"Be Different" works for consumer brands - it'll work for cities too

Aaron Renn comments:

In a much-discussed New York magazine essay, Oriana Schwindt dubbed this “the unbearable sameness of cities.” Traveling to the city nearest the geographic center of each state, she described how she constantly kept seeing the same Ikea lights in coffee shops she’d visit. “And it wasn’t just the coffee shops—bars, restaurants, even the architecture of all the new housing going up in these cities looked and felt eerily familiar. Every time I walked into one of these places, my body would give an involuntary shudder. I would read over my notes for a city I’d visited months prior and find that several of my observations could apply easily to the one I was currently in."

We all want to be Shoreditch or Brooklyn (or indeed a load of other successful places - it used to be Barcelona or Montpelier), to capture that hipster vibe that transformed these places from declining slums into funky suburbs. But we never ask about the fundamentals and we never set out to be different.

The fundamentals are about jobs, investment, levels of consumer disposable income. And if you're (like Shoreditch and Brooklyn) right next to a place - New York or the City of London - that hoses out that money, your chances of success are a lot higher than is the case for the place 250 miles from those centres.

And being different means just that - if you're Bradford you focus on your Pakistani heritage population and their culture, if you're Blackpool you funk up "kiss me quick". We don't do this because we think that these cultures (loud brash British Pakistani bling and working class holidays) are negative, that the people with money will reject them for the comfy edginess of hipsterish irony. The problem is that trying to be like everywhere else doesn't work.

One of the fundamental mantras of brand marketing is 'differentiation', making your brand stand alone, unique and distinct. It's odd that, when it comes to branding cities, we do the opposite focusing on sameness, on being like another place (but not really as good). But surely is "Be Different" works for consumer brands it'll work for cities too?

....

Can you salvage an unpopular brand (or "Maybe Bradford should Change its name?")

Polling company YouGov recently looked at how "well-liked" UK cities were, with the findings placing Bradford at the bottom on 23% and York at the top on 92%. Obviously, when local politicians in Bradford as asked their view the response is to attack the poll - "really annoying", "people haven't visited", "misleading" - rather than ask why it is that people have such a poor opinion of Bradford's brand. Nor does it help to say "Bradford is wonderful", babble on about "diversity" or list a load of attractions. We must shout louder is another favourite line, as if mere communications volume is sufficient to turn the UK's worst city brand into a winner.

All this raises an important question - can we turn round a really unpopular or damaged brand? There are always suggestions out there including:

Listen to what consumers are saying

Engage with what they say even if it hurts

Seek out the most negative and talk with them

Shooting the messenger - what my colleagues are doing by attacking YouGov's poll - merely reinforces the problem. We also seek out only those people who have positive things to say, surrounding ourselves with a protective bubble of that positivity. It feels good but gets nowhere near the job at hand of fixing the brand's problems. And, let's remember too, that brands are defined by the interaction between the consumer and the identity not just by the spin we create around that identity.

A more constructive response to YouGov's work would have been to go talk to them about the polling, perhaps even commission them to dig a little deeper into why people don't like Bradford (or taking on board that most won't have been here, don't like the idea of Bradford). Anecdotally, we all know that many residents in large parts of what makes up the Bradford district would really rather they weren't lumped in with that city. This is, after all, why we don't describe ourselves as a "city", choosing instead the less grand word "district" - the only UK city hiding its light under a bushel in this way. Most of us have witnessed (or even done it ourselves) people going through convoluted locational descriptions - "near Leeds", "Aire Valley", "just off the M62" and so forth - to avoid using the "B" word. I've a tendency to say "the next village to Haworth" as a short description of Cullingworth's place in the world.

What happens right now is a focus on what us marketers would call features, a sort of "hey look at all these things we've got, how can you not love us!" The problem is that - as the poll showed - people don't love us even though we've got City Park, The Alhambra, Science and Media Museum, and St George's Hall. Nor does the prospect of the Rugby League Museum, the refurbished Odeon and a new market add anything to this love. People's perception of a place are not a function of its features but reflect the interaction between those features (and others like idiot young men driving too fast) and the consumer.

I wrote recently, drawing on the work of American urbanist, Aaron Renn, about how Bradford needed an unique selling point suggesting that, for the old City, this USP is the Asian community - instead to trying to ape other cities through shiny regeneration projects (that mostly don't work) maybe we should set out our stall as the capital of Asian Britain. But to do this we would need to deal with the problem that half the district will hate this idea - they'd either have to lump it or else we'd need to find a parallel positioning that reflected these (in the main more successful) parts of the City.

