Wix Breakfast: Brand Personality!

Actually called: Wix Breakfast: Life Attracts Life- Give Your Brand a Personality Boost!  IMG_20150114_081015

School’s getting closer, so I decided to retrain myself for it by going to bed ridiculously late and waking up ridiculously early for a lecture! Yay! I found it on Eventbrite while browsing and took a chance.

And I’m really glad I did. It was a really interesting seminar, a little on the short side, full of little tips I would have never thought of, like how important emotional touchstones, big and small (“anything from a big brand experience to a tweet”), are to a customer base. There are tons of examples of these connections with consumers that I can think of. Some smaller gestures include Xbox’s (T, F) and T-Mobile’s (T, F) avid usage of their twitter handles and Facebook support apps to annual events like Krispy Kreme’s Day of the Dozens, Talk Like a Pirate, and National Doughnut Days. Everyone remembers larger political gestures like Oreo’s support for gay pride, to well-established, company-wide policies like Starbucks’ C.A.F.E Practices (they work with Conservation International to keep the farming sustainable) and TOMS Shoes policy of donating a pair of shoes for every pair purchased. All of them work to improve the perception of the brand and endear its consumers to it, while actually decreasing a little of the bad in the world at the same time. And of course, little gestures like that are key for small business owners to create their own communities; Milk Sugar Love’s content on their Facebook page regularly attempts to engage users with questions and relatable expressions.

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Charlie Hebdo

Created by Lucille Clerc.

Perhaps I’m just a coward, but I don’t feel right expressing ideology right now. I don’t want to impress onto anyone that I am comfortable in ignorance, that I take comfort in “The truth resists simplicity” just as Mr. Green of the vlogbrothers doesn’t take comfort in his own phrase, highly repeated when tragedies of worldwide significance go on, but I’m also a wholly ignorant person. I don’t have any inside knowledge, and the barest of outside knowledge. I am no soldier, no scholar, no great influencer. I know to be a successful believer and supporter of anything ,I must focus, but that focus creates guilt. I am a mighty defender of the pen, but I am also hurt at what some of those pens spill. I am no supporter of violence, but I’m not blind to the power of it. I talk at times like I am not affected by the thoughts of others, but I am as subject to the feelings of others as anyone else.

I will say that there is no room for base ignorance when the internet is such a vast place. Beware of the words you use, and make sure you know what they mean. Being careless is useless at best, and harmful otherwise. The brilliance behind the covers of magazines is that they are not stupid mockery.

And so I leave this rather paragraph here. Je ne suis pas Charlie, but I will always admire strength beyond my own.

*List taken from Telegraph:

• Charb – (real name Stephane Charbonnier) 47, an artist and publisher of Charlie Hebdo

• Cabu – (real name Jean Cabut) 76, the lead cartoonist for Charlie Hebdo

• Georges Wolinski – 80, an artist who had been drawing cartoons since the 1960s

• Tignous – (real name Bernard Verlhac) 57, a member of Cartoonists for Peace

• Bernard Maris – (known as “Uncle Bernard”) 68, an economist and columnist for the magazine

• Honoré – (real name Philippe Honoré) 73, the artist who drew the last cartoon tweeted by the weekly publication

• Michel Renaud – a former journalist who was visiting the Charlie Hebdo offices

• Mustapha Ourrad – a copy-editor for Charlie Hebdo

• Elsa Cayat – a columnist and analyst for Charlie Hebdo

• Frederic Boisseau – a building maintenance worker

• Franck Brinsolaro – 49, a policeman appointed to head security for Charb

• Ahmed Merabet – 42, a police officer and member of the 11th arrondissement brigade