Forcing Ourselves To Slow Down

We all talk a good game about slowing down sometimes… taking the time to better examine what’s around us. For those of us in communications it’s often something we want our audience to do – to take the time to consider what we have to offer or to better consider what we are trying to communicate.    
            
Heiner Goebbels ‘Stifter’s Dinge’, now running at the P3 industrial space in London achieves what many crave – and perhaps gives some clues for communicators.

 

It’s an opportunity to meet the futures of music, theatre, performance and art installation, courtesy of Artangel (http://www.artangel.org.uk/). It’s a spellbinding blend of word, music and vision featuring five electronically programmed pianos and an extraordinary variety of digitally actuated sounds – from huge plastic pipes to plant containers and a supermarket bag. The natural world is explored – a forest of ice, rain on pools, the fizzing of life beneath the water’s surface.

 

It’s a triumph of the imagination and a must see for anyone fascinated by how experiential boundaries can be stretched. Described as a performance without performers by Goebbels, the pianos do make a gesture of appreciation to the audience as the piece ends.

 

Unmissable – and vividly memorable. ABD

Is There A New Bond Film?

CRICKET went to see the new Bond film ‘Skyfall’ last week. The cinema was packed… and the one we visited had been pretty solidly booked from opening night the previous weekend. Little wonder when you consider the omnipresence of advertising and publicity for the film. It seems like every newspaper has been reviewing, running Bond features and competitions; that every TV and radio talk show has interviewed the stars; and Bond specials are on every satellite and terrestrial channel. We’ve mocked up the Angling Times cover but we’re sure there were editorial meetings at both Angling Times and Crochet Monthly where supporting the movie with a feature was discussed…

So why have the media got behind this particular Bond film so wholeheartedly and is there such a thing as too much publicity? Does such an onslaught start to breed some sort of resentment amongst the public?

The answer to the first question is probably money and momentum. A new Bond in a Jubilympic year meant that the publicity machine started playing in earnest almost a year ago – and we reckon that much of that was telling trade partners that this would be big. And once that machine started everyone wanted a piece of the expected financial bonanza. So a clever bit of B2B strategy ahead of the B2C.

As to whether they over played their hand from a consumer perspective… well the numbers at the box office would probably suggest not. Skyfall had made £37.2m in the UK in its first seven days – to overtake previous record holder, the last instalment of the Harry Potter series. Skyfall is already 2012's third highest grossing movie and may now be on course to beat Avatar’s £93m for the highest-grossing film in UK cinemas of all time.

So a good UK result. But it was interesting that in talking last week to a Shanghai based client that he had seen very little publicity – strange for a film where one of the main action sequences is set in Shanghai, and a sequence that makes the city look pretty amazing. Perhaps Bond is after all an acquired taste. JS

When does being Customer Centric become digital stalking?

We are big buyers of music at CRICKET. We like independent record shops though when we’re busy Amazon becomes the default supplier. Yesterday the latest CD from Neil Young & Crazy Horse was released – a minority taste perhaps but each to their own. We also like a bit of analogue in our digital world, so late last night I re-visited Amazon to see when the limited edition triple vinyl edition was being released.

 

First thing this morning I followed a colleague’s link to the excellent Pursuitist website and a feature on the late Steve Jobs luxury yacht. I then noticed a bizarre coincidence - the pop up ad from Amazon was recommending the very same vinyl edition of the Neil Young album I’d looked at, but not bought, last night. Obviously this was no co-incidence – a minority vinyl edition from a minority musician that happened to be the last thing I looked at around 11pm on my iPad in the comfort of my home was now being promoted to me on a website I only visit in the office.

 

Clearly the Amazon cookies were busy through the night linking themselves not just to my private home computer but also to my office account… from where I order most Amazon things.

 

Dead Clever? Yes.

 

Customer centric? Maybe.

 

Smart business? No.

 

I don’t think I want to do business anymore with a retailer who is digitally stalking me. Without being over dramatic it feels like an invasion of privacy. When I buy a CD from the excellent bricks and mortar retailer Fopp I don’t come home to find an assistant hanging around outside my house with an armful of CD’s I might like. Just because digital technology enables Amazon to do the equivalent cheaply doesn’t mean it should do it.

