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.