I can be accused of trying to be commercial sometimes.

The importance of logo into today’s fashion is un! be! Lievable!

The ability of a successful company to add functionality to its product has long been upheld.

I’m sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn’t on our radar screen. We were just making great software.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

Every nation has to follow a certain policy: Commercial, trade, various other types of policies.

When it comes down to my brand, We the Best, we’re about the people and whoever is passionate and in love the way I’m in love when it comes down to the headphones I’m promoting.

It was always a plan that we were going to have a retail side with what were doing musically, like an Apple store or Nike Town. I wanted something where you can come get everything – ‚Marathon‘ or ‚All Money‘ or ‚Crenshaw‘ – and make it like an experience. Especially with what Crenshaw and Slauson meant to my story.

I would say raising capital is one of the weakest things for most entrepreneurs.

I’m a control freak. If you’re going to slap my name on something, I would like to control it.

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

Apple took the edge off the word ‚computer.‘

Every successful businessman will have experienced set-backs and failures – they’re lying if they say they haven’t. Virgin has had some tremendously successful businesses and some that have not quite worked out. Virgin Cola springs to mind – the product wasn’t distinct enough from Coca-Cola.

The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I’m making 22 minutes; I know there’s a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

Commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive, and impolitic.

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.

I built a company at the same time I built a career.

I don’t run restaurants that are out of control. We are about establishing phenomenal footholdings with talent.

All I can do is try to create my own brand and have people appreciate me for that.

I suppose Virgin is an unusual brand in that I suspect we’re the only ‚way of life‘ brand in the world. We’re one of maybe the top 30 best known brands in the world, yet if you look at the other 29, they all specialize in one area. Whether it’s Google, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, etc., they all generally specialize in one area.

You’ve gotta understand that with branding and the way things are promoted, in our day and age, your older movie stars are not reachable or accessible because they’re not a part of the whole social media world.

Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.

One of my mentors schooled me on branding before it was a cliche term in the game.

I see fighters make funny videos about me and stick them on Facebook and get 20 likes. When I make a video, I sell it to Fox and make seven figures. That’s the difference.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

I don’t think so, in that Virgin is already a global brand. Brands like Amazon have had to spend hundreds of millions of pounds you know, building their brands, whereas Virgin is already well-known around the world.

Be willing to use yourself to get out there and put the company on the market. If you have to make a fool of yourself, make a fool of yourself, but make sure that you end up on the front pages, not the back pages. In time, it’s possible that your company will stand out from the crowd, and you’ll be successful.

The state of the economy is not the issue when it comes to growing a business. The relevant questions are always: ‚What business are you in? Furthermore, is it adapting to the times?‘

Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business.

As I see it, fast food outfits have targeted small children with their advertising in a very effective way. You know, it’s clowns and kid’s toys and bright colors and things like that.

I spend just as much time on how people hear my music as I do the actual music, no matter how long it takes. I’m such a visual artist as well that it always goes hand-in-hand.

I believe that economics is based on scarcity of markets. And it’s possible to monetize your art without compromising the integrity of it for commerce.

I would never do a commercial if I thought it was offensive to anyone.

I feel like everything we do comes down to how it looks. Even no branding is branding. For example, you had no face or image to put to my music at first. That was branding.

Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.

To me, we’re marketing hope.

I remember auditioning for record labels and having them tell me, ‚Well, the country-radio demographic is the thirty-five-year-old female housewife. Give us a song that relates to the thirty-five-year-old female, and we’ll talk.‘

My task over the last two years hasn’t just been to stop the bleeding. My task has also been to try to figure out how do we address some of the structural problems in the economy that have prevented more Googles from being created.

But Apple really beats to a different drummer. I used to say that Apple should be the Sony of this business, but in reality, I think Apple should be the Apple of this business.

Many entrepreneurs do not realize that many of the problems their businesses face today began yesterday, long before there was a business.

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.

On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It’s very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.

I actually do think you’re seeing this trend towards organizations just caring more about their brand and engaging. And so I think Home Depot will want to humanize itself. I think that’s a lot of why companies are starting blogs, are just giving more insight into what’s going on with them.

When most people ask about a business growing, what they really mean is growing revenue, not just growing the number of people using a service. Traditional businesses would view people using your service that you don’t make money from as a cost.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

I was probably the first footballer ever to have a pop-star profile, and my agent was right when he said we could put my name on stair rods and sell them to people in bungalows.

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.

We were told our campaign wasn’t sufficiently slick. We regard that as a compliment.