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.