ‘A Book About Innocent: Our Story and Some Things We’ve Learned – Book review

Posted on July 10, 2009 by John Lyle

There are few books that I have ever read that I have enjoyed more than ‘A Book About Innocent: Our Story and Some Things We’ve Learned’, because it is so obviously living its own values throughout every single element of the presentation.

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How to create devoted customers

Posted on July 8, 2009 by John Lyle

If you don’t take customer devotion seriously as a brand owner, pretty soon, your customers will fall out of love with you and the devotion will be gone.

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An Innocent tale – Updated

Posted on July 7, 2009 by John Lyle

Innocent often put ‘joke’ ingredients in their listings and on one, they added the odd ingredient of ‘Two Plump Nuns’. This was designed to show their purity and innocence – a lovely and funny thought – but really not one to be taken too seriously – who would really be thinking there was bits of nun in it, plump or otherwise?

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‘Who moved my cheese’ by Dr Spencer Johnson book review

Posted on July 6, 2009 by John Lyle

What an amazingly simple little book this is. I was expecting to hate it and having read the first few pages, I knew I was going to hate it, but the beauty of this book is its sheer simplicity. It’s a tale of two mice and two little people who discover a huge supply of cheese and proceed to stuff their faces with it until it runs out.

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What you need to ask in order to create brand that really works in the words of Rudyard Kipling.

Posted on July 3, 2009 by John Lyle

If you are branding, thinking of branding or looking at rebranding, act like the Elephant’s Child and ask the six wise questions. If you do this, you can create a brand that is differentiated enough to really work.

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It’s not about branding – it’s the product

Posted on July 1, 2009 by John Lyle

It’s not about branding – it’s the product. As long as you add the caveat here that blind testing is not always a faithful predictor of what you are going to do in future. Martin Lindstrom in his book Buyology massively disproved that, but it will make you think.

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