Brand strategy is the connection between your marketing goals and your customers’ experience. How you position your brand defines who comes to buy, why and how to build your market.

So do you have what it takes to enlist your own army of brand followers? Take a look at how you interact with your customers and ask yourself if you are worthy of their loyalty.

When you think your consumer brand is well-known and enjoys incredible loyalty, that you can’t possibly loose your core customer, be wary. No matter how loyal customers are, they can desert you, especially if they, well, age and die off.

Yahoo seems to have no idea what it’s trying to do with it’s site. They don’t even power their own own search now that it has been “outsourced” to Microsoft.

With branding and tag lines you focus on the simplest words that convey meaning and differentiation to the potentially most loyal consumer.

When you go into a store, whether it’s a Safeway, a Macys or a Trader Joe’s, the signage immediately sets the tone. Is the place fun? Is it formal? Is it “hip”? And lastly, does this place communicate that they have what you want? Beneath the simplicity of hanging signs or shelf talkers can be [...]

So why not reinvent what Black Friday could be for retailers: brand loyalty day.

The shocking part about the Gap’s disastrous misstep is that it shows their lack of connection to their own consumers, which is incredibly important.

The motivation to protect what’s unique to a specific community, a region, or a particular street has come as a reaction to the mass influx of chain stores in the last 30 years.

Do you think the same guy who’s selling you a a Chrysler Le Baron or Jeep Wrangler can sell you a Fiat 500? Not on your life. Fiat is doing it right by launching 200 new dealerships in the U.S.