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How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding
D. B. Holt Manufacturer: Harvard Business School Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 1578517745 |
Book Description
“Iconic brands” (ie: Coca-Cola, Volkswagon, Corona) have social lives and cultural significance that go well beyond product benefits and featuresThis book distills the strategies used to create the world’s most enduring brands into a new approach called “cultural branding".
Brand identity is more critical than ever today, as more and more products compete for attention across an ever-increasing array of channels. This book offers marketers and managers an alternative to conventional branding strategies, which often backfire when companies attempt to create identity brands.
Customer Reviews:
Dissapointment.......2006-02-02
Surprisingly Important Book.......2005-11-08
Great - even the most successful iconic brands have emerged more by intuition than by design........2005-08-17
Make your brand an icon.......2005-04-14
Planning to be an Icon, not Hoping it will Happen.......2004-11-19
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Petretti's Coca-Cola Collectibles Price Guide
Allan Petretti Manufacturer: Krause Publications ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0873492412 |
Book Description
Petretti's Coca-Cola Collectibles Price Guide has been called the bible of Coca-Cola collectiblesand with good reason! This impressive 11th edition of the hobby's standard reference depicts, describes, and values more Coca-Cola Company marketing, advertising, and promotional items than any other published source. The new volume covers items produced from the 1880s through the 1960s, and includes 96 full-color pages; photos and descriptions of previously undocumented items; up-to-date pricing information; and revised guidelines for collectors. Allan Petretti, long regarded as the foremost authority on the subject, has combined years of experience in the hobby with his proven expertise as a Coca-Cola collectibles dealer and auctioneer to provide the collecting community with the up-to-date information needed to keep pace with this popular and fast-growing hobby.- Current market prices for every item depicted and described
- New color sections featuring trays, calendars, and other highly sought after items
- Includes additional, recently found rare pieces not shown in any other collector guide
- Contains an expanded and improved bottles section
- New chapters include Coca-Cola candy and Coke's Diamond Design from the 1960s
- Offers new guidelines for grading and evaluating Coca-Cola items
Customer Reviews:
Great if it has what you are looking for.......2007-10-21
Great resource, but are the prices realistic?.......2003-11-18
I do question the pricing of these items, however. I don't see how everything can continually increase in price from one edition to another, especially when you consider internet sales activity (a very large part of Coca Cola memorabilia sales nowadays). As a collector, I never pay at price-levels shown in this edition, and I certainly do not obtain these prices when I occasionally sell an item off on an internet auction site. I just feel that the prices are a bit inflated. No one could keep track of the huge amounts of Coca Cola memorabilia sales in all venues around the country. I tend to take pricing in guidebooks with a grain of salt, especially, as in this case, when the author is also a major collector. Just a little too much potential for conflict of interest.
Fed Up With This One, Too.......2003-10-04
1) The back index is as bad as they come. Totally incomplete.
2) You want to find a certain tray? Be prepared to bounce from one end of the book to the other looking for what you need. There is no apparent logic to the way this guide is arranged. I'm sure the author felt it was completely logical, but his logic escapes me.
3) The front index is just painful to figure out. There is a usability book out there called "Don't Make Me Think". The author of this Coke guide should study it.
4) Too much rhetoric and opinion about "fantasy" items. I find this section of the guide painful to sift through. Just the facts, please. And then there's the illogical order of everything
The best that can be said about this guide is that it's big. It is poorly organized and has way too many omissions to be my primary guide. If a 12th edition ever comes out, I'm going to check it out before buying, to see if these problems have been fixed.
I much prefer Wilsons' guide over this one.
