Strategic vision, brand and targeted creative: Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoir’s Failure and Under Armour’s Creative Collapse. Why?
Exploring the challenge of branding, focused market relevance and brand storytelling. Some time back, I was asked by a Creative Director at a major food producing organization, to create a brand shift that would take the riskiest flagship brand to a place of renewed...
Online shoe brand development: marketing and website observations
Photo A indulgent luxury that is flourishing even in recessionary challenges. It's what we walk on. It's what we walk with. Or what we've got on our feet. And for some of us, the concept of the shoe is just "down there", something to walk, work out in, or shuffle from...
Brand Development: Symbolic Design, Metaphors and Cumularity
Strategies of brand patterning, collaborative design and Girvin evolutions Design is about the embrace of change. And any brand, over time, has to freshly attach to the conception of transition in continuously and resiliently responding to shifts in the market. The...
Droid Interface | new brand strategy and design from Motorola
The red seeing eye of the Droid: exploring brand differentiation for telephone hardware First off, since this blog is about brand messaging and imagery strategy, it would be good to explore that as a opener, so there's some ground to the accusations. The basic...
Empowering Brands to Win: Online Promotional Messaging
Internet Advertising Winning Formulae Working as a strategist and designer in theatrical advertising and branding, there's an approach that's linked to sequence and revelation of motion picture content that's showing some proven measure in conventional online...
Local is global: Mom & Popism Shops
Exploring tiny market communities and micro retail -- small shopping is beautiful While I've (and the Girvin team) had the chance to work on some of the largest retail groups in the world, namely Sogo&Seibu Co., Ltd. (Millennium Retailing) and their expansions to...
Le Microsoft Windows Café à Paris
Better than a store, you can eat there: Microsoft Café Exploring a new conception from Microsoft, a café in Paris -- to be short-lived, yet an interesting telling on the principles of relationship development. But, Windows 7? Imagery sources Like good storytelling,...
Tom Ford | Grey Vetiver
Tom Ford in Tokyo. Photo By Akiko Sameshima Exploring the human brand, story, product development, scent and visioning. Obviously, I've got a thing with Tom Ford. There are layers there. One, meeting him, talking to him, interviewing him -- and learning from him. And...
Humanitarian Brand Development | Cause Related Marketing Development — it’s all about love.
What if your brand is about a cause? What if your brand is humanity? What if your real messaging reach is love? This is an overview of Girvin's strategic thinking about the nature of humanitarian and cause-related branding strategy and tactics. There have been a...
The mystery of the book: my encounter with Jorge Luis Borges
The mystical character of a man, a letter and an inspiration For a long time, I've been exploring the realm of the mysterious. Perhaps my whole life. But mystery is something that speaks to the character of that which is merely unseen. It is what is hidden. Being a...