What's Up Wednesdays: Brand Image

Every Wednesday, I gather together five interesting blog posts from around the Internet and share them with you, the Beyond the Rhetoric community. Let’s see what’s happening this week.

We start off with Darren Barefoot and his post on Bell’s Let’s Talk Day. It’s supposed to be a day about raising funds and awareness about mental health, a subject that I hold dearly, but it’s really just a big marketing ploy by Bell. If they were really interested about mental health first, the hashtag would be simply #LetsTalk and not #BellLetsTalk. The donation wouldn’t be tied to Bell cell phone usage and cheap Twitter advertising either.

That being said, we now turn to Chitraparna Sinha who reminds us why we shouldn’t decry brands on social media either. You could get sued for large sums of money by these different companies and your slandering of their products could come to hurt you now and into the long term. I understand that brands need to protect their respective images, but at the same time, I don’t think that the voice of the consumer should be silenced either.

Next, we have Scott Young who reminds us that not all growth is the same. In general, there are actually two types of growth. There is logarithmic growth where you get a lot of progress in the beginning, but it becomes increasingly difficult as you move along. This would be the case with professional sports. Then, there is exponential growth where it is more difficult in the beginning, but the growth builds upon itself in the long term. This would be the case with wealth accumulation.

Speaking of making money, how many of you want to make money working from home? Jeff Morin and his Daily Doodle address that very topic in his recent Homework comic. Back when we were in school, most of us dreaded getting homework and we couldn’t wait to grow up so we would never have to do it again. Why is it, then, that working from home as adults has become so popular? It isn’t for everyone, you know.

And finally, we have Jeffrey Trull who is going against the grain, listing twelve financial rules of thumb that you should ignore. Do you really need to have an emergency fund to cover six months of expenses? Should you pay off your smallest debt first? Is it really better to own your home rather than rent it? What about saving at least 10% of your income?