Book Description
The world's sharpest creative minds are in high demand in the advertising world, because making effective ads takes a whole lot more than just marketing know-how. A great ad grabs the viewer's attention and gets the point across in an original, surprising, funny, touching, or even shocking way. Because ads reflect global and regional mentalities, studying them is interesting not only for their selling points but also for what they have to say about their clients and target audiences. This mega-roundup of the world's best contemporary advertisements highlights the work of designers in over 40 countries. Organized by subjects, such as socio-political, food and beverage, cars, technology, and media, the ads are dated and annotated with information on the design agencies, clients, and products. Also included are case studies illustrating, for example, how an ad campaign can be made on a small budget or how an advertisement can be adapted for different cultures. This guide is a must-have for advertising students and professionals, graphic designers, and anyone who's interested in the different ways products are advertised around the world.
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Amazon.com
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Like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Born to Buy is a major contribution to our understanding of a contemporary trend and its effects on the culture.
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Sumptuous though the book is I feel that Flair is resting in its reputation. To my mind, having worked as a publication art director, the photos, typography and layouts are very conservative and do not show any particular innovative design. Other magazines and designers were much more creative in the fifties, 'Fortune' with Will Burtin, 'Glamour' with Cipe Pineless, 'Harper's Bazaar' with Alexey Brodovitch and 'Vogue' with Alexander Liberman. Certainly the covers with their die-cut holes (sadly only six of the twelve are included) and the bound in booklets were unique to consumer magazines at the time but I think that Flair should be remembered as a magazine concept rather than a magazine full of creativity.
Fleur Cowles writes a short piece about the origins of Flair (handwritten in gold on dark blue paper) but does not give enough detail (I believe each issue involved several printers and binders) and as there were only twelve issues a list of all the articles should have been included. Another reviewer has commented that the high price (reassuringly expensive?) and the cloth covered box the book comes in reflects snob appeal, I agree but I'm still pleased to have a copy.
Book Description
Published in cooperation with Bill Graham Presents, The Art of the Fillmore reunites for the first time in a single volume the original Bill Graham posters created exclusively for the San Francisco and New York Fillmore dance concerts. Indexes cross-reference the posters with the bands they advertised and the poster artists who created them.
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Amazon.com
After a short but sweet introductory essay by New York Times designer Steven Heller, editor Jim Heimann organizes the ads by subject: consumer products, fashion and beauty, entertainment, travel, etc. It's gripping to watch sex and status try to outdo each other in selling 1920s cars: the snooty Pierce Arrow associates itself with wealthy Century Club types, while the Ford Fordor stresses the populist $660 price and the flapper struggling to keep the wind from whipping her perilously brief hem over her head. High art rears its lovely head in ads for the Marmon Big 8 racer, powered by a 125-horsepower engine and a lightninglike look derived from Futurist art. Most ads range in a safer esthetic region bounded by retro-Currier & Ives, zesty art deco, and the funny papers. Fear is a great motivator: hunky Marvin loses the girls to halitosis; classy dames subtly judge each other on the quality of the ScotTissue in the bathroom: "Women sense it immediately!" The ads featuring black people fascinatingly demonstrate that even the era's most talented artists couldn't draw blacks because they literally could not see them when they looked at them. This book is a must for any serious student of pop cultureor anybody out for a graphic good time. --Tim Appelo
Book Description
Prohibition made liquor illegal and all the more fun to drink. Speakeasies, luxury cars, women's liberation, bathtub gin and a booming economy kept the country's mood on the up-and-up. Women sheared off their locks and taped their chests, donning flapper dresses and dancing the Charleston until their legs gave out. Gangsters flourished in big cities and gangster movies flourished in Hollywood. It was the roaring twenties in America: a singular time in history, a lull between two world wars and the last gas before the nation's descent into the Great Depression. Forging the way into the future like a modern streamliner in a sea of antiquity, advertising in the 20s sought to bring avant-garde into the mainstreamwhich it did with great success.
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Generation Y has grown up in an age of the brand, bombarded by name products. In Branded, Alissa Quart illuminates the unsettling new reality of marketing to teenagers, as well as the quieter but no less worrisome forms of teen branding: the teen consultants who work for corporations in exchange for product; the girls obsessed with cosmetic surgery who will do anything to look like women on TV; and those teens simply obsessed with admission into a name-brand college. We also meet the pockets of kids attempting to turn the tables on the cocksure corporations that so cynically strive to manipulate them. Chilling, thought-provoking, even darkly amusing, Branded brings one of the most disturbing and least talked about results of contemporary business and culture to the fore-and ensures that we will never look at today's youth the same way again.
