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.