 

We’ve talked often in these pages about the importance of managing every aspect of brand behaviour to match a company’s vision and values.

 

Amazon states: ‘Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric company’. Making sure I’m only ever a click away from buying from Amazon may make good business sense but I’m not sure if it’s what we want.

 

When Jeff Bezos created Amazon, he said ‘If you make customers unhappy on the internet they can tell 6,000 friends’. I think they may be doing just the sort of thing that turns Brand Champions into Brand Terrorists. JS

The Rhythm of the Brand

John Lennon, in reply to a question about whether Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world, answered ironically that ‘he wasn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles’. Ringo described himself as "your basic offbeat drummer with funny fills". He was much more than that though, for all the lauded creativity of Lennon and McCartney, Ringo was the pulse, the signature feel of the band.

Charlie Watts, the drummer of that other 60s popular beat combo, the Rolling Stones, is at 71 about to go on the road again. For all the pomp of Jagger and the legendary antics of Keith Richard, Watts, like Ringo is more than the rhythmic timekeeper. He gives The Stones the way they walk musically.

Tickets for two 50^th Anniversary concerts by The Rolling Stones went on sale today. One ticket up in the gods of the 02, for which you’d probably need climbing gear to get to as well as oxygen, will set you back just £460. Something slightly closer to the action approaching £2000.

 A few years back bands rarely made any money out of live performances – these served only to raise profile and drive sales. Now, even at more normal prices, revenues from live performance are often the primary income source for most bands because they no longer make enough money out of selling CDs, vinyl or even legal downloads.

In another part of the media/entertainment forest there was a story this week that The Guardian is considering abandoning the printed paper entirely and going ‘digital only’.

Why would they seriously even consider doing that?

The printed page is the drumbeat for any newspaper. The feature columnists and the by-line staff writers may be the Jaggers of the brand but how their work looks on the page, how it balances pictures and words, how the paper is laid out gives the newspaper its identity – its rhythm and unique signature.

Revenue from the printed paper is undoubtedly less than it was a decade ago but it’s still measured in pounds as opposed to the pence of their offline income. If any of the newspapers manage to invert that ratio and genuinely make money from their digital presence – and it’s a big, unproven if – abandoning their signature rhythm will probably be a great mistake. News vendors with only a digital face - like The Huffington Post - still mimic their printed paper cousins in presentation.

For any brand the need for constant vigilance over what keeps the brand DNA alive is paramount. What may be today’s revenue driver may not be tomorrow’s. What makes the business relevant will almost certainly need to change over time: but what keeps it differentiated will the constant drumbeat of brand. JS

Apple Designers: the new royalty?

 

When a team of senior US based Apple designers attend a conference in Europe later this year they will be following the Apple travel code. This means that no more than two of them may travel on the same aircraft and they will all stay in different hotels. Travel arrangements like this were once the stuff of royalty, but given the recent court decision in favour of Apple over Samsung, Apple designers are clearly the new royalty – at least in Cupertino.

 

 

The court decision also illustrated that patent law is not just about technology or what’s inside a product anymore. Three of the six patents that a jury found Samsung had violated were not about how the iPhone works but covered the way it looks.

 

These days virtually any technology or service advantage can be copied, cloned or re-invented in double quick time. Therefore, brand advantage has to include the design component - the way the product, technology or service is delivered. Brands need be clear about the way this facet of the brand is articulated and mobilised so that it is built in and delivered in every product and at every contact point. JS

Overheard Not Over-Hyped

 

We’ve recently been staring out of CRICKET’s office windows at a couple of rare sights.

The first is of a New Oxford Street where the normal car park of stationary buses is a fast flowing river of big reds  – a genuine success for 2012 Games©®™ and Transport for London’s pre-Olympic strategy.

The second extraordinary view is a heavyweight bus advertising campaign where the majority of the ads are in Chinese. The few that are in English give little clue to as to the advertiser’s brand or product.

It transpires that the advertiser is Yili – a leading Chinese dairy products brand – and sponsor of the Chinese sports delegation here in London. Yili products are not in distribution in the UK so even if the delegation are spurred into action they’ll have to wait until they return home with their medals to stock up on their favourite milk, yoghurt and cheese.