The thing that connects Haworth, Queensbury, Bingley, Ilkley and villages like Cullingworth isn't that we're all in the Bradford "district" but that we're all in the South Pennines - Yorkshire's South Pennines. No-one owns that positioning and it allows us, instead of pretending that calling Haworth, Ilkley and Bingley 'Bradford' is any kind of help, to create an uniqueness for these places and it doesn't matter really if some of this leaks over into Calderdale or Skipton.

We have in 'Bradford' a broken brand that we've then dumped on a load of places that have so much to offer - Haworth, Ilkley, Saltaire - resulting in them losing impact because of the association with a city brand that is not liked. Given the realities - for all the "look at all the things we've got" rhetoric - it seems likely that association with Bradford will act only to harm those strong South Pennine brands. The options are to have two brands - "Bradford: Capital of Asian Britain" and "Yorkshire's South Pennines", to split the district into the City and the District, Bradford and South Pennine Yorkshire, or to focus on the positive and drop the name Bradford.

South Pennines* Metropolitan District Council anyone?

....

*Update: For those who think the South Pennines are in Derbyshire, here's a link to a funky map from Chris Sands. 

*And OS 021 South Pennines

...

Murder, starvation, poverty, autocracy...how did communism get to be cool?

It came to a head with an attractive young journalist proclaiming on morning TV: "I'm literally a communist, you idiot". For me this seemed little different from someone popping up and saying; "of course I'm a Fascist, twit face" or "absolutely, you numpty, I'm a Nazi". Yet unlike these latter statements, saying you're a communist doesn't get shock horror reactions, The Guardian won't headline its spluttering indignation at someone being a communist. Indeed the more likely reaction is a sort of "bless, young people care so much about the downtrodden - communism is wrong but their heart's in the right place".

Communism - even in places that really ought to know better like East Berlin - is cool and trendy. Communism is cool despite its track record of economic failure, suppression of democracy, state-sponsored murder, starvation and the incarceration of political opponents. The cruelty of Pol Pot's Cambodia, Mao's 'Cultural Revolution', Stalin's purges and Castro's gay correction camps is set aside because, y'know, communism is cool.

Why is this - seriously, why? Here's a few thoughts with my marketing hat on.

Communism is an ideological brand and people's attachment to it isn't based on much considered analysis but on the belief that (as my Dad said years ago) "socialism just means good". And if you don't believe me, here's a response to me on Twitter following my criticism of communism:

The communist manifesto like any seminal text is not to be taken so very literally but considered and applied to the current socioeconomic climate, taking or leaving as appropriate. This just seems like adult common sense to me.

It's like the Bishop of Durham explaining how, in a very real sense there is a god but he/she/it isn't quite how it says in the bible, that's allegory. So let's explore how communism got to move from being a 19th century piece of political philosophy to a seemingly faith-based creed (despite killing about 100 million people inbetween).

Communism's brand identity has a variety of elements - workers, the people, revolution, anti-establishment - that position it well for those looking to be politically contrary (a common trait in younger people). All of the factors in communism's brand identity are positive - other than the unfortunate fact of, when put into action, its tendency to make people poorer or at least those people it hasn't killed or exiled. But the identity is strong enough to resist these unfortunate historical issues. How come?

Communism's brand associations provide a justification for the "not true communism" response to any criticism citing the Soviet Union ("Stalin wasn't really a communist"), Castro ("Cuban totalitarianism was forced on it by US aggression") or Vietnam (US aggression again). These brand associations - what do you think of when someone says 'communism' - include:

Trendy university lecturers (I recall one lecturer's opening remarks to our 'Geography of South East Asia' module - "I'm a radical Marxist geographer")

Marx and Marxism - not The Communist Manifesto but the degree to which Marx is seen as significant in economics and (especially) sociology. Communism gets academic credibility to match lecturer trendiness

Communist iconography is appealing and rebellious - Che Guevara t-shirts, the hammer and sickle, the colour red.