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Recommended Books
Too Much HYPE !.......2003-06-28
WHY NO BLOTTERS??.......2001-07-28
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Advertising Now. Print (Midi Series)
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Advertising Now. Online
Logo Design (Midi Series)
Guerrilla Advertising: Unconventional Brand Communication
Creative Advertising: Ideas and Techniques from the World's Best Campaigns
Hoopla
ASIN: 3822840270
Very Good.......2007-08-27
Outstanding Book........2007-07-28
Good resource........2007-05-09
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Counter Culture: The Allure of Mini-Mannequins
Steven Heller
Manufacturer: Princeton Architectural Press
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ASIN: 1568983042
Packed with a colorful survey of commercial culture.......2002-02-05
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Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture
Juliet B. Schor
Manufacturer: Scribner
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The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need
Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers
Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (Bk Currents)
Consuming Kids: Protecting Our Children from the Onslaught of Marketing & Advertising
The High Price of Materialism
ASIN: 0684870568
Very interesting.......2007-06-22
Great analysis of a creepy industry.......2007-06-08
What Every Parent Needs to Know.......2007-04-02
Solid argument against the commercially constructed childhood.......2006-04-23
Reading "Born to Buy" will make you want to throw out the TV, disconnect from the Internet, run to the country and home-school your children. Simply put, there's no way to avoid marketing techniques, and your child will succumb to the corporate-commercially constructed childhood. With all the doom and gloom in this book, Schor offers little hope of avoidance...in the end, she does provide a few solutions.
All in all, "Born to Buy" was very informative and an easy, entertaining read. However, some of Schor's original research and statistics caused me to get bogged down. I wasn't looking for scholarly research and did not need to see these statistics. Additionally, Schor seemed to use this book as a chance to take shots at the Bush administration. Although I'm not a fan of this administration and some of the criticism is valid, I do not think Bush started this problem...he's just done nothing to fix it.
All in all, this is well worth the read, especially if you have small children...just skip over the stats near the end, and forgive Schor's attempts at making this political.
If You Have a Child, Read This Book Immediately.......2006-01-04
The only deficit to Ms. Schor's work are the, at times, specious and/or factually incorrect claims about macro and micro-level behavior of America's youth. She can be rather quick to jump to conclusions that serve her arguments' ends, while glossing-over counterpoints to highly debatable issues. Case-in-point -- she cites the youth increase is ADD/ADHD diagnoses as "mounting" "evidence of distress among children", while completely sidestepping the highly complex etiology behind the increase in those diagnoses.
She also appears to be somewhat out-of-touch with contemporary culture, to the point that she makes statements like (as appears on page 141), "He's supposed to do his homework, but he has lied and said he doesn't have any so he can spend his time playing a new Gameboy." A statement like that reads like someone saying referring to a car as a "motor carriage"; she more likely meant "...playing a new Gameboy game.", as effectively no child would ever receive a new Gameboy handheld console with enough frequency to refer to their current one as "new". Perhaps I'm being hypercritical, but, if someone is indicting elements of pop culture, I'd prefer their terminology be accurate.
However, an intelligent reader should be able to sift through the missteps and inconsistencies, as the vast majority of the book's content & assertions are reputable, well-researched and well-articulated.
This is A TRUE MUST-READ for all parents, as well as anyone concerned about the impact of media and advertising on their own life.
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Best of Flair
Manufacturer: Rizzoli International Publications
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How to Do It or The Lively Art of Entertaining
Mrs. Tependris: The Contemporary Years: The Adventures of An Art Collector
Entertaining is Fun!: How to Be A Popular Hostess
In the Pink: Dorothy Draper--America's Most Fabulous Decorator
Tony Duquette
ASIN: 084782229X
Release Date: 1999-11-13
Fifty years after it ceased publication, Flair is still one of the most talked-about and influential magazines ever created. It is remembered for its innovative design and production quality, its superb coverage of the arts, and its intuitive discovery of many artists and writers well before they achieved fame and fortune.