It appears that the campaign is designed to be overheard by the China based target audience. The logic is that by seeing a domestic Chinese dairy brand advertising in the very same West that gives them LVMH, Gucci and Range Rover imbues that brand with coveted Western quality, style and credibility.

CRICKET have always been fans of overheard brand communication – allowing the target audience to discover the message rather than having to constantly bat it away. Exactly how the brand mobilises the campaign within China would be interesting to understand… is the Chinese Gary Lineker standing alongside bus lanes delivering his update on the latest Chinese medal winner?

Either way it’s an interesting strategy for a country not yet known for creativity in brand communications. JS



 

After The God Particle, has the meaning of Britishness finally been discovered?

So, has Danny Boyle found the God Particle of Britishness? Will brands who want to hitch their wagon to Britishness now know what it looks like?

Over the years CRICKET has been involved in a number of ‘Britishness’ projects. We’ve attended research debriefs of widely different calibre on the nature of being British; debated what is and is not relevant for branding purposes, and offered our own – and we believe useful definition. Britishness is not simple up close, and too simple from a distance. It’s a hazardous territory for a brand or a film director to negotiate.

Phrases like Cool Britannia have described moments in time but never captured or represented the whole story. This is because, as the Opening Ceremony illustrated, the narrative of Britishness is rich, long and complex – a pageant hard for international audiences to comprehend.

The Opening Ceremony was a brilliant piece of theatre – like Boris I found myself wiping more than the occasional tear from my cynical eye. It explained cleverly who we are, how we are, what we do, where we’re from.

But sadly it chose not to look to the future – evidenced by a lonely Professor Tim Berners Lee left looking like a prophet in the wilderness. If the Games©®™ had been in the USA, would Bill Gates have been made to stand there holding a copy of ‘Windows for Dummies’? Can you imagine Steve Jobs revealed from beneath a Cupertino middle income bungalow? He’d have wanted visuals of wonder to celebrate his breakthrough vision. But then that’s the British eh? Proud of the smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution (terrific coup de theatre), but hiding our current inventive light firmly under bushels of old corn and Mr. Bean.

Maybe Danny Boyle is saving Britain’s vision of the future for the closing ceremony. But whatever happens, marketeers have to future Britishness if it is ever going to be a pillar of global consumer aspiration for our brands. JS

David Puttnam the British film producer (Chariots of Fire etc), once tutored a young director with the wise words ‘Just because modern technology allows you to morph a cat into a horse doesn’t mean that you should do it’. He was, I recall, suggesting the primacy of relevant storytelling, narrative and character development as engagement devices much more powerful than using the latest special effects for the sake of special effects.

The same could be said of the advent of technology, social media, geo-tagging and the ‘always on’ consumer leads us to believe that our target customers want to engage with us in an intensive, heavyweight way every time they wave at us. Just because we have the opportunity to engage interactively doesn’t mean we should take it for granted.

More and more marketeers are talking about recognising and enabling ‘consumer collaborators’. We have a suspicion that many consumers are already pretty tired at having to shoulder evermore burden in their innocent quest for knowledge, information or even a price. We know that many resent having to leap through a number of on-line sign-up hoops to get a train-time or fare from an airline. In many cases the reward does not outweigh the effort required.

Brand and consumer collaboration now seems to be a one-way street – often in favour of the brand.

Rather than getting all strung up with ‘how can we better reward’ consumers with burdensome layers of interaction perhaps we could do them a favour?

Genuinely make interaction easy.

Recognise that they may just want a telephone number and not ‘an experience’.

Work harder at saying less and meaning more.

Make sure that we always work harder than they have to.

Finally, as a creative director once reminded the industry at large “we must not go about like multimedia lager louts or corporate graffiti artists. Just because there is a bare wall don’t slap a poster there. Just because there is a silence, resist the temptation to fill it with a message” In today’s communicopia we may want to add “…and just because we have the capability to engage interactively respect the fact that the consumer may just want to have a quiet look at you”. JS

CRICKET builds moving image team



Dominic Powers and Helen Persighetti


Two new team members have joined CRICKET to expand the company’s offer in brand-led moving image and digital content.

