ThoughtSpurs

I don't revel in the misery of others. I watched the footage of Caroline Marcil on TV One's late night news broadcast. Caroline was asked to sing the national anthems at an exhibition game between the Canadian and U.S. national teams in Quebec City. Two lines into The Star Spangled Banner, Marcil appeared to forget the lyrics and left the ice briefly. When she returned with a lyric sheet in her hand, she slipped on the ice and fell hard. By then the crowd was booing loudly. Totally humiliated, she gave up on the performance. The game went ahead without the singing of anthems. I felt bad that we subject someone who obviously has talent to international humiliation by media. The sniggering of the show's minor talent hosts was worse than the item. I felt embarrassed for them. I fail to see how Kate Hawkesby's talent for reading from an autocue and being a fashion manque would ever work with The One & Only framework. Perhaps the Brazilian channel Globo have got it righ...

It has been a slow week for blog posts. I've been distracted with real world matters - moving house, school holidays. Going through my inbox this morning I found a regular mail that spots consumer trends. The latest issue talk about Generation C - consumers who want to have direct influence on what companies develop and produce for them. Access to media ranging from the ability to send stills and movies from a humble PXT phone to sophisticated movie making with digital video and PC based editing software gives anyone with access to quite low cost technology the ability to create and transmit ideas with no friction at all. The web gives us all an audience. Some of the most popular expressions of access and creativity have been where consumers create advertising for companies - such as the Converse movie gallery. The big question this raises is, what does the future hold for ad agency creatives when literally everyone and anyone has access to both the medium and the message? Brand ow...

As my personal relationship with my partner and lover came to its end over these last few weeks and months I have been contemplating the nature of relationships, intimacy and how we engage with the world. I've referred to Kevin Roberts Lovemarks in other posts and have expressed concern about the wholesale application of human characteristics onto products and services. I think we must take care not to make blithe assumptions about people and trivialise ideals that go beyond importance and extend into the essence of who we are. I worry about unhealthy ideas of 'love' projected onto brands in a needy, greedy way. My own thinking about the nature of brands as The One & Only, like all branding theories must, at some point consider the perceptual relationship with the product and the people who consume it. I believe that issues such as intimacy, as expressed in Lovemarks, don't properly address what intimacy is and its significance to us as humans. Intimacy begins with ...

This blogging business is fascinating. Actually, I'll qualify that, this whole internet business is fascinating. I was following some links from my blog to people who had left a message, and on from there to other connected sources, I made the mental leap between the trail we leave on the web via hyperlinks and the project to track the migration of humans across the planet using DNA. It's like a mirror image - the connection between the DNA project - looking for the origins of human beings and being able to follow chains of thought around the world. Kind of cool. Apparently we all came from Africa - and more recently than you'd think. National Geographic genographic project

The One & Only approach to brands and marketing is a humanisitic view, applied to both organsiations and individuals. At it's core lies the elimination of practices and expressions that do not fit or are not authentic to the entity. I read a sports story once (I can't remember where, who the protagonist was or the actual team involved - except that it was a famous American baseball coach and team - I'll do my best to be faithful, if not accurate); a new coach had been hired to work with a team that had been performing badly. The owner and had sunk millions into his team after making billions in some entrepreneurial venture; now he had the time and cash to indulge in his lifelong passion. It troubled him that the team was in such a slump. The first thing the new coach did was to interview all of his players. He paid particular attention to the pitchers. He believed pitchers won games. If batters couldn't hit the ball then they couldn't score home runs, let alone ...

Watching Nightline this evening I am left wondering about justice and activism. Farming couple successfully prosecuted for not moving stock to higher ground in the face of a bad weather report. All survived (just as they would, had nature been left to run its course) Meanwhile thousands of animals (cows, chickens, pigs) are butchered everyday to provide life threatening calories to people who don't need them. I love a great big juicy steak. My son and I have our 'steak out' on Wednesday evenings. I like mine medium rare. Recently I had a discussion with the marketing guy from SAFE , the animal rights activist. They wanted a campaign to promote the plight of battery chickens to the public. My suggestion was to promote a moderate view. Encourage consumers to simply eliminate one chicken meal every week. It's strange thing, but -in my observation - people are so used to seeing other PEOPLE eviscerated and dissected on CSI (the murder franchise: Las Vegas, Miami, and New Y...

