http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog Pithy, quirky, quixotic, insightful idealistic, helpful musings on branding, advertising, marketing, banking, and cyber stuff. Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:20:30 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Standard outline for preachers. Saw this article. Thought you might like it. ’Nuff said. http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2010/03/03/stand-up-speak-up-shut-up/ When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a short story entitled, “My Grandfather’s Wake,” for a fiction workshop. It wasn’t a great short story, and most of it wasn’t fiction. But it had a pretty good first line, if I do say so myself: The groundhog didn’t see his shadow when ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2010/02/04/groundhog-day/ I’ve learned a lot of things from my mentors. When I was four, my grandfather let me help him with his garden. I got to dig with a spade. And, as a side benefit of learning to dig, I learned that you could use certain types of claw hammers as ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2010/01/18/mentors/ Word reached me over the Christmas holidays that my Uncle Ducky was frustrated at my infrequent blog posts. Isn’t that just the way it goes. You post and post and post. And you don’t think anyone notices. Then, you get distracted for a few weeks, and you start to hear ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2010/01/11/thank-you-uncle-ducky/ It covers something like 80 percent of the Earth, right? It comprises like 60 percent of your body. You can’t live more than three days without drinking some. Water is pretty important. Next to oxygen, it’s the most urgent thing. Last week it was urgent to us for another reason. ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2009/12/14/h2o/ Back in the last century, in my package goods days, I worked on the Taster’s Choice brand, where I had the pleasure of trying to convince people that instant coffee was…coffee. Now, let’s talk a little bit about Taster’s Choice. If ever there was an instant worth drinking, it was ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2009/09/29/what-is-the-life-expectancy-of-via%c2%ae/ We’ve been talking a lot lately about brand names. The question is, what difference does a name make in the future of a brand? Not an easy question to answer, but a good question to consider. At one end of the spectrum, there are genius names, names that are unique in ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2009/09/16/what%e2%80%99s-in-a-name/ Our friend Audrey asked for some yummy recipes to start her married life with. So, here you go, sister. Enjoy. Zucchinis are like rabbits. You plant one, you get a zillion. So it’s always good to have some recipes for them. Let’s face it, your gardening friends are going to give ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2009/08/18/zucchini-soup/ We had French Canadian guests at church yesterday. But I’ll get back to that. Anne and I decided to take the day off on Friday. It was a half-day (an office schedule experiment we started a couple of years ago, that has been a great success—maybe I’ll blog about it ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2009/08/17/gourmet-hay/ My college poetry professor, Paul Nelson, always asked, “What’s the objective correlative.” He was a sort of a concrete imagist. So he was always trying to get us to write about things in terms of other things. Abstract things in terms of concrete things. Ideas in terms of things. He ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2009/08/10/tweets-and-mortar/