Helen Persighetti is appointed Senior Producer, having worked with clients Rolls-Royce, the John Lewis Partnership and London 2012. Production Assistant, Dominic Powers, arrives from Another Film Company where he worked on commercials for a wide variety of brands including BBC, Kia, Visit England, COI and Mars.

Helen and Dominic will continue to develop CRICKET’s innovative seminars developed to help companies address the changing role of moving image for internal and external communications.

More info from Louise Barfield mailto:louise@cricket-ltd.co.uk

Fundamental Flaw?

One of CRICKET’s favourite magazines The Word, announced this morning that next month will be its 114^th and final issue.

It’s tough in the publishing world at the moment – in truth it’s been especially tough for the last decade – but we wondered why this magazine couldn’t make when it seemed to get so many things right…

The magazine covers contemporary music, books, film, DVD and popular culture and is primarily targeted at 35+ AB males – a lucrative and traditionally difficult audience to reach and one that is attractive to advertisers.

It has a strong subscription base with big incentives for subscribers.

Every edition came with a free CD of new music.

The publisher and editorial director is a big blogger and tweeter and leads a relatively large and active Twitter community.

There is an engaging weekly podcast – a free 15 minute podcast sampler is available for free on iTunes. If you wanted the full, unexpurgated, album-length deal you have to subscribe to the magazine.

There is an excellent website, effectively an open blog, which is to the readers their on-line community. A ridiculously vibrant and active group of regular and ad hoc contributors on all things music and popular arts associated.

The Word hosted music events on a pretty regular basis in a London music pub and held reader events every few months in venues both in London and well beyond the M25.

It has been the media sponsor of the Latitude Festival, one of the major UK music and arts festivals, for the past few years.

The Word was well regarded in the publishing industry - voted UK 'Music Magazine Of The Year' in 2007 and 2008 and Mark Ellen, the magazine’s editor was this year voted Editors' Editor of the Year by the BSME.

So with lots of things right, what went wrong?

The publisher cites “dramatic changes in the media and the music business…plus the general economic climate…that have made it more difficult for a small independent magazine to survive and provide its staff with a living".

The most recent ABC figures for The Word, covering the last six months of 2010, showed that the magazine's circulation dropped 5.7% year on year to 25,048.

So perhaps it was a more fundamental issue – there may have been a gap in the market but there was not a big enough market in that gap.

Sad news for an intelligent, well crafted magazine who understood and catered for its target audience.

Fast and Furious - technology and brands

In the latest edition of the CRICKET Commentator, we've been looking at how premium brands in high-tech markets compete - when premium price no longer equates to leading edge. In personal and home technology, where consumers are constantly on the look-out for the latest innovation, where does this leave the concept of brand loyalty?  Or, as James Dyson recently commented, ultimately is it the ingenuity and IP of product design that wins hands down?

One Great Leap for Fankind

Every now and then brand marketers look to other creative industries for inspiration.

As music downloads in the UK exceed sales of physical product, what lessons can we learn from the music business - the creative industry under more pressure than most? Recognising that Simon Cowell is not the music industry what have the creatives – the musicians - done themselves, to reshape the way the industry traditionally markets its product?

Let’s take three strong minded highly creative artists – first the band still regarded as one of the most interesting and innovative, Radiohead, hyper prolific American alt country bad boy Ryan Adams and indie singer-songwriter trio Ben Folds Five - and see what bright ideas we could learn from.

When Radiohead self-published their In Rainbows album they asked fans to pay whatever they thought it was worth to download. While some people inevitably downloaded it for 1p it’s reported that the ‘average’ price volunteered for the download was £4. Whatever the real price paid what did subsequently happen was a sell-out of a full price limited edition CD and a bunch of fans applauding the bands creativity and trust in its audience.

Ryan Adams did a deal with his record company that allowed him to publish the songs from what would become his Love Is Hell album as they were being written. They came by way of downloads and a couple of 4 song EP’s over the course of a year. He conducted a dialogue with his fans on his website, scrapped songs that didn’t work well on the road and reworked material that was liked. The majority of fans bought material three or four times over as it was refined and re-released – happy to be part of the artistic process.