Kevin Roberts calls brands Lovemarks and says that brands are dead. Lovemarks, it would seem, are the last word in branding. This has been bugging me for some time and, while I admire the way he has marshaled his resources to promote his brand, sorry Lovemark , I'm not convinced. I guess, in a way it would be like me coming home to my wife - if I had still had one - and saying "I'm not your husband any more I am your Lovinman," - and for good measure putting a trademark symbol on the end of it. Yes, I can be your Lovinman but I will also be your husband. Seems the two need not be mutually exclusive. Are Lovemarks anything more than a hi-jacking of the marketplace's attention? A re-branding of Saatchi & Saatchi? Something to be as carelessly applied as the received wisdom of the 1960's concept of The Single Minded Proposition. Make up your own mind: Order your copy of Lovemarks from Amazon My former partners at BrandWorld and I applied the strap line to o...

Mt Everest holds a special place in New Zealand 's consciousness. Ed Hillary climbed it with Tenzing Norgay and actually got to the summit and back in 1953. It may be that the English climber Mallory made it to the summit before the New Zealand beekeeper. But Mallory didn't make it home to tell the tale. Ed Hillary is widely regarded as a great New Zealander. One of the greatest. I agree, but not for the reasons most people do. Climbing Everest for the first time must have been challenging for him and I'm glad he 'knocked the bugger off' for himself - because 'conquering' a very small point at the top of the world seems to me to have very little real point or consequence other than as a personal challenge. Isn't it ironic that Hillary's real qualification as The One & Only is not for 'conquering' Everest and, literally, being on top of the world, but for his SERVICE to the community. He put aside the very ego that drove him to the summ...

Ok, so, a quiet night in, alone at home - for a change. I decided to have a Led Zep revival fiesta. On the weekend I hired film The Song Remains The Same - Tuesday now, been saving it. I wrote the other day about growing up with the music of the Clash. Well, Led Zep was probably more significant to me than all of the punk and post punk bands I enjoyed put together. I discovered the joy of headphones and stereophonic sound with Led Zep. Lying in bed at night with the lights off listening to the wailing guitar and sound of Robert Plant's voice oscillating from one side of my brain to the other. Now, I have to confess at this point that drugs never played a part in my enjoyment of the music. Not because I'm a stiff - (I don't care if you enjoy using drugs - it's entirely up to you), it’s just that I was never introduced to drugs. Never even held a lit cigarette, let alone tried to find a vein that hadn't collapsed. I've managed to live my adult life without anythi...

I read a little poem the other day - and while most poetry leaves me baffled I rather liked this one. "Come sit down beside me" I said to myself. And although it doesn't make sense, I held my own hand As a small sign of trust And together I sat on the fence. Michael Leunig - 'Sitting on the Fence' I return to the idea that: until we know ourselves and our own brand identity in rather more intimate ways than most people and organisations are currently comfortable with, then all we will be left with are projections of archetypes, cliches and rather pointless templates that fall, uncared for on deaf ears. If you are to be The One & Only then becoming comfortable with who you really, are is a significant challenge with implications throughout the marketing process from pricing to trade relationships? How can you charge a premium for your brand if your understanding of why it is worth more is faulty. How can you charge a premium if you do not have an utter and un...

I'm talking at a conference on integrative health on next month. I have been wary of the concept of integration in the context marketing communication since the early 1990s. It has always seemed to me that integration, when one person or organisation controls it, becomes a semantic exercise - a Trojan Horse for an agency that wants to control the client's budget. In my experience what is best for the client is less important than what is best for the customer. The motivation to 'integrate' has to be considered very carefully. Responsibility lies with the client - whether they are the patient of a medical centre or client of a multinational advertising agency. Something important has changed since 1994. Consumers have been given the most important tool in the history of economics. The commercial Internet made its impact felt in 1995. It has become a cliche but, since then, nothing has been the same. The web has refuted the economic principle that 'the consumer cannot...