WW2 - the Russians were our friends and allies (sort of) so communism isn't as bad as that other totalitarianism we don't talk about except when we want to criticise slightly orange US Presidents

All the bad stuff must have been a mistake ("not real communism") because Dr Steve Rogers* is way too trendy to do anything so bad as executing shopkeepers or forcing accounts clerks to work in market gardens. And anyway Marx says (insert trite quote cut and pasted from Good Quotes or Wikipedia). "Do you like my Che t-shirt - only £9.99 down the market?"

The communist brand also has what we can call width - if you thought communism was about economics or sociology think again. Those trendy lecturers crop up everywhere and communism (or "Marxism" but in branding terms there's little difference) has something rebellious - always "challenging orthodoxy" to the point where the challenge becomes the orthodoxy - to say: in the arts, in offshoots of sociology like gender studies and media studies, in literature, language studies and doubtless archaeology.

We can take a step back and observe that communism, from its inception in Marx and Engels' manifesto, has always been predicated on the idea of violent revolution - how else are you going to get hold of the property "for the people"? But this essential violence becomes cool because some of us (especially men) get quite turned on by political violence and the people advocating the violence are rebels, cool dudes fighting for a better world.

Communism's brand is cool because the idea of using violence to remove oppression is cool (watch Star Wars if you doubt this for a second) and the flaws - communism's track record of cruel, hateful oppression - is disregarded because the iconography, identity, story and associations allow for a myth rejecting its failures, most commonly because of the actions of communism's enemy rather than because of its inherent failings. Communism is cool because its brand values allow it to resist an honest assessment of what it has done and what it means.

...

Rents and the death of the high street

Aaron Renn reports on the arrival of a mustard shop in New York's Upper West Side:

Maille is a supermarket brand of dijon mustard. It’s a product of Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch food and consumer products giant. You may not know Unilever, but you know their brands, including Hellman’s, Dove, Lipton, and even Ben and Jerry’s.

This particular location provides mustard tastings, and sells dijon in a variety of flavors not typically available. I believe they also have some vinegars. I was once needed some dijon and purchased a jar of their regular flavor for $7 – which is $3 more it sells for at the grocery store a few blocks away. They apparently charge as much as $99 for a jar of black truffle mustard.

Shortly before this description Aaron had noted the departure of his local (Upper West Side) Starbucks following a rent hike to $140,555 per month. As he points out you've to sell a whole lot of coffee just to cover a $1.7m rent.

So why the mustard shop? And how is it that Unilever (fresh from scrapping with Tesco over Marmite) feel able to justify forking out something similar for a shop round the corner from that defunct Starbucks? The answer to this question is central to how we see tomorrow's high street. I've written before about the shop as part of a brand marketing strategy:

Just as Diageo wants high net worth customers in the Johnny Walker House, the future high street success wants high spending, high end customers - the every day buyer can shop from his computer and have it delivered or collect from the Post Office. In town retailing becomes an event, an orchestrated, animated marketing promotion. The customers walking into you shop are there because you've invited them - to a product launch, an anniversary, a preview. They're dressed up to party not slouching round the shops in jeans and an old t-shirt.

What Aaron Renn is saying, however, is that because the cost for the mustard shop rent is coming out of Unilever's marketing budget, it's a drop in the ocean. Moreover, that rent isn't set against sales (even though you can pay $99 for some truffle mushroom) but against the objectives set by the brand managers - measures of equity, voice and share are just as important as sales. After all the supermarket's more likely to buy the product (and maybe pay a little more for the product) if it's the mustard with the flash shop in the posh Upper West Side.

The effect of this is to push up rents and to push out actual retailers. With ever more sophisticated home or click-and-collect delivery systems the ability of real retailers to compete is diminished. The high street as we know it is already pretty ragged but what this tells us is that the future of town centres - even in wealthy places - is as a billboard rather than a shopping centre.

....

Is Labour a zombie brand?

You all remember Smash don't you? Without doubt one of the 1970s mega-brands. The agency getting this account with its huge ad budget and massive sales would throw one hell of a big party.

What do you mean you've never heard of it? It's still there in the shops. You can buy it. Loads of people still do buy it - preferring to add hot water to powdered potato rather than peal, cook and mash actual potatoes. Those people do this out of ingrained habit. Smash isn't advertised, there's no big push to merchandise - it is, in essence, a zombie brand sustained only by this unthinking consistency from its customers.