The Best of Flair is beautifully illustrated in full color and produced with all the innovative features of the magazine, including the best pieces from the original twelve issues and a selection of the famous die-cut covers, foldouts, and self-contained booklets. In print once again, The Best of Flair is a cultural event not to be missed.
Fleur's flight of fancy........2002-07-14
The return of Flair.......2001-09-11
Grab it!.......2000-04-06
dazzling!.......1999-10-21
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The Art of the Fillmore, 1966-1971
Gayle Lemke , and
Jacaeber Kastor
Manufacturer: Acid Test
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Off the Wall: Psychedelic Rock Posters from San Francisco
The Art of Rock Posters from Presley to Punk
Rick Griffin
Art of Modern Rock: The Poster Explosion
Live at the Fillmore East: A Photographic Memoir
ASIN: 1888358092
High on the colors.......2007-10-10
Useful Resource.......2007-06-17
The main negative: most of these are shown as a small part of each page; few are relatively large, and I don't recall any being full-page size. So, don't buy this book in the expectation that you're getting a collection of full-page reproductions (even reduced in size from the originals, as they would be).
Important historical document found!.......2007-02-26
Superb.......2006-10-08
Art of the FIllmore - Posters 1966-1971.......2005-10-26
Not a book for everyone, but if you were there, or you think you wanted to be there, this is a great value.
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All-american Ads of the 20s (Midi Series)
Jim Heimann
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ASIN: 3822825115
All American Ads - 20s.......2007-07-03
Back to the past.......2007-05-15
Best of series, typographically speaking..........2005-10-11
If you're into copying type, don't bother with the 60's -- the type is really boring. The 20's has one has everything from campy to elegant type... I'm looking forward to the release of the 00's-10's (turn of the century).
Good for stealing from.......2005-07-29
I just couldn't resist this one..........2005-05-01
I'm in love with this book, and there's a lot to love about it. The production values are outstanding--the colors are brilliant, the images as crisp as they can be, and the selection of ads is wonderfully varied. It's a visual treat--Taschen has done it again.
If I do have one complaint, it is that the emphasis is on full-page, full-color ads. While I am a painter and find this book a visual delight (the colors! Oh, joy!), I'm also a geeky cultural historian. I've looked at a lot of magazines from the period--enough to know that some of the most telling ads about the anxieties, attitudes and preoccupations of the time aren't the largest, most sophisticated, or visually striking ones. But since this book has been produced primarily as a showcase for graphic design of the period, and not by hopeless history nerds, I have no trouble giving it five stars.
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The Total Package: The Secret History and Hidden Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Other Persuasive Containers
Thomas Hine
Manufacturer: Back Bay Books
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The Practical Guide to Information Design
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ASIN: 0316365467
What a fantastic surprise!.......2007-07-23
I have read one strong critique of Hine's book in that it does not go very deep into the psychology of packaging and how it shapes the choices that consumers make. I think that is beyond the point here. Hine's work does an outstanding job of making an interesting historical narrative about packaging. Hine sees the world through the eye of the consumer from the epoch of the proto-package, through the world of boxes and tin cans, and on through cellophane and plastics. That perspective in this book has opened the world up to me.
I cannot recommend this book enough!
You buy, therefore you must read this book........2005-04-11
There plenty of insights here for the consumer who wonders why there are so many kinds of toothpaste and why there will always be a battle between Coke and Pepsi. You eat a lot of tuna? Did you know it was canned for the first time because a cannery ran out of sardines? Did you know that canning itself was developed for Napoleon's military campaigns? You know yellow makes products look cheap? You do, but you didn't know you did.
For designers it is an indispensible history that will help you locate your place in the world of business and the American economy.Thomas Hine discusses how research dominates design and how brand managers can wipe out your precious work with a single "Natural!" violator.
