Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Finding your pod of gold

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I came across this article in the newspaper which was talking about branding and thought that i should share it with you guys. One example the article cited for bad branding was Creative.

Marketing strategist Al Ries (No, never heard of him before) who said that the naming of the product is "the single most important marketing decision" a company can make, described the Creative Nomad Jukebox as a mistake as it was too long and too complicated.

Even Creative's brand name was criticized as "too generic" and that "All products are creative". He conveniently left out that Apple itself is also too generic a name and perhaps it even confuses people into thinking that it is a ... fruit company?

He further went on to say that he believes Creative "will never become a big global brand because the name encompasses too many products".

Blah, blah, blah ...

[READ FULL ARTICLE]

3 comments:

Varuna Singh said...

That my friend, will hopefully Change !

Anonymous said...

Actually, I would have to agree with most of what that article is saying. Obviously, Creative is in trouble. They are downsizing big time and cutting costs all over the place. I used to be a big fan of Creative products, but their engineers have really dropped the ball when compared to other companies who produce much better, long lasting products (coming from another engineer!!!). Even the new Zen X-FI I would classify as a huge disappointment. Furthermore, even the sound quality that one expects from a Creative product has been lost somewhere along their line of players with companies such as Cowon and Sony picking up the pace. I hate it for their company, but I will never feel inclined to buy another Creative product ever again, as the quality control of their players is just not there. Clearly, they either need to clean up their act and make more reliable, better sounding players if they intend on competing with Apple and others for market share! (Not to say that ipods are great or anything...far from it, but Apple is on the ball when it comes to marketing strategies!)

- Connor

brahmasoccer09 said...

This article is quite bad, IMO. Many of the world's biggest corporations have similar, if not worse, names. Big ones: Ford, Dell, Disney: all very creative being named after the last name of their owner. The iPod name is just as good (or as bad) as the Eee. People just have to get used to it. A few years ago, iPod was a dumb name. Now that everyone has one, it's not so stupid after all.
Nomad was actually brilliant: if you think about it, nomad means wandering, portable, genius really for a portable Jukebox. People (especially for marketing strategists, who make a living out of saying what everyone thinks publicly) were just too dense to get it. iPod, really was just an invented word.