Russell Davies

daddy, what's a brand? part 1

I've been thinking a lot about what we mean when we say 'brand'. (Not prompted by Arthur, I just thought that was a slightly funny title.) In this and the preceeding/following posts (depending how you look at it) are some of those thoughts:

It would be quite useful to stop using the word brand altogether. (Though it's a hard habit to break)

Because using the word brand often seems to be an excuse for talking a lot of bollocks. Which I guess I'm possibly just about to do.  Using the B word seems to give people the option of detaching themselves from common sense and a real understanding of people. Using the B word seems to lead to pointless brain-storming, ill conceived projective techniques and endless tiny diagrams.

How about if we just used these words - product, service, company (or organisation) and reputation. And maybe, if we really have to, image. We all know what these words mean. We all know how we would go about managing and improving these things. We don't need to talk bollocks to talk about these things.

Thinking back to my days on Honda I suspect part of their brilliance was that they refused to let us use the world brand. We were never allowed to talk about brands. We weren't allowed to think of doing a 'brand campaign' (with the inevitable corollary of also doing a 'product campaign' and then having huge fights about which one got the biggest budget blah blah blah). We only ever did product ads, however minimally they featured actual products. It's just that one of the objectives of these ads was called 'image up'.

So how about if we dropped the word brand for a bit? it seems like a small tweak in language, but it might create a bigger tweak in thinking.

(I will now proceed to use the word brand an enormous number of times, assuming you're reading down the page. Ah well.)

daddy, what's a brand? part 2

We need to distinguish between brands and BRANDS

As many of us have, I've been reading Neil Boorman's splendid Bonfire Of The Brands. He's writing a blog about writing a book about burning all this branded goods as an experiment in living 'brand-free'. Which is rather noble and interesting. And is just the kind of experiment which makes you think about stuff. And it made me think about what exactly he means by 'brand'. Because mostly what he talks about are highly-branded goods, luxury things, fashion things. Not soap powder and hammers. There's not much discussion (unless I've missed it) of the brand of matches he's going to use to start his fire or what'll happen when he burns the Esso/Shell/Tesco fuel in his car.

(And I know I'm being annoyingly literal here and he's too smart and savvy to pretend you can live an entirely brand-free life unless you're an ex-member of Crass. I think he's just aiming at a thought-provoking gesture and a life less mediated by brands, which seems entirely fair. Anyway if you were going to be entirely brand free you'd pretty end up doing what Michael Landy did, and destroying all your possessions. Which was another fascinating project. I guess you could get everything from Muji, but that's sidestepping the point, it's just another brand. One of the best fictional discussions of brand-free-ness is in Pattern Recognition because Cayce Pollard, the protaganist, is allergic to brands, but then she's a brand-consultant.)

Anyway, what it made me  realise is that when we talk about brands we're talking about at least two different types of thing, which you might divide up like this:

brand - a service or product where most of the value is in the service or product

BRAND - a service or product where most of the value is in the image or reputation of the service or product

(I imagine the latter is mostly the kind of brand that provoked the affection and then the ire, of Mr Boorman)

You see what I mean? Does that seem useful? I know it's naive and simplistic but isnt' simplicity supposed to be very fashionable right now? I think a distinction like that might be helpful to think with.

And I don't think, as many people might, that brand is neccesarily better than BRAND. They're both equally valid sources of happiness and utility for people. It's just that if we're going to make them useful, interesting and relevant it's worth knowing exactly what kind of bRaNd we're talking about.

daddy, what's a brand? part 3

Brands are easy, people are hard

As I've probably said before, I think managing a brand (or product, or service) is really rather easy; be honest, be interesting, create happiness, create utility. Or at least it's easy if there's just you managing it. Or you and your husband. Or you and your mate from college. Brands only get difficult when large organisations get involved, say anything from 5 people to 500,000 people.

Because the stuff that's simple when you make all the decisions yourself, and it's all in one person's head and one person's soul, are frustratingly impossible when you've to try and get groups of people to do the same thing. We don't have the language to talk about the complexities and nuances of brands, we don't all see the same thing when we look at one or understand the same thing we talk about what we're going to do. So as soon as the management of the brand lives in more than one person's head it starts to fracture. Which is where all the brand management and planning tools come into play. They're not really there to help you understand the brand, they're there to enforce it, to try and make sure the organisation has some shared sense of what it means. And they can never really do that. And if it can't be done through benevolent shared understanding then they do it with compulsion, by issuing CI guidelines and manuals and three-ring binders. And maybe once, in the days of monolithic and mediated brand communications that might have worked. But not any more. Not when so many brands depend on real human contact. And every conversation can't be scripted. Then the brand really does live in every person's head and every person's mouth.