There are plenty of other brands that still exist only from this sort of inertia, from their being part of our psychological geography - Yellow Pages, Spam, Kraft Cheese Slices, R White's Lemonade, Nimble. Pretty sure you will be able to add to this list - not just from nostalgia but from the fact that these zombies still fill shelves in supermarkets and gather dust in the corners of our cupboards.

Here's one comment on these zombies:

Brands are playing a ‘zero sum’ game: most of them compete in flat-lining categories, with private label sales expected to soon exceed branded product sales in Europe and other maturing markets like the US and Canada (Planet Retail). Brands are under increasing time pressure: the expiration date of brand creativity is getting shorter, with ideas being copied better and more rapidly. Brands can no longer rely on the classic Pareto rule: in any given category, 20% of customers currently represent maximally 50% of revenues. And brands struggle to connect with younger, more empowered consumer generations: what marketers consider to be important for the marketing-savvy millennials is not always thought of as such by the latter.

The world has changed, consumers have changed the way they make decisions and the media they use to inform them about what to buy. Brands aren't dead - just look at tech brands like Apple or at those with an ubiquity that transcends traditional media like McDonalds or Coca Cola. But that observer is right - most brands operate in stagnant markets and rely in the inertia of consumer habit, on the heuristics of brand equity, to sustain themselves. Unless they're actively shut down these brands slip lower and lower in people's perceptions, those brand short cuts aren't renewed - the brands die but still wander the land fooling a few that they are alive.

All this brings me to the Labour Party. Right now it seems pretty alive as it engages in another leadership tussle - as one member put it to me; "we move smoothly from one leadership crisis to the next". But the Party's position as a political organisation isn't sustained by the febrile positivity of the Corbyinista membership but rather by the inertial attachment to the Labour brand. That old joke about putting a red rosette on a donkey seems too true - people are voting Labour from habit. There is no other reason to do so. It's because they've always voted that way, their Mum voted that way and everyone round here votes Labour.

These voters have little in common with the people they're electing - the sons and daughters of former pottery workers in Stoke are electing Tristan Hunt, public school educated son of a public school educated life peer, without asking whether he really understands their lives or gets their concerns other than in a "these people are struggling, we should care for them" sort of way. And old-fashioned, conservative working class communities are electing middle class 'third sector' workers who are their polar opposite in values and outlook.

Yet the real truth about the struggle within the Labour Party is that it's a battle over this brand - over the loyalty of those voters. It's not a fight over the 'soul of the Labour Party' or any such nonsense, it's rather about two incompatible political positions - anti-market socialism and pro-market social democracy - having a fight to the death over the right to brandish that Labour rose. It doesn't occur to either camp to think whether the policies they propose are actually these brand-loyal Labour voters actually want. Do these mostly working class voters really think the gender balance in boardrooms or among BBC presenters is all that important? Or for that matter the plight of Palestinians, fair trade or solidarity with Latin American socialist dictatorships. Yet these are the issues the two competing halves of Labour seem most concerned about.

And none of this matters when the roof leaks, you've no overtime again this week, there's another red letter and your son can't get a job because he has a record for selling weed. Yet people like this - if they can be bothered at all - loyally troop to endorse the Labour brand. After all the alternative is the Tories - the party of the boss, the man in the suit and the patronising sorts with posh accents who drive big saloon cars and drink gin at the golf club.

Labour is a zombie brand. Any continued appearance of life is breathed into the corpse by habitual voting, the tribal inertia of brand loyalty. But this matters, those millions of voters who will never vote anything other than Labour really are why people are tearing the party to shreds over its brand. Whoever owns the brand - regardless of the policies they put forward - can rely on those loyal voters. If the Party splits - and it still might - the winner is the one with the brand.

....

A dangling conversation about Mrs Roosevelt and parking outside Cullingworth Primary School

****

For many years I subscribed to that famous Eleanor Roosevelt dictum - you know the one:

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Now leaving aside just what an unpleasant gossipy bitch Mrs Roosevelt was, I've now come to the conclusion that this dictum is a monumental load of tommyrot. And this realisation came from listening to a song I really don't like all that much - Paul Simon's 'The Dangling Conversation'. In the third verse Simon tells us:

Yes we speak of things that matter,
With words that must be said,
"Can analysis be worthwhile?"
"Is the theater really dead?"
And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow,
I cannot feel your hand,
You're a stranger now unto me
Lost in The Dangling Conversation
And the superficial sighs
In the borders of our lives.