Ben Folds is currently trying the Pledgemusic platform Ben Folds Five – a process that makes it easy to allow fans to directly participate in a release and to buy and hear that music before anyone else. The platform challenges artists to offer their dedicated fans other kinds of creative incentives and exclusive items in return for their support. Similar to the Ryan Adams drip release technique it engages fans way up front – not via the traditional tease but inviting them to participate and be involved as they maintain their engagement with the band.

All brands strive to engage and galvanise their most loyal customers - and the music industry is no different. These musicians are employing personalisation to both engage and fundamentally generate additional revenue from a broken business and distribution model. While the majority of any audience may be happy with the vanilla, off-the-shelf product is there a proto fan audience within your customer base prepared to pay a premium for product variants that recognise loyalty and their desire for personalisation?  

Smells like tan spirit

As retailers and shoppers grow tired of the Pop-Up concept, it’s heartening to see the rise of the ‘curated space’ as a way of allowing people to soak up the stories of luxury brands,  OMEGA’s new Olympic ‘House’ being  a recent example.

In London this month, Hermès has installed a multi-sensory exhibition that delivers a beautifully managed tour of the brand's quirky history and 'no stone unturned' search for perfection.

As Emily Bell said recently in Pomp magazine, as the brand celebrates its 175^th anniversary, “Hermès is officially old”.

However, as we all know, age is no barrier to style. Hermès ‘ Forever Leather provides the chance to experience both the touchy-feely textures and craft of the brand (including chatting to Nadja, one of Hermès artisans, in person) to interactive signatory orange boxes.

Walking through each room, visitors are hit by waves of sensory effects – the aroma of the leather, the shock of the white sand in the equestrian section – in a way that is still simple and somehow avoids being ostentatious.

Forever Leather is at 6 Burlington Gardens, London until 27^th May.

Instagram $1bn, Kodak $??

It’s been an interesting few months in the world of photographic brands. Instagram has just been valued at $1billion while Eastman Kodak is facing bankruptcy.

Ironically for Kodak, photography in our hugely over-photographed society is on the up and not just through smart phones. On a recent trip to the British Museum CRICKET  lost count of the number of the new £500+ small format mirror-less cameras being toted around.

With the invention of roll film and the slogan ‘You press the button, we do the rest’, George Eastman made photography easy and widely accessible to the world.

 

In their 124 year history, the company and the brand grew to global domination, with the release of millions of cameras and accessories, photographic paper, ink, processing machines - bringing the world of memories to life with ‘Kodak moments’.

The once huge Eastman Kodak company is now worth a mere £75,996,383, 12 times less than Instagram and falling.


So what happened to the photo giant? With their vision to make photography simpler, more enjoyable, more accessible and ‘as convenient as the pencil’ and with an abundance of products to support it inside and outside the digital space, why did Kodak not continue to expand and change the way they brought photography to the world? The complete answer is understandably complex. From a brand perspective they were hampered by a strategy that leveraged their considerable patent legacy yet failed to truly unlock the power and potential of their biggest legacy of all – the Kodak brand. Strategically, they appeared blind to the significance of digital imaging at its outset, and they remained blinkered to the potential for social digital media.

It’s fascinating that a two year old app can effectively own the world’s modern take on photography. Integrated with the smartphone and the internet, and intuitively understanding how the world now shares, accesses, interprets and interacts with information, the founders of Instagram saw the future of personal and social photography and made their mark. Ironically, with a square Kodak 120 and Polaroid format!

There was no reason why Kodak couldn’t have been the logical provider of the Instagram experience – in fact it would have been a natural step for the owner of ‘moments’.

We wonder how long it will be before a generation of new consumers will ask – ‘What or who was a Kodak?’ – not knowing that the square shape was the very format of both Kodak 120 film and Polaroid SX70. Both pioneering photographic brands without which Instagram wouldn’t exist!

Listen up

Is listening becoming a lost art? Do we need to sit back, speak less and listen more? ‘It doesn’t cost anything to listen,’ says Richard Branson, suggesting executives get out there and really listen to what customers have to say. As billions of conversations take place across social networks, how can businesses and brands visually listen to the important ones – and filter out the noise?

