Some say there is a “New Normal” and that business has changed in a profound way from the beginning to the end of the first decade of the 21st century. If so, then what are the implications for the concept of BRAND — is it more or less important than it was? Should more thought go into proactively creating and managing the brand experience? Should more resources be expended in shaping and defending the brand? And if the answer is yes to one or more of these questions, then by what means can we achieve this control and what can we expect as a return on our investment? These are important questions for marketers of all stripes — from agency denizens to company product managers to entrepreneurs launching new brands.

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Gwen’s Girls gives young women in our area the support they need to overcome their challenges and become healthy, confident and successful. The services this organization offers change girls’ lives, and, by investing in the promise and potential of girls, also change our society for the better.

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New Fitting Group creative services intern, Beckie, blogs about her experience with handling culture shock.

In my opinion, I’ve lived a sheltered life. I grew up in a rural area, two hours from any major city, fifteen minutes from a decent-size town in Maryland and forty-five minutes from my 600-student high school in Pennsylvania. Up until this past December, I had never been further than Orlando, Florida, and I had never been on an airplane (yes, we drove for 15 hours).

But I finally got my chance to break these boundaries. My fiancé’s sister, Ashley, is currently living in Honduras teaching math at a bilingual school. His family invited me to go with them for two weeks to visit her and sightsee. We flew out of Baltimore on December 18th to the capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa.

Walking around Tegucigalpa and our second destination, Juticalpa, nearly everyone stared at me. I also knew very little Spanish. It was extremely unnerving. I was prepared to stick out like a sore thumb, and I knew I would have trouble communicating, but I was not prepared for the overwhelming feeling of panic.

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When GeoSonics and Vibra-Tech, sister companies who have united as one, decided to demonstrate their union on the World Wide Web, they needed a site that was chock-full of technical information, but still easy to use and awesome to look at.

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RiverLift Industries is a logistics, transloading and trucking company that really knows how to deliver. They came to Fitting Group in need of a website that would send a very important message: you can count on RiverLift.

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Fitting Group met with the Comcast folks last week and learned all about the cool stuff coming down the pike for advertisers — both online and on cable TV. What we learned was that upcoming innovations clearly point to Comcast’s understanding that in today’s world, TV must learn to play the instant-gratification game in order to keep up and attract young audiences.

Most advertisers are familiar with Comcast’s On Demand service, which was its first attempt at providing subscribers with more in-depth information on a product or service. This was a good start, but it didn’t compare to the “seek-n-find” capability of the Internet. Well, in the very near future, subscribers are going to be able to push a button on their digital cable TV remote when they see an advertisement to instantly (with a double opt-in “yes” feature) request that coupons or additional information be sent to them via snail-mail or email.

This capability will open up endless possibilities for advertisers — if subscribers actually do it. As with anything else, it will take time to catch on. But, when it does, it will become as second nature as setting your DVR to record The Bachelor (by the way, you will also be able to hit a button on your remote when you see a promo for The Bachelor to signal your DVR to record it for you — instantly!). Technology and advertising — I LOVE IT!

Lots of client work is a good thing — but it left us with very little time to create a proper holiday greeting. SO ANYWAY, here are some videos we had lots of fun hastily cobbling together.

Using nothing but home-made puppets, action figures and a whiteboard, we improvised video recreations of our favorite holiday stories.

And hey… actors sometimes enjoy their performances more than the audience does. So, be kind!

Senior Designer Andrew O. Ellis loves Pittsburgh. Read why.

I may have been one of the only kids in Michigan to have this card on purpose.

If you don’t mind, I’m going to spend the next few paragraphs patting myself on the back.

Why? Because I’m part of a small and exclusive group. I’m a young person who moved TO Pittsburgh and stuck around. And more than that, I did it before it was cool.

You see, I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. One Christmas during the early 1990s, we came to Pittsburgh to visit relatives who at that time lived in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. I don’t know if it was the rivers or the hills or the dinosaurs or what, but something about this town captured my imagination for the rest of my childhood. Pictures of the skyline adorned my bedroom walls. Bridges became more fascinating to me than cars and trucks, and the Pittsburgh Penguins became my hockey team – a move, in Red Wings territory, that was about as popular as being, say, a Cleveland Browns fan in Steeler Nation.

In Detroit, most of the art and design schools were rumored to be straight recruitment lines to the now-crumbling automotive industry – a path I wasn’t eager to follow. It seemed almost too perfect that I’d end up attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. I still had friends questioning the move as my high school graduation loomed, but I was feeling the sort of satisfaction that you feel when things start falling into place. (more…)

Can the Gap brand be saved?

The all-American brand of the Gap has been under scrutiny over the last several years from Wall Street analysts, branding industry leaders and advertising publications all asking roughly the same question: Can the Gap brand be saved? The topic even came up earlier this year on Gap’s own Facebook discussion board, albeit without much action.

The most recent move by the Gap was to go outside of their agency of record relationship to hire Crispin for their holiday season campaign. A bold move? Yes. The correct move? Well, we’ll have to wait and see. I am fairly certain Crispin will be very creative. However a clever holiday campaign may boost year-end sales, but will it truly save the Gap brand?
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I’ve been thinking about how to make Fitting Group’s product better, which in turn, helps our Challenger Brand clients enhance their marketing efforts. Each client has his or her own business goals, but usually among them, is growth. And I can tell you, it’s really, really hard to think up better ways to do things when you’re in the thick of things. So I sought inspiration in the Rockies.

Andrea's cogs are turning at 10,000 feet

I might look like I’m not working. But believe me, the cogs are turning furiously. The lungs are working pretty hard too.

Here’s one of the things I’ve come up with so far. The old model of marketing was pretty simple and straightforward: make a product or deliver a service that is predictable, consistent and works as expected, control your costs and sell at a profit. If you attract more customers and sell more stuff, you’ll make more money. But there is something fundamentally flawed with this model given our world today. The basic assumption relies on the principle that stability is the norm – that the “customer” will have the same needs or desires tomorrow as he does today. If that were true, the status quo would indeed be something to protect. And many keep on trying to protect it. No wonder people need the weekends to recharge their batteries. Going to work every day and holding up the dike against a sea of change saps a lot of energy. There’s not much left over to think about a better way to do things.

So at least take the holiday weekend to think about how the world has changed for your customers. Maybe you’ll be able to come up with a better way to help them cope with it.