The couple in the song lived absolutely according to Mrs Roosevelt's dictum yet Paul Simon suggests that the result of this is that what they considered to be grand thoughts about important matters were, in truth, utterly superficial. What matters is more personal, more direct and much much more difficult to discuss - how we feel about others, how people relate and how this affects our lives.

This morning I turned down the opportunity to go on the radio for a discussion about 'Charlie Hebdo', free speech and all that stuff. I did so because some neighbours of the primary school in Cullingworth have complained about parking by parents delivering their children to the school. An utterly mundane matter of no strategic significance but, I decided, far more important than pontificating about grand things on the radio.

At the primary school I've got a fighting chance of doing something to make the situation a little better, to allow my neighbours (and the school's neighbours) to rub along together a little better. And this matters far more to people than whether or not I think it's OK to publish cartoons that might upset someone. Those people are the small minded folk that Mrs Roosevelt viewed with such snooty disdain - they want to tell me about the man who parks his 4x4 on the pavement or the taxi driver who always ignores the double yellow lines. This is because these things matter.

When the grand people on the radio or television - or those apeing them like the couple with the dangling conversation in Paul Simon's song - talk about grand ideas they forget that those grand ideas, when acted on, result in real effects on real people. Indeed that, were the ideas presented to those mums at the school gate or the couple in the council house round the corner, they'd get short shrift - out-of-touch would perhaps be the most polite response.

Because us grand folk have Mrs Roosevelt's disdain for such small-mindedness (too often thinking that those people simply won't understand so why bother), we resort to conducting political debate through dumbed down slogan and pithy soundbites. This is the world of 'not right or left but right or wrong', 'long term economic plans' and 'for the many, not the few' - endlessly repeated advertising mantras that mean little but make a pleasing sound.

We pretend that people like what we're saying by the liberal use of opinion polling as post hoc justification of the slogan or soundbite. Yet this brand marketing is weak, inconsistent and ineffective compared to that from big brand owners - put simply Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Persil are more trusted than any political brand anywhere in the world. And this is because, unlike those brands, political parties treat their customers - the voters - with Mrs Roosevelt's disdain.

None of this is to suggest that we shouldn't discuss grand ideas but we need to try to include more people in those discussions rather than, as is typical, using words and concepts seemingly designed to close the debate off to any but the cognoscenti. Whether it's a debate about 'culture' or a discussion of macroeconomics, we should try at least to use words people understand rather than pretending that language is somehow a barrier to the analysis of the subject in question. In the end - as so often with these things - someone has made the point much better - here's George Orwell:

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Above all, it seems to me, we need to spend more time talking about (and to, and with) people and their daily lives and not pretending that somehow this is a lower form of talk reserved for people who aren't nearly as clever as we are. For, by the use of that grand language, we fall into Orwell's trap and become fools. Fools no-one else much can understand but fools - snobbish fools - nonetheless.

....

More lies about advertising - this time from the Children's Food Trust

****

The Children's Food Trust are back again with their proposals for advertising bans and controls. And, since it's the enemy of choice, the attack on advertising is couched in terms of a criticism of self-regulation.

“The ASA has proved itself unwilling and unable to fulfil this role,” he added.

“In industry after industry – from MPs’ expenses, to phone-hacking, to banks, and now in online marketing – self-regulation has proven to be a failed model. More of the same is not what is needed to protect children’s health or to give parents more help in making healthy choices for their family.”

The problem, we're told, is that the self-regulation of advertising (remember that broadcast advertising isn't self-regulated but regulated by statute) under the aegis of the Committee of Advertising Practice has allowed advertisers of food products to use online advertising. This, of course, means that some of the adverts are seen by children.

What struck me about the reports from the Trust is that the main evidence it presents (about four or five websites) simply doesn't indicate anything different from what is allowable in broadcast advertising already. However, they also demonstrate the scale of parental irresponsibility when it comes to Internet use:

Social networking websites, like Facebook, are especially popular amongst children and young people, 28 per cent of 8–11 year olds and 75 per cent of 12–15 year olds have an active social networking site profile. One third of 8–12 year olds have a profile on sites that require users to register as being aged 13 or over.

So let's be clear about this - Rowntree, Krave, Cheesestrings and Nesquik are advertising in media that have a 13 age minimum. But because irresponsible parents allow their under-13 children to use those sites those advertisers should be banned from doing so?

