When we started Substance, our focus was on the interactive brand experience. Three and a half years later, our focus continues to be on the interactive brand experience, but has deepened to providing strategy, tactics and implementations in creating brands that interact.
full archives
our thinking about Brand Strategy…
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July 26th, 2010
Interactive Brands, Brands that Interact -
April 28th, 2010
Build Engagement, Not WebsitesWords, photos and videos can’t do it alone. Through content, along with interactivity, back-and-forth communication (a.k.a. conversations), context, and reciprocity, the goal is to create useful information… something people care about and serves a purpose.
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July 16th, 2009
More social, less media.Facebook groups for advertising campaigns with half of the 50 fans working at the ad agency who thought up the idea. Twitter as a popularity contest. LinkedIn connections collected like fur trappers collected animal pelts. Quite frankly, I’m tired of hearing about social media. It’s not the oversaturation of articles about social media on blogs and in the news. It’s not…
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May 27th, 2009
The Myth of SEOWhen meeting with new clients, we are often asked “do you do Search Engine Optimization?” SEO is something that is top of mind for most clients; if you build it, you want people to be able to find it, right? Many clients are under the impression that all it takes is a few strategically placed SEO keywords and the masses…
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May 19th, 2009
Digital or Interactive… what’s the difference?I think I made a mistake. We’ve said we do “digital brand strategy.” We’ve talked about what that means. And I still think there’s still a lot of truth to all that. But it doesn’t tell the full story, and I finally realize why. Digital is a medium. And that makes digital brand strategy a medium strategy (medium being the singular…
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May 13th, 2009
The challenges of the 1500′s, the challenges of tomorrow“To him, architecture existed to solve problems, and he seems to have given equal weight to elevating the image of his clients, making their lives function more smoothly, and creating beautiful objects for the world.” – from “All He Surveyed,” by Paul Goldberger in the New Yorker (about the architect Andrea Palladio) From the 1500′s to today and the future, from…
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October 13th, 2008
Logobama, Week 32, and the Concept of Branded ApplicationsWeek 32 in the life of Logobama.com resulted in the second heaviest week of traffic to the site since launch. To celebrate, we’re going to discuss the concept of branded applications. What’s a branded application? A branded application is the concept of digital brand strategy applied to a functional, actionable application (as opposed to an overall company website, marketing campaign, etc.).…
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October 9th, 2008
Start by inspiring, end with inspiration realized.Start by inspiring. It means not starting with a site strategy document. Don’t start with technical requirements. And, heaven forbid, don’t start with wireframes. Start with a simple question: why should this site (or solution) exist? The way we answer this question needs to inspire our team, and inspire our client. Not, “what does the site need to do.” Not, “how is…
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April 1st, 2008
Who should I make this check out to?I believe that sometimes the things we find online are somehow put in our path… that we don’t “randomly” come across some of the stories we read, but a higher power, some kind of Internet deity, directs your browser to what it wants you to read. So when I got an email from my friend Jeff Faulkner recommending the Bubblegeneration…
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February 21st, 2008
Digital brand strategy? What’s that?Digital brand strategy… or, what exactly is it that we do around here? (The sarcastic remarks about drinking coffee and Rock Band aside.) Most often people assume, “oh, you guys design web sites.” Well… kind of. But not really. But sometimes. See? It’s confusing. Let’s try and clarify. It starts with brand. “A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product,…
While we can't show you yet, we just had a big deal enter beta phase. Actually, some of you followers might have gotten the link...
4 days, 15 hours ago / twitter.com/substance