Branding wins on Celebrity Apprentice: PR lessons learned

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Donald Trump fired Gold-medal Olympic figure skater, Scott Hamilton, in episode 2 of The Celebrity Apprentice 2. The very obvious branding disaster which caused the men's team to lose was the exclusive idea of project manager, Scott Hamilton and The Donald had no choice. Here's how it happened.

The task was for each team to create a comic-strip character-super hero to represent the signature of Zappos.com -- exceptional customer service. The winning team would be decided by Zappos.com CEO, Tony Hsieh and the winning project manager would receive $20,000 for their charity.   

Khloe Kardashian, reality TV star and retailer, led the ladies team. Although they were troubled in the planning with bossy Annie Duke and idea-grabbing Melissa Rivers and even though they had a poor presentation by a stumbling Claudia Jordan -- the team understood the importance and uniqueness of the Z in the Zappos brand. They called their super hero Mizz Z with a Z in the center of the costume and she carried an oversized thunder-like Z in her hand for power. 

Scott Hamilton was unable to get his team focused and as a result they were unprepared with ideas for the comic-book reading focus-group. In what could have been the beginning of a great concept -- it was too late to evolve so Scott Hamilton's theme of everything, everywhere, everytime and naming the comic superhero E was a non-sequitor in promoting the Zappos brand. Not even Tom Green's smooth presentation could save it.

Our PR lesson from this episode is embarrassingly obvious. If your company name is blessed with an unusual letter like Z and an usual word like Zappos -- all of your promotions should follow.  Scott Hamilton's decision to create a Zapppos character that had nothing to do with the Zappos company name was a failure from the start. He would have been better off with Zeverywhere, Zeverytime, Zeverything -- that had the chance of being Zwonderful! 

Read updates and view slide shows from preview column and review of episode 1.

Remember Kwame Jackson, finalist for The Apprentice season 1?  Find out more here.