Last week a few of us went to Las Vegas to attend Brand ManageCamp, where Marty Neumeier, our Director of Transformation was one of the featured speakers. The event was very well attended, with over 300 branding professionals who came from cities across the country – and also quite a few from outside the US (We met one attendee that flew in all the way from Qatar!). I wanted to compliment Len Herstein for putting together an extremely well organized, inspirational and very successful event. The line up of speakers was outstanding and the topics extremely relevant. It was a pleasure being there as an attendee – and Marty was also very pleased in terms of his experience as a presenter.

Some brands create such strong customer communities that they are practically cults. Apple, the Grateful Dead, and Harley Davidson are a few good examples. The customers for these brands become part of a tribe - with its own culture and sense of belonging. The brands that succeed in creating such a strong connection among its customers and employees benefit from exceptionally high levels of loyalty, to the extent their customers rarely practice brand-switching – instead, they actually promote the brand actively – and often try to convert others into becoming "brand believers".

Going into it's 6th year, dConstruct 2010 invites and brings together leading industry figures to explore the power of design thinking. Held this year on September 3 in Brighton, England, dConstruct is the affordable one day conference for those designing and building web applications.

Brand ManageCamp 2010 is an intensive two-day conference that features the most engaging and dynamic speakers in branding. This year, Marty Neumeier, Director of Transformation at Liquid Agency has been selected along with twelve peers to speak at this renowned event in Las Vegas, September 21-22.

We are proud to announce that Marty Neumeier's Innovation Workshop won awards in two categories at this year’s Telly Awards. The Telly Awards receives more than 13,000 entries from all fifty states and five continents. Each year the Telly Awards honors the best television programs and commercials, as well as the finest video and film productions for broadcast, along with work created for the Web. Innovation Workshop is a 45-minute tutorial that helps individuals and teams to transform their company into a powerhouse of nonstop innovation.

Marty Neumeier, Director of Transformation at Liquid Agency has been invited by REBRAND to be one of ten jurors selected every year for the annual REBRAND 100 Global Awards.

As I said in my book The Designful Company, if you want to innovate, you have to design. Yet design is a foreign language to most business managers. This is because the principles of traditional business management principles evolved to serve the needs of the industrial age. They rely on a mechanical two-step process for making decisions: knowing and doing. You “know” something—from a past experience, a case study, or a best practice—and then you “do” something.

The company that used to be called AOL, and was recently spun off from Time Warner, is shrinking in size in order to survive...and now its name and logo are shrinking as well. Perhaps as a reflection of its intention to cut about 2,500 jobs, AOL has changed the UC treatment of the acronym to one that includes an upper case "A" and lower case "ol". And, in an attempt to communicate that the company is in the internet space, it is adding a "." after its moniker. "AOL" is now "Aol."

On Wednesday night I attended an event at the Thomson Reuters center in NY featuring Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto; Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO; and Will Setliff, VP of Strategy, Insights and Innovation at Target. The three panelists were joined by Bruce Nussbaum, from BusinessWeek – who helped moderate the conversation, often making it more interesting through humor and memorable anecdotes.

Below is an article written by Alfredo Muccino for CorpComms Magazine - the only monthly magazine targeted at the in-house communicator. The magazine offers advice and informative articles on a range of topical subjects, such as social and digital media, internal communications, sponsorship and CSR. Based in London and published by Hardy Media, the publication is edited by Helen Dunne, who contacted Liquid to get our thoughts on the London brand, since Boris Johnson, London’s mayor recently announced that he wanted to re-brand the city.