"How we experience ouselves is reflected in the way we can experience other people: we cannot know other people better than we know our own selves; we cannot trust other people more than we trust our own selves. When we avoid knowing how we feel or what we think, we cannot learn to empathise with other people and take their feelings and thoughts seriously." Stephanie Dowrick - Intimacy and Solitude I have learned so much from Stephanie Dowrick. Her work as a psychotherapist and author has been profoundly important to me. I find her thinking refreshing. Her writing is clear and engaging. The two combined make a difference. There is something about market research, the opposite to Ms Dowrick's concept of humanity, that I find cold and disective. The only problem with dissection is that it is, usually, fatal or performed post mortem . There is plenty of evidence to suggest that marketing research is an utter waste of time. You can ask consumers in a focus group what their ...

Because New Zealand (and I use the term loosely) has a fascination with everything Scandanavian See my earlier story I thought I'd paste in some news that may have slipped under your radar. As of 1 January 2004 the new state owned company: Innovation Norway has replaced the following four organisations: The Norwegian Trade Council, The Norwegian Industrial and Regional Development Fund, The Norwegian Tourist Board and The Government Consultative Office for Inventors. Innovation Norway promotes nationwide industrial development profitable to both the business economy and Norway´s national economy, and helps release the potential of different districts and regions by contributing towards innovation, internationalisation and promotion. This is a footnote to the home page of the Innotown 05 Conference to be held in the picturesque Norwegian village of Ålesund on the coast, 45 minutes north-west of the capital Oslo (as the Valkyrie fly). Apparently Ålesund is an Art Nouveau treasure,...

There is a line in the Wild One when Marlon Brando's character is asked "What are you rebelling against Johnny?" With a dismissive curl of his lip Brando/Johnny sneers: "Waddya got?" That's the famous line. The one I prefer is when one of the rebel biker gang asks a local in the bar: "What do you hicks do around here for kicks?" "Oh,…The roses grow. People get married. Crazy as anyplace else. " Crazy as anyplace else. Now there's the rub. Often I meet with clients who agree with everything I say about being authentic; being The One & Only™. They nod and agree. "Yup, that's what we're all about. We're The One & Only™ alright. That's us…yessiree Bob" Then they tell me what they are doing to promote themselves to make the most of their distinctive qualities. "Well, we kind of match our competition because that's how things are done in this category." Lockstep. It is then I realise that o...

Sometimes I am just appalled by the expectations of my clients. It's not that they want too much. It is that they want too little. The following is based on a real converstation with a client. I have pixellated his face to preserve his privacy. "What about Big Hairy Audacious Goals" I flip in to the conversation, casually - as if to suggest some collegial affinity with Jim Collins (academic and author of Built to Last ), "You know - what's your BHAG". "What, like that book by Roald Dahl?" "No, you're thinking about the BFG. …BHAG - Big Hairy Audacious Goals." He looks back at me. Actually he looks over my shoulder, avoiding eye contact, as if to see whether my mind, which I have clearly lost, is running naked out towards the carpark. He fidgets nervously. "Look, I can't handle acronyms. If your going to use consultant-speak then I prefer metaphors, OK, …do this one thing for me and I'll be happy." "What, like ...

I heard today that my friend Paul Jeffreys, better known to some in the advertising community as Squeeze, passed away this morning. Paul and I were in business together in the 1990's. Our company was MacGregor Jeffreys and Co, Saatchi & Saatchi lured Paul away. I resented that. I had high hopes for our little business and we were starting to get traction. Paul was great company, we both loved music, him more than me. We worked with music industry clients ranging from the Opera Company, Polygram, Naxos and The Record Industry Association of New Zealand - nearly all of whom Paul brought on board. It was a laugh while it lasted. I had so much fun. Paul was unique. He could talk backwards (I'm sure he wouldn't mind me telling you that - he was quite pleased his talent - learned at Stowe, his boarding school). He had the most prodigious memory of anyone I have ever met. We would practice submissions to clients and Paul would deliver the entire pitch, word perfect. We did t...