In the latest edition of CRICKET Commentator, we’ve been looking at Active Listening – why it’s important for the individual and how it enables brands to build belonging and create advantage.

If you'd like to receive the latest CRICKET Commentator, drop a line to louise@cricket-ltd.com or click here. 



Stamp of Disapproval




Royal Mail announces 30% price increase

So DHL and the like charge about £2.50 to deliver an envelope Next Day to the other side of the country.

Imagine if a salesperson made the following pitch… ‘To get a letter next day to the other side of the country just drop it in one of our conveniently located drop boxes and a member of our trained team will deliver it by hand the next day to anywhere in the country’. How much? “60p a letter – regardless of whether it’s next door, the next town or 500 miles away.”

If this offer was from a new carrier I reckon you’d be mightily impressed – and probably wondering how they can do it for so little?

If the provider was the Royal Mail and the price of the service represents a 30% increase on what you are paying today, how do you feel?

In a Daily Telegraph poll yesterday 50% of respondents didn’t think the Royal Mail should be able to set their own prices due to their universal service obligation. In fact the overall mood was somewhere between outrage and an inevitable sense of betrayal.

So what could the Royal Mail do to stop the outrage of the British public?

It seems to us that the company has failed to successfully communicate what the Royal Mail brand is all about. Always resisting pouring the ‘gin’ of a private company into the ‘mother’s milk’ of the old state run institution that we all grew up with.

But branding, if it’s about nothing else, is about clarity.

This is who we are. This is what we do. This is why we do it. These are the values that make us different. Judge us – our products, services and pricing against these.

Huff and Puff

The new Guardian long form TV commercial
"Three Little Pigs" is currently running on Channel 4 … and on YouTube, the Guardian website, in cinemas and no doubt on a smartphone near you. It’s a worthy successor to "Points of View", the last campaign they ran way back in the late 1980s, and as with PoV it is an intelligent and ambitious piece of communication.

A couple of commentators have wondered what is its purpose, why the ad doesn’t have the obvious call to action that most media commercials have – “buy it tomorrow”, “collect the vouchers”, “special edition” etc. Clearly this is because it’s a brand ad – it’s reminding existing buyers why they buy the paper and non-readers why they should consider buying it.

In talking to what the publisher calls the paper’s operating system "open journalism", it sketches out a much bigger point – not just the style of journalism it holds dear but a new agenda of interaction with readers, other journalists, bloggers, tweeters. The idea that it doesn’t just want to passively engage you as a reader but to actively engage and involve you in what is happening in the world. Suggesting that you have a role to play – perhaps even a responsibility to engage and have your say.

What surprises us most is the irony of using that most traditional of media – the TV commercial – to kick off the debate that news is different in the age of social media.

The Geneva Jaguar Land Rover Brand Briefing

Earlier this month, 

CRICKET was tasked with communicating to the global media the ambition of the Jaguar Land Rover brands - visually and experientially - for a pre auto show Media Brand Briefing

In the grounds of the historic Chateau du Parc des Eaux-Vives, CRICKET designed and constructed a 4,200 square feet Jaguar Land Rover structured environment. The hour long presentation, using multi-screen technology, communicated the JLR business, the global infrastructure and ended with detailed insight into the two iconic brands of Jaguar and Land Rover by the respective Global Brand Directors. The presentations were a combination of video, complex graphics and stunning imagery to bring the key messages to life.

The evening, attended by 170 global media and 8 of the JLR board of directors, ended with dinner in the Chateau, which was the original venue for the world premiere of the iconic E-type Jaguar in 1962. 

The Geneva press party

A post Geneva press day party was held at The Little Buddha Bar in downtown Geneva, where CRICKET transformed the venue, with live music and a DJ within a world theme, for informal conversations between journalists and JLR executives.

Theatre of Brand

Online, on-street, or in-mall, retail is facing tough challenges. Brands have to deliver on three dimensions of the retail experience - Choice, Behaviour and Content - to win customer allegiance.  In this month's CRICKET Commentator, our regular thought piece, we've been exploring how the landscape has changed. We believe brands have to be multisensory, not just multichannel, to gain ground with consumers and staff - as well as having a clear idea of what they stand for and who they want to talk to. To read the full Commentator piece, please email louise@cricket-ltd.com and click here.

