With a nationwide GMO labeling bill now signed into law, brands are attempting to sort out what the new requirements will mean for their products. Although the FDA has until summer 2019 to establish the full rules for the law—and even longer to enforce them—the length of supply chains means […]
Google vs Market Research As a college student circa 2005, I was brash enough with my newfound power of knowledge that I told my mother that Googling “didn’t count as research.” A few years later my mom asked me, somewhat pointedly, if that were still true, and though I had […]
(This brand naming post is part of an ongoing series of posts we’re calling Brandcrumbs, which are bits and pieces of branding advice left over from our regular conversations about real-world brand positioning challenges.) Brand naming is one of my favorite things to do at MarketPlace. I love the process […]
Although the food industry has historically been dominated by entrenched major brands, startups and venture capital have begun to move aggressively into food and beverage and agriculture, rightly perceiving the industry to be both exciting and profitable. High-profile food startups like KRAVE and Blue Bottle Coffee have found success bringing an entrepreneurial, […]
Since our beginning as food industry consultants 15 years ago, we’ve remained focused on the food industry. We’ve done so partly because the food industry is where we started and what we love. But we’ve also done so because we place great importance on the value of focus. Effective food […]
From GMOs to FD&Cs, whole grain over multigrain, no brominates and definitely no aspartame, it’s getting harder for the average consumer to know what to think. This isn’t to say that cleaner labels aren’t good for our collective wellbeing—just that it’s a lot to keep straight. You could forgive consumers, […]
I’m a nerd. I grew up with a Nintendo controller in my hands; I’ll stay up until the small hours to catch Vincent Price or Hammer Films horror marathons; and my personal geography is dotted with mountains of unread books—on topics ranging from 17th century Dutch painting to the history […]
As a brand development agency, we handle a lot of visual identity projects for our partners—both consumer-facing and B2B. Those projects are often the first tangible deliverable of a well-rounded branding campaign. As a designer, I love taking on that responsibility, especially the work that goes into crafting a logo—that […]
We regularly say that a company’s website, designed and developed correctly, is more than a marketing tool; rather, it’s a brand asset that benefits all marcomm efforts and increases profitability for years to come. Typically, we develop websites as a result of or in tandem with a brand identity project (logo, […]
My love of garden-grown, heirloom tomatoes is well documented. However, since it’s late summer, prime tomato-harvest season, I’m not the only one with tomatoes on the mind—recipes are being published aplenty, and the Washington Post recently ran a fascinating history of the “tumatle from Themistitan” (for an explanation of that […]
I can remember my first encounter with marketing materials from our local independent hardware shop. While still a student at the nearby university, I glanced at a campus bulletin board on the third floor of an anonymous campus office and saw, tacked among the posters for campus theatre productions, a […]
In spare moments, I’ve been reading Tom Nealon’s 15-blog-post-long history of condiments, a frantic and learned tour through more than two thousand years of vinegars, sauces, dressings, and spices. It’s tremendously informative and entertaining—Nealon studies rare cookbooks, and consequently possesses a massive repertoire of weird food facts and history. Perhaps […]
