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.