If you’re a geek-chic Career Science company marketing to Gen Ys and Xers, you better have a website chock-full of razzmatazz to persuade them. So we started drafting plans for uSooth’s command center.

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So Butler Health System came to us a while back and said they were going to build a new patient tower. It’d be made of gleaming glass and steel and cost something like $127 million. And we said, “Hmm. You might want to tell some people.”

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We come to the end of another Shark Week — Discovery Channel’s summer-doldrums ode to blood and water. Yes, it’s more than that. It’s educational, it’s scientific, it’s a complicated love/hate affair with an aquatic species most of us will never, ever encounter.

I mean ever.

But forget about all of that. Let’s talk about something you might not know.

This year marks Shark Week’s 23rd season, making it cable’s longest-running event. And it’s garnered more than 20 million viewers every year since 1995. On cable.

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Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young professionals go to MBA Tour events to learn about schools and collect swag. But every booth has basically the same fare: pens and papers and lanyards. All hit the trash right quick.

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No one is in business in spite of the customer – we are all in business because of the customer. If other people didn’t have needs that we could fulfill, we would still all be hunters and gatherers, foraging for ourselves.

Big companies sometimes lose sight of this simple truth. Over time, they forget their roots, growing into complex organizations with lots of layers of management and administration, production and supply chain integration. Most of the people, whose livelihoods ultimately depend on the customers, are completely out of touch with them. If you surveyed the work force of a very large company I wonder how many of them would be able to tell you why the customer buys or what they most care about. Read the rest of this entry »

People say that entrepreneurs are risk takers. I believe that people who start businesses are no more interested in risk than anyone else. They just have a higher tolerance for failure. Entrepreneurs view failure as just another possible step in the process: try, fail, brush yourself off, learn from the mistake, try again. They don’t see failure as the end of the road, because for them, it isn’t.

That is to say, for less adventurous types, trying and failing sends them running back to the presumed safety of a paycheck and thus their entrepreneurial days are behind them. The entrepreneurs we admire the most are the ones that never stop trying, no matter how many failures they experience. Each one actually makes them stronger and smarter.

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I’m supposed to be on vacation. As I write this, I’m staying with my parents in my suburban Michigan hometown while I prepare to participate in the wedding of an old friend. Yet my head is so full with thoughts of brands and branding that I feel compelled to share some recent observations.

When I arrived at the old homestead, my parents were out running errands, but their mail was sitting unopened on the counter. Included in the pile were envelopes from PNC Bank, a familiar Pittsburgh institution. As you may know, PNC recently acquired National City Bank, essentially forcing a banking switch upon millions of National City customers and greatly expanding PNC’s reach across the nation. In today’s economy, this kind of thing isn’t unusual, but my experience may have been.

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uSooth came to Fitting Group as Insight to Careers, a new company with big ambition and little recognition. With the help of our Brand Spanking Workshop, Insight to Careers was able to identify its potential as uSooth, the career scientists dedicated to finding the career truth behind every lost student and young professional in the Western Pennsylvania area.

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Yes, Gap is again searching for a new agency to generate creative ideas for their upcoming campaign. This is their strategy to reach their goal of increasing sales. I guess it is hard for a one-time market leader to actually do something different.

To save me from repeating myself, here’s last year’s blog: The Challenger Gap!

I still have my 1988 Gap jean jacket. It is increasingly becoming buried in the back of my closet. But as a loyalist, I’m still rooting for you, Gap. If this year’s campaign doesn’t work, maybe you’ll think about a brand spanking.

There are more than ten military bases surrounding Williamsburg, VA, and the Mason School of Business at The College of William & Mary plans to cover all of them. With the help of Fitting Group, the School of Business is recruiting all military personnel with college degrees to check out their graduate business opportunities with a new “military-friendly” campaign, spanning the entire 2010 academic year.

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