A co-founder of the firm, Robert is an entrepreneur with 25 years' experience in global communications. His prior venture was sold in 2000 to a public company. His client experience includes TIME magazine, R.R. Donnelly, and Johnson & Johnson, for whom he has been an approved supplier for 17 years. He is the author of Translating into Success, Harvard Business School-style case studies in cross-cultural communications. A graduate of Harvard College, summa cum laude in classics and German, he received an MA in languages from the University of Cambridge under a George C. Marshall Scholarship awarded by the British government.
I met Martyn after he had started the verbal-branding practice at Landor; he was dreaming up names for the latest wonder drug or perfume, and we would ensure the names didn't offend in Chinese or Hindi. People always ask, incidentally, whether TippingSprung is named after an English village or Malcolm Gladwell’s book. (For the record, Martyn was born well before the latter.)
There is something downright poetic about Cheetos lip balm (a real product that was featured in one of our surveys with Brandweek). Marvelous to relate, I met the president of the company that marketed this product and, instead of pelting me with Jello, he said the exposure was some of the best his firm ever got. Go figure.
I’m continually amazed that many US companies get half their revenues from abroad, yet many have limited international representation in the teams that develop product names, concepts, and package designs. The “Chevy Nova” example is entertaining, if apocryphal (“It means ‘doesn’t go’ in Spanish”), but our job is not merely to create products that don't offend. They should be as compelling abroad as they are at home.
To the degree I have been able to walk and chew gum at the same time (something I’ve mastered in certain weeks of odd-numbered years), I owe this to street smarts from my native Scranton, Pennsylvania, to which I also owe a love of the classics acquired at a Jesuit high school and a love of community work acquired at a home for the elderly.
As a rule, I shy away from books with “branding” in the title. Branding is really about clear communication, so one can probably learn as much from E.B. White and Edward Tufte than from the branding guru of the moment. Plus, you don't have to be seen carrying around a book with a title like "Brand Toothpaste" (That being said, we were given a nice write-up in a great book titled What is Branding?, so I shouldn't quibble.)
I am a perennial re-reader, since I hate to be disappointed by a book. The books I return to often are Between Meals, a culinary memoire of Paris by A.J. Liebling, and The Expert at the Card Table, the memoire of a great riverboat card sharp.
That would have to be delivering a speech in Latin at my Harvard commencement. The theme was the absurdity of giving a speech that no one can understand (although seniors were given a bilingual version so they could look smart by laughing at the right spots).