Packaging Is What We Are.......2005-01-02
In his book, Mr. Hine writes about the development of things that I had never even given a thought like the invention of the shopping cart and how it should not take up too much space or the design of the grocery store as a maze, but the book also tells so much more like what colors on the packages say about the products and so on. Mr. Hine even argues that "packaging is what we are" for "packaging mirrors its expected customers, and thus it provides an unfamiliar and provocative perspective about who we are and what we want."
Well, I consider this book to be a true eye-opener and I experience just walking down the aisles in a store as a truly unique experience now for I came to realize that there is a whole theory behind everything I see around me or every aspect of the store.
Excellent Book!.......2004-05-21
What's up with the icky cover?.......2001-09-30
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Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers
Alissa Quart
Manufacturer: Basic Books
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ASIN: 0738208620
Release Date: 2004-02-17
Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers.......2006-07-22
However, once I got into actually reading the book, I was very dissapointed. Quart seemed, at least to me, to merely skim the surface of the problem, filling the pages with statistics and endless lists of numbers but not really pulling much meaning out of any of it.
It also seemed to me that she focused most of her attention on the "rich" kids. I feel that a comparison between priviledged and average teenagers, even severely underpriviledged teens, would have made the book much more interesting. It got especially frustration for me when I reached the chapter titled "Logo U" because (my being fresh out of highschool) I felt that she was exaggerating, or else obviously not expanding her interviews for children NOT from wealthy families. I never took an SAT course, never bought an expensive SAT book but still did perfectly well on my SATs, and got into several excellent colleges.
I understand that the point she was trying to make was about teens getting the "Logo U"s in their minds and refusing to be denied access to them, but I feel the endless droning about SATs offered nothing to feed that point and just made me try to compare the information to my own experience, with little, if any, success.
I apologize for my review being so unorganized. I am no professional writer myself.
Okay, but lacking..........2006-05-25
However, I did learn much from this book, and the chapter on teenage plastic surgery was quite shocking and disturbing to me.
Overall, I do recommend this book, if you are able to draw your own conclusions from the facts provided.
Brand This!.......2005-07-07
What struck me most about Quart's analysis is how RELEVANT it is. Unlike many books published today, the research, reference, and anecdotal material in Branded (published in 2003) is very recent and does not rely too much, or at all really, on the 1990s.
Two shortcomings of the book were the chapter on Self-Branding (I felt Quart could have done more with body piercing, for example) and the last few pages (her final analysis could have been stronger). Despite these weak spots, Quart clearly did her research.
Branded is an interesting and even fun read suitable for parents, teenagers, and educators alike. As a teacher myself, I will definitely refer to it in the future.
Good concept, but not totally engaging.......2005-01-18
Fresh and Disturbing Take on a Rather Tired Argument.......2004-09-23
Although the book's subject is the way that companies market to teenagers, in a sense this is only a subset of the author's larger concern with capitalism and consumer culture. She obviously has a left wing take on this subject, although I disagree with earlier reviewers that her presentation is manipulative or unfair. The issue isn't whether or not companies fill a demand (obviously, they do), but about the lengths to which they go to create that demand. How you feel about this obviously depends on your politics, but Quart's viewpoint seems to me to be reasonable and valid.
My problem is that this argument is just sort of tired. I'm just bored of hearing the same critique of "consumer culture" over and over again. What sets this book apart, though is its focus on marketing to children, and, in particular, the passages where Quart presents the kids' lives through their own words. It's pretty disturbing to hear how closely they identify their own self-worth with the products that they use. I'm not just talking about the idea that they have to conform to a certain image in order to be beautiful--again, this is old news. But about how the almost BECOME the brand that they use. When a teenager named Carrie, a fan of MTV's "Total Request Live" describes her loyalty to that show and to the marketing she does for The Backstreet Boys by saying, "I like the Boys as much as my friends and family"--well, there's something really disturbing about that.