Editor’s note: This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. To see the original, go to http://tinyurl.com/7a7fqf.
When I started covering marketing for the Star Tribune’s business section in 2003, I spent the first few months meeting people in the advertising, marketing and PR business.
And I bet 90 percent of them had a story to [...]

A while ago, I mentioned Brandtags.net, an experiment by Noah Brier that tests the theory that brands exist in people’s heads. A recent trip led me to play with the backwards section where visitors guess the brands based on other users’ tags.
Some brands are dead giveaways (Apple’s popular tags include Steve Jobs, ipod and mac), [...]

You’ll soon have the chance to decide just where the union resides. I’m going to be writing a weekly marketing column for MinnPost, Minnesota’s leading independent online news source. Like so many other Star Tribune refugees, I found my way to Joel Kramer’s bold new venture.
I don’t use that word lightly. It takes a lot of [...]

Several ponies from Fast Horse have been regulars at likemind, a monthly coffee-and-conversation group that meets in downtown Minneapolis. There’s usually a good turnout, with Carmichael Lynch, Space150 and Fallon among the agencies often represented. It tends to attract a lot of planners, which is great from my perspective, because they look at things differently than creatives [...]

Seeking to reverse a geriatric image and boost flagging sales, the California Prune Board in 2000 decided to rebrand its product. Advised by Ketchum, California – which produces about 90 percent of the prunes consumed in the U.S. – declared that henceforth its fruit would be known as “dried plums.” Why not? It worked for the Chinese gooseberry, which [...]