The Use of Branding in the Presidential Election – 3Q08

In the midst of a highly-contested Presidential election, the value of well-crafted messaging campaigns is probably never more evident. With the daily challenge of pandering to the widest range of target audience that is the American public, as well as the world’s press, candidates are involved in fully-dynamic, ever-changing message manipulation. With a rabid press and online contingent tracking and pouncing on every word and message uttered by both candidates, message consistency and brand identity can certainly tilt an election. In politics as in business, the better branding usually wins.

News from Inside Articulation

Another recent launch involved the development of a personal brand for one of the nation’s leading commercial real estate brokers. The goal was to develop a scalable and credible brand story and messaging strategy to support the broker as an expert advisor, speaker, and mentor. This involved editorial and strategic assistance in the writing of a book detailing core real estate investment tenets and strategies to create wealth. Articulation also built and launched the broker’s personal website to extend his brand, showcase service offerings, and provide an outlet for investors, students, and clients.

Inside the Industry 

Google recently entered the browser business with the launch of Chrome during the third quarter of 2008. While certainly not offering any groundbreaking features or new benefits, Chrome captured more than 1% of the browser market within its first day of release. Since then, it has been growing steadily, possibly providing another long-term player to compete with Microsoft’s Explorer, Apple’s Safari, and Mozilla’s Firefox. For the web development world, it certainly becomes more and more challenging to create sites that work fluidly on an increasing number of browsers and versions of each—especially with a big group of users stuck on the ultra-buggy IE6.

Current Projects 

During the third quarter, the Articulation design team worked on revamping the look and structure of a high-end jewelry design company’s website. We targeted a more sophisticated and elegant user interface with new features to give the site a more continuous flow. These features added to the site’s interactivity, but also reduced the number of clicks a user needs to be exposed to as much of the art and jewelry collections as possible. We also added search functionality visitors can easily find what they are looking for while still getting a sense of the company’s global and widespread national scope.