Is bad grammar killing your brand?

Siting our increasingly abbreviated writing styles, Forbes contributor Jayson DeMers poses this very interesting question.

Dramatic, you say? Maybe not so much.

My fellow storytellers at CCM know that I have a love-hate relationship with grammar, a condition that I often blame on the New Jersey public school system. So who am I to write anything about grammar? Seriously, random typos, acronyms, and memes prevail across online and social platforms, and brands are increasingly engaged in a two-way conversation with their communities. I’m not being a 'meme-o-phoebe' here. This is a good thing. But if you begin to sound too much like your audience, overusing acronyms and Internet speak, and losing focus on maintaining a strong brand voice, how can that be anything but detrimental in the long run?

Is your brand cool but authoritative? Hip, but also smart? It better be, or risk being like the parent who, preoccupied with being “the cool mom,” allows her children to make all sorts of bad choices, loses their respect and ultimately drives them away.

DeMers asks, “Is grammar dead, or just changing?” Read thefull story in Forbes.

The oldest company logos in the world

I’m often asked about logos – which do I like best, who designed them and, occasionally, how long they’ve been in use.

Even before Sherwin-Williams began to “cover the earth” and a certain insurance company used the rock of Gibraltar to suggest its sturdiness, their was Stella. The origins of Stella Artois can be traced to 1366 when the Den Hoorn brewery was established in Leuven, Belgium. Despite numerous shifts in management over hundreds of years, the original horn logo has not changed.

In a fast-paced world where clients and marketing consultants seem to share a serious attention deficit, it is truly amazing that so many of the logos we recognize today have been in continuous use, largely unchanged, for so many years.

To learn more about the world's oldest logos, go to the 24/7 Wall Street story by Thomas C. Frohlich.