Our participation in social journalism starts today. We’ll beg forgiveness up front as we inevitably learn through trial and error the ins and outs, the rules and regs of this form. What you can expect is total honesty. Our unvarnished opinions and views will appear here. And the good news: we have a lot to say so this effort will likely gain momentum in the coming months as our training wheels come off and we get the gist of interactive conversations.

First up: the remarkable change that is taking place around us at an unbelievably rapid pace. It is why we have narrowed and re-focused our agency’s brand positioning on what we’re calling TrailBlazer brands. The metaphor is simple – to win in this marketplace you must be willing to slay the marketing and communications conventions in your product category and follow a new compass. Navigation now must be driven around the over-arching requirement to be relevant in consumer’s lives. Either consumer’s will indeed care about your brand or they will relegate it to the “how cheap is it” menu. Sounds simple enough but the forces of commoditization are impressive and pervasive. Retailers exercise enormous power these days and it can be tough to create the kind of change necessary to truly disrupt the consumer’s perceptions of what a brand is all about and re-cast it in new light. It will take ideas, a certain level of fortitude and recognition that the consumer now controls everything.

We hope what appears here will help inspire that kind of change.