Yet again we are seeing the use of poor quality research - with no peer review and no robust methodology - to justify arguments for advertising bans. Controls proposed solely because some parents can't say 'no' to their children. Meaning that children see advertising that they would not see on a commercial children's TV channel - advertising that complies with the agree codes of practice. Indeed, because the websites all show TV advertisements, these are codes of practice subject to statutory regulation.

But I guess that blaming advertising gets a better headline than blaming parents for letting their ten year olds go on Facebook (where an advert for Sugar Puffs is probably the least of worries).

....

...in which we are reminded that plain packs won't stop people smoking

****

These proposals come from people who neither understand brands nor appreciate the point or purpose of marketing. As I wrote a while ago:

...brands do not act to recruit customers to a given product – we choose to buy the product and then we select the brand. Nobody starts buying bread because they saw a Warburton’s ad – they buy bread because, well, they want bread! What the brand provides is a heuristic – a short cut, if you will – allowing the consumer to make a choice quickly and confidently. What we do know is that it is the search for a benefit that makes consumers choose to buy a product rather than the shininess of the brand presentation.  Or is you prefer: we buy bread because we want to eat it not because the advert featured a brass band playing chunks from the New World Symphony!

So I was pleased -although not surprised - to see this view confirmed by a branding expert:

...the notion that selling cigarettes in logo-free dull green packages will deter smokers fails to take into account both human nature and the way brands work.

Advocate of plain packaging believe that smokers and aspiring smokers will be repelled by unattractive plain packages.  I doubt that this will have much effect. Nobody smokes because the packages are cool; people start smoking because smoking is cool – at least in their eyes.

You the problem is that the anti-tobacco lobby - rather like Naomi Klein - haven't the first idea about brands, advertising or the point of marketing. They - like most non-marketers - confuse 'marketing' and 'selling' assuming that the two words are interchangeable, that 'marketing' is merely a posh word for 'selling'. And they are wrong.

The result of this isn't better public health, it isn't the incipient collapse of the tobacco industry (perhaps the anti-smoking lot might care to visit Peru or Afghanistan to look at the growing of coca and opium poppies) - what we get is job losses, businesses closing, a new criminal class of smugglers and no further progress in reducing the harm caused by smoking. As Andrew Hennigan, who I quote above, concludes:

Reducing the number of people smoking and, most importantly, the number of young people starting is a key public health goal, but I fear that we need to find some other solution than plain packaging...

Perhaps shifting from denormalisation to harm reduction might be a start?

....

Why fans shouldn't be worried about Manchester United future income...

****

...except that it's not really about Manchester:

Manchester United has signed a partnership with the first mobile phone firm to operate in Azerbaijan.

The three-year deal with Bakcell will give the telecommunications company the right to screen the club's MUTV in the eastern European country.

Bakcell will also offer United-themed phone packages, which will give subscribers access to club news, video highlights, ringtones and other features.

....

Why our "City Region" shouldn't be called Leeds

****

I like Leeds. It's a fine City with a great history. But the "City Region" in which Leeds sits shouldn't be called after that city.

1. Leeds isn't a strong enough brand when set against "Yorkshire" or "York". Most of the people we want to reach will more likely have heard of the county and its eponymous city but won't have heard of Leeds.

2. Yorkshire means something to people - both cultural identification (verging on the nationalistic at times) plus a distinct and powerful appeal

3. Using Leeds alienates and distracts from the point and purpose of the "City Region" - inevitably (and to date accurately) the accusations are made that all the attention is on the City of Leeds itself rather than on the rest of the region

4. There are five actual cities within the "city region" - why pick just one of these even if it is the biggest

It seems to me that, if we are to make the most of this opportunity, we need to get a brand that isn't divisive and that resonates for a much wider audience. "Leeds" will never do this - we have to change the 'city region's name.

...

This isn't about beer...

****

It's about mass-produced alcoholic fizzy-pop. But then the big brewers have long seen the traditional UK markets for beer - places know as pubs - as an expensive inconvenience. To fully understand everything that is wrong - really wrong with the UK beer market just read this:

Additionally, Burgess said that the company was “thinking” about opening up its own store in the UK as a showcase to try “different things and really immerse people in the brand”.

