Mike Renaud

A charismatic brand includes a dedication to aesthetics. Why? Because it’s the language of feeling, and in a society that’s information-rich and time-poor, people value feeling more than information.

Even back in the command-and-control days of the production line, Henry Ford’s decision to manufacture automobiles was driven by intuition rather than market research. “If we had asked the public what they wanted,” he explained, “they would have said ‘faster horses.

Getting back to those terrible purpose-led, strategy-showing ads. It’s possible they’re working and that they’re successfully tugging on the heartstrings of consumers and causing the kind of emotional resonance that drives successful advertising. I doubt it, but maybe. But if they’re not also delivering “salience,” which I can’t imagine they are si... See more

When the external actions of a company align with its internal culture, the brand resonates with authenticity

To systematically build iconic brands, companies must reinvent their marketing function. They must assemble cultural knowledge, rather than knowledge about individual consumers. They must strategize according to cultural branding principles, rather than apply the abstracted and present-tense mind-share model. And they must hire and train cultural a... See more

Type specimens are time capsules of typographic history. There is no substitute for seeing them in person, but you can now use a web browser to track the evolution of type design through the pages of over two hundred manufacturer catalogs from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. For years, I accessed these books via an unwieldy pile of b... See more