Author Archives: Chris Farmer

The Elusive Definition of Luxury

“Luxury is multi-faceted and cannot be contained by easy one-sentence definitions” Unpopular as it might seem these days, I prefer to know what I am talking about before I start talking about it. When discussing the topic of luxury, the challenge is to come up with a defin

Branding is in the Eye

Branding is about first impressions, memories, and falling love We see differently when we are in love. When we are in love, we are often overswept by the visual. Her eyes, her hair, her smile. When we are away from her, we remember her in images – still photos, remembering the time

Luxury Brand Building: Trusting Time

Last month, Cartier’s iconic watch, the Tank, turned 101. In 1917, this watch was designed to be unisex and gender neutral, words that may have had little resonance in the early 20th century, but today have risen nearly to the level of calls to action. Louis Cartier said that the shape of the Tank

Website-less in Cyberspace

Branding and Your Website Since 1993, there has been a small and steady footwear manufacturer in Zemun whose rise to recognition has been less than meteoric. It is a boutique shoemaker, designing for both men and women, and bringing out new and interesting models each season. Reasonably priced and a

Five Questions about Your Brand Story

It’s your story. Your brand is a story. If it is a good one, it is a story that people remember and tell later to their friends after work over beers or bring up around the table at a family meal. It will be a story that inspires great work, that fires the blast furnaces, […]

Love. Attraction. Branding.

We all want to be attractive. We all want to be loved. These two desires however, while not being mutually exclusive, are certainly not the same. In your daily life and personal relationships and in your relationships that you develop with brands, the idea of being attractive is what brings you to t

In a World Without Brands…

Imagine waking up to a world without brands. A world without brands has no names – it has designations. This is SODA. These are SHOES. You can have WORK SHOES and SPORTS SHOES. You wash your DISHES with DETERGENT. You have lunch at a RESTAURANT. It has FOOD. A world without brands has no color. [&

A Logo is Not a Brand

A brand’s logo is all about signs and symbols. We see a symbol – a swoosh, for example, or an ice cream cone – and we make associations. The swoosh can only be Nike. The ice cream cone, on the other hand, could be a number of different brands. How does a logo help a […]

Brand Refresh: The Good, the Bad, and the Smelly

Every country in the world is chock-full of smelly brands. Old brands that have somehow survived the test of time by having no direct competition, by a sense of nostalgia, by price-gauging, or other means, sometimes boggle the imagination at how they have managed not to die. An example of that from

Branding: It’s Only Human

Do you talk to your cat? As humans, we tend to endow human qualities to a wide range of unlikely things. We give our pets names and we attribute to them the ability to think and understand us. We talk to the dog and the cat and the fish and the fern and allow ourselves […]