The FreakyTrigger Top 25 Brands
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Nov 06
The FreakyTrigger Top 25 Brands: 24: TOP OF THE POPS
Top Of The Pops is a brand. Marketing says so, the BBC say so. Question is, how important a brand is it? Vacuum cleaners would exist without Hoover and (these days) Dyson, but the existence of iconic brands within a marketplace helps raise the profile of that very product. But what if the brand is not actually representative of the product? What is Top Of The Pops trying to sell?
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Nov 06
The FreakyTrigger Top 25 Brands: 23: PANINI
One of the great – though cynical – goals of marketing is to encourage consumers to waste stuff. Not in the enviro-friendly sense of extra packaging – the brands put that shit on their products when it was fashionable and they’ll take it off as soon as consumers start fussing enough, no problem. No, the idea is to do two things:
A: get consumers to buy more than they need.
B: make sure they don’t save the stuff they don’t use.
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Nov 06
The FreakyTrigger Top 25 Brands: 22: TARMAC
Tarmac? What kind of a brand is that, its just the pavement, right? Wrong my friends. Tarmac is a brand and an awe-inspiring dominant one at that. I love brands whose names are synonymous with their main product, it shows an awesome degree of brand dominance when the brand name becomes subsumed into language. But it is also dangerous: when Hoover became the de facto name for vacuum cleaners, they did not maintain brand dominance, and then the name stopped referring to the company at all (with the knock on effect that – say a Hoover Washing Machine also looked pretty suspect*).
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Jun 07
The FreakyTrigger Top 25 Brands: 21: POKEMON
Marketers at Nintendo has credited the popularity of Pokemon to its expert combination of two previous fads – the Tamagotchi and the Beanie Baby. Fair enough, but this isn’t why Pokemon has become so successful as a brand, capturing the imagination of children and adults worldwide. A great brand needs a great brand symbol, and Pokemon’s is Pikachu – in fact without Pikachu as an identification point the game would never have been a success.
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Jun 07
The FreakyTrigger TOP 25 Brands: 20. APPLE RECORDS
That’s Apple Records. Not Apple Computers. Or indeed Apple Martin-Paltrow. Both a blatant rip-off of Apple records logo etc.
So Apple Records. That is beatle band record label. Why is it so important, its only a record label. Well Apple was one of the very first stabs at a creative entity (the Beatles) owning the means of production and distribution. Being able to set up a stall and rake the money in directly. To ignore THE SUITS and do what the hell they wanted. Of course it was just a shame that what the hell they wanted was Mary Hopkin records and The White Album, but then such is the way with truly innovative ideas. And as a brand Apple was very easy to understand, there was that nice picture of the Granny Smith on the label.
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Jul 07
The FreakyTrigger TOP 25 BRANDS: 19: LONDON TRANSPORT
It’s a simple pictogram of London, the circle with the straight-line river running through it.
It’s a tube tunnel with the long line as the tube, oblique.
It’s the deck of a Routemaster, low set with a wheel in the middle.
It an old school commuters head, bowler hatted, on the way to work.
CIRCLE and LINE: it’s the Circle Line.
It is the London Transport logo and it is without a doubt one of the best logos ever designed.
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Aug 07
The FreakyTrigger TOP 25 BRANDS: 18: K-TEL
There are a lot of great record labels out there. look, Apple as a brand has already appeared in this list. And for a bunch of music fans knocking together a list of memorable and great brands, it is inevitable that a few record labels would show up. That said I wonder if anyone sitting around that fateful table own many K-Tel records. It is a great brand, a memorable one certainly, but not really for any of the right reasons.
The K is for its founder, Phillip Kives. The Tel was for Television. Hence me showing you the logo where you often saw it.
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Sep 07
The FreakyTrigger Top 25 Brands: 17: THE OFFICERS CLUB
Fashion brands come and go but for the non-fashion-literate the world of clothing can be a baffling and intimidating one. As a marketing professional I could probably outline the distinctive brand values of Top Man, Gap or Uniqlo – as a prospective purchaser the difference is elusive and strangely frightening. Surely there must be a brand for a consumer like me – not fashionable, low-budget, easily intimidated by even a helpful salesforce.
And lo, there WAS such a brand – The Officers Club! Except I never thought a lot of its clothes were any good, but hey, this is branding we’re talking about.
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Oct 07
The Freaky Trigger Top 25 Brands Of All Time Not Just Summer 2006 Which Makes This One All The More Embarrassing No.16: RUSSELL BRAND
In a move similar to The Freaky Trigger Top 25 Grants, one of our entries is not a Brand like the others. Where the others are marketing heavy representatives of an ethos, structure and mindset behind a product, number 16 is a person. A famous person admittedly, and one whose own recent meteoric rise (and partial fall) was peaking when we created the list. We were also quite drunk.
Ahem. Ballbags
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