Mike Renaud

The ability to subtract features is the rare gift of the true communicator.

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

Think of this scale as form of Richter scale to get a feel of how bad the hype is. A new technology doesn’t have to move through every single level but it most likely will at least reach level 3.

“I think that instead of the Brand, we should figure out the Purpose of Airbnb and its community. There clearly is a huge and vital community of Hosts, Guests and Employees. Let’s figure out what role Airbnb plays in their lives and why they are committed to it. If we can do that, then it will be much easier to figure out what Airbnb’s Brand is.... 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... See more

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... See more