This is the hard part about managing brand-owning organisations, not managing the brand, but managing the people who are managing the brand. This isn't really news, but I think its worth remembering. I think smart planners and strategists should bear that in mind when they're  trying to make something happen inside an organisation.

And don't get me started on the fact that, of course, none of these people actually manage the brand anyway, their customers do that. (Except, that I tend to use 'managing' in the sense of 'coping' rather than 'organising'.)

cable confusion

Many, many years ago I decided that I would, wherever possible, only buy Sony products. I absolutely loved my original Stowaway, perhaps the best product I've ever owned. I adored (and still adore) their industrial design and I thought that a single brand policy would simplify the CE shopping and owning experience. And it has. Kind of.

But there's always been some nagging disatisfaction about the whole experience and this brilliant post today crystalised the problem exactly. You'd think that buying only, or mostly, Sony products would reduce the number and confusion of cables. But oh no. And you'd think that Sony would reward the customers who buy mostly, or only, Sony with simpler cable management. But oh no.

I'd never really thought about that before. That's what makes for a good blog post. And it turns out Martha Stewart's a genius.

hit the north

The serendipity of links and trackbacks led me to one of the simplest, most useful, most common-sensical and human bits of advice I've read for ages. Northern Planner's Top Ten Tips for Working With Suits. Practical genius. And it wins extra points by being Northern. I like the North, I'm not from there, I'm from the Midlands (something that confuses Southerners) but I admire someone who's proud of their geography.

sleephacks

   

       

Since I've suggested you all get up at dawn I thought this fantastic round-up of sleep tips might be useful.

hucksterism

Every meeting I've ever had as a client I've felt tempted to start it like this one. It's a temptation I resist, because it's horrible, but it certainly would be memorable.

(And I always want to end each meeting with a rousing 'go back to your constituencies and prepare for government' but whenever I do everyone in the meeting is either too young or too American so they just look at me blankly.)

Anyway, this is the quintessential ad meeting moment. It's got everything.

1. The account manager type trying to make sure 'the talent' doesn't say anything that might annoy the client.

2. Splendid assortment of junior toady clients (all required to shout CHECK! to affirm their agreement with the big senior client)

3. The best meeting opening moment ever. (I won't spoil it for you)

4. The worst and most pointless visual demonstration ever ('anything else is all wet')

5. The most accurate, chilling and pointed exposition of the worst and most prevalent advertising thinking I've ever come across. (All products are identical. Consumers are there to be duped. Advertising works through mindless, irritating repetition. It would be funny except this seemingly facile view represents how so many practitioners actually behave)

6. The first instance captured on film of 'the Theatre Of Insight' - when the ad hero (clearly a planner) uses overly flowery language to point out that the ads the client so clearly loves (and which seem to be extremely effective) are all wrong. And he gets away with it.

A fantastic movie. And at the risk of inventing youtubevertising, here's where you can buy it. (Including my affiliate number, hurrah)

Assignment 7

Don't forget, assignment seven is here. It needs to be completed by the end of June.

sudeep in byways

Someone suggested that I should combine my two blogging lives and interview planners in cafes. So here's the first one in a series cleverly called Planners In Cafes.

I met up with Sudeep Gohil of Wieden + Kennedy at Byways in Portland. (He's Strategic Planning Director for Portland and the Global Planning Director on Nike.) He's a very nice, very smart man who's worked at interesting agencies all over the world. He talks about adschools, planning on different continents, ad-blogs and planning in a small(ish) city. Very kind of him to talk to me.

Clearly there's a tension inherent in the idea of interviewing people in cafes, ie cafes are noisy. And my mic technique isn't exactly unstoppable yet, so I apologise for the background sounds. But I think he's pretty audible. And he's worth listening to.

MP3

summer fun

Arthur's starting to leave his Star Wars phase (it's been a couple of years) and enter a Justice League phase. His knowledge of the Star Wars oeuvre has been very useful for explaning all kinds of things, you can answer many six-year old questions by referencing the Force, the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. But I've got to admit, all his light-sabre training has done nothing for his cricket stance.

As someone at the park said today, summer is the time for junior cricket and the evocative sound of sponge on sponge.

Back at the flats we discovered that the Stomp Rocket is an unusually effective toy for communal activity, which is normally so hard to manage. Arthur was very excited that lots of the other kids crowded around to play. Stomp Rocketry is nicely egalitarian in that almost everyone can get it to go pretty impressively high, so there's lots of wowing. And the heights are fairly randomly distributed so the bigger kids can't lord it over the others. Plus, there's a high rate of fire so you don't have to wait too long for your turn.