Journey of Discovery

CRICKET's Kellie & Paul at the RGS

To celebrate the 1 millionth Land Rover Discovery, CRICKET were commissioned to transform the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington into an informal celebration dinner attended by the ‘who’s who’ of adventurers and adventurous people, from Sir Ranulph Fiennes, to Bear Grylls and Zara Phillips to Donald McIntyre. The evening (video) was also a send-off dinner for the Discovery trek which is a 10,000 Km trek to Beijing, with the ambition of raising 1 million pounds for the International Federation of Red Cross. CRICKET’s role was to transform the RGS, including displaying and lighting the iconic vehicles, with key after dinner presentations from the Land Rover Global Brand Extension Director, Mark Cameron, and Bear Grylls.For donations see http://www.ammado.com/community/125893. 



Great channel, great initiative

The launch by the Royal Institution of  a dedicated RI channel is a fantastic alternative to mainstream content and TV - a generous, altruistic and innovative way of sharing ideas and speeches from the archives.  http://richannel.org/

Gym brand fails Twitter fitness test

For those of us who have been following the recent ‘LA Fitness meets Twitter saga'* some thoughts…

*For those unaware of what happened…Young couple from Billericay – he recently made redundant, she very pregnant - move flat to save their precious remaining pounds and try to cancel their expensive, now unnecessary and geographically challenging  gym membership. LA Fitness want to hold them to the £700 cancellation period. Couple write to Guardian Consumer Champions who plea on their behalf. LA Fitness stick to guns and do their level best to look like an unpleasant bunch of uncompassionate money grabbers. Caitlin Moran (Times journalist with big Twitter following) retweets an early heads up to the plight of the couple. Within a couple of hours the story is ‘trending’ – people offering to pay the money for the couple to shame LA Fitness, members proposing that everyone cancels their membership and asks LA Fitness to sue them. The company wake up – probably from the smell of abuse slowly rising up their track suited thighs...

From the outset we’d have thought any business that receives a consumer complaint via a national media consumer champion would have a standing instruction to escalate to the CEOs desk and sort within 36 hours. As painful as ‘giving in’ may be it has got to be the default response… along with, in this case, a mea culpe grovelling backdown, a bunch of flowers to mum-to-be and an offer for the mother to attend a course of ‘get your tummy back’ classes.

Instead, after weeks of ‘la la can’t hear you’ and other to-ing and fro-ing, LA Fitness issue a mealy mouthed ‘things have changed… we weren’t really wrong… just misunderstood the facts…’ statement. At that point the Tweets got more vindictive ‘Cancel you membership, pass it on. Let’s make them lose thousands!’

Having a standing set of instructions in the ‘Crisis Management’ booklet is obviously critical.

However from a brand reputation perspective those instructions/protocol have to be driven by the brand – its values, behaviours and guidelines for customer facing employees.

Having a Twitter account and social media campaign/comms team is not enough – you have to have clear brand values and policies that drive content and approach

Brand is not something that only the marketing types do – it’s a whole business responsibility. Brand informs and drives the human ‘voice’ of the business. It is aligned to a wider set of principles, led by an understanding of what the organisation stands for, expressed through brand (behaviours, values, promise).

Maybe this is just a storm in a teacup for LA Fitness – I’d only hope that if it does blow through that they use the time to pull out their ‘brand stuff’ and make sure everyone knows how to use it as part of the way ‘we do things round here’.And it’s here that it gets interesting for those of us in the ’brand is your most valuable asset’ world.

Bald and Bold

The ‘Bald Barbie’ Facebook campaign demonstrates the pressure on corporate brands to respond before the challenge reaches a point of ultimatum and in a way that’s brand additive. In Mattel’s case, it’s also a test of its ‘family’ values and agility in social media. See the report in Marketing magazine here

Altered Image

Mercedes’ apology for the use of Che Guevara’s image to promote its new car sharing scheme was in response to an outcry from both communities and political figures.  It's also a classic case of not understanding the cultural sensitivities of the target audience; an arrogant use of an iconic image; and an inappropriate choice of brand ambassador....