He adds: “How much we can deliver of that in-store realistically in an environment where we are very passionately focused would be a challenge. I’m not sure its high on our strategic priorities at the moment but maybe there will be something like the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam in the future.”

For crying out load you idiots, beer is an exciting, living product not something for you to practice impenetrable marketing jargon on. If businesses like Heineken weren't so resolutely focused on flogging idiot juice at the lowest possible price maybe we have less nonsense from New Puritans. nannying fussbuckets and neo-prohibitionists.

I hate them (but not as much as the health fascists).

....

Plain packaging...

****

Chris Snowdon has - via the good offices of the Adam Smith Institute - published a paper on the lunatic idea of introducing plain packaging for cigarettes. It is an excellent read filled with real facts, references to real research and a commitment to liberty.

In addition Conservative Home have given Chris some space to set out his argument - it's certainly worth reading the comments thread. No sign of much support for the idea.

For my part I wrote about this - from the perspective of a professional and experienced marketer:

Firstly, brands do not act to recruit customers to a given product – we choose to buy the product and then we select the brand. Nobody starts buying bread because they saw a Warburton’s ad – they buy bread because, well, they want bread! What the brand provides is a heuristic – a short cut, if you will – allowing the consumer to make a choice quickly and confidently. What we do know is that it is the search for a benefit that makes consumers choose to buy a product rather than the shininess of the brand presentation.  Or is you prefer: we buy bread because we want to eat it not because the advert featured a brass band playing chunks from the New World Symphony!

Secondly, packaging serves two purposes – identification and appeals to impulse. In the first instance we put our product into easily identified packaging as part of that heuristic, as a quick means of identifying our particular version of a given product. And, where purchase is often impulse driven, we use packaging to make the product stand out from other similar products. So yes packaging can assist purchase – but only where it isn’t a considered purchase.

The rest of this piece can be read here - suffice it to say that the scale of ignorance about the purpose of brands and the point of packaging beggar's belief. Anyone would think they had an agenda!

....

Trust me, I'm a politician!

****

Trust is a tricky old thing – that headline probably brings out the sense of irony in you (although you don’t know for sure whether or not I actually mean “trust me”). Indeed our default position is, as Martin Vander Weyer points out, more often distrust:

...trust is no longer offered, in any sphere, as it used to be; distrust is now the default response. It’s easy to argue that business leaders, especially in the City, have brought this on themselves by behaving greedily and uncaringly. But that’s not the whole story, which is also about social change.

At the core of this is a presiding sense that they’re out to rip us off. Politicians, lawyers, doctors, journalists – the entire panoply of professions – are cynical, driven by personal success rather than by any concept of service. And our mistrust extends further – we see train drivers striking on boxing day and see self-interest rather than a collective response to injustice, we tell tales or teachers or council officers seeing the “strike day” as an excuse for a jolly and we’ve got used to anger at huge bonuses in large firms and big public organisation that seem merely to reward failure or incompetence.

The other day, Jack of Kent pondered on why everyone hates lawyers and concludes that it is the majesty of the law that we fear rather than its agent, the lawyer:

It is perhaps not so much that lawyers are hated, but that law itself is feared and mysterious.

That this is the case is unfortunate, and it is an entirely fair criticism that many lawyers do not do more to promote the public understanding of law.

Of course, barriers to lay understanding can suit the interests of lawyers. Lawyers have no general interest in enabling potential clients to work out their own legal problems.

And, so to that extent, lawyers really only have themselves to blame.

But it isn’t quite so simple – what has happened is that we have stopped trusting lawyers because they are lawyers, doctors simply for the fact of their doctoring and politicians by dint of their elected authority. The brands of these professions are corrupted by our awareness of their failings, our recognition that lawyers, doctors, MPs and other ‘professionals’ will close ranks, will protect their privileges, rather than have those failings exposed.

This is a good thing although we still give too great a credence to the self-interest of the Law Society, the BMA or the ‘senior backbencher’. However the growing doubt as to motive means that trust must be earned. It’s perfectly possible to trust a lawyer, a doctor, even a politician but only in so far as we trust the individual behind the badge.

When I urge you to trust me because I’m a politician, I’m asking you to trust the idea of such a person rather than to trust me. Such heuristics damage society by granting to a given organisation, professional body or political party the power to bestow trust.

You should trust Simon Cooke because he has proven himself trustworthy not because he has the stamp of politician.

...