Original flavor, please
With the arrival of summer, it’s difficult not to notice the increase in foot traffic, even here in the busy city streets of Manhattan. In this transition between spring and summer, citizens and tourists alike wait in abundance outside frozen yogurt shops, only to increase the city’s congestion. Alongside brand leader Pinkberry, a dozen or so fro-yo copycats have emerged, like Red Mango, Yolato, Kiwiberri, Berri Good, Yogurtland, and Flurt.
From a brand perspective, the fro-yo war in this city is a tasty example of the potential pitfalls that come with copycatting. What copycats fail to realize is that mimicking the leader, not only in product offering but also in look and feel, lands you in the ‘me too’ brand category – and fast. And this leads everyone to believe that you’re only second best to the original. Without the ambition to go above and beyond best-in-class practices, and aiming instead only to match them, these other yogurt chains are neglecting to lead. Not only are brands like Red Mango declining to differentiate themselves, but they’re also up against Pinkberry’s strong cult following.
With greater attention to brand than the competition, everything about Pinkberry looks, feels, tastes, sounds and smells like Pinkberry. From the Philippe Starck chairs and Le Klint lighting fixtures to the Alessi-populated shelves and pebbled floor, Pinkberry has chosen each element of its experience – online, environment, collateral, packaging, PR and community – with brand delivery in mind. As for the mild success of Pinkberry’s copycat predators, I would argue that the business they capture is made up mostly of the spill-over from Pinkberry.
After all, if the beloved Pinkberry line is too long, most will take off across the street to Red Mango, because when all is said and done about brand, second best fro-yo tastes better than none at all.
30 June 2008, posted by Eliza Blank
Invisible brands
Recently I’ve stumbled upon some of Rob Walker’s work in prelude to his new book “Buying In”. In one of his write-ups he talks about invisible badges. According to Walker, badges are signals that suggest a tighter relationship with the brand producer and the brand consumer.
Walker observes that people no longer buy stuff to impress others, rather to impress themselves. This means that logos are becoming less important indicators of status. Look no further than the high-end fashion industry where logos are shrinking.
Christian Louboutin has made red soles the staple of his shoe line. Bottega Veneta bags are identifiable by their intricately weaved patterns. Rolex is known for the weight of its watches and Armani for the slender rounded shoulders of its men’s blazers.
Intended for small affinity groups rather than mass markets, these companies are creating brand undergrounds where consumers need to be fully indoctrinated in the brand cultures to fully understand their subtle signaling.
This is a liberating trend for brands with strong belief systems like Zappos that pays their employees to quit or Gourmet that believe that there is no conflict between mixing high fashion and streetwear pieces. Companies with substance can now start to tell richer brand stories through the product themselves.
Moving forward the miniaturization of logos will become more prominent, where embedded clues, colors, fabric and materials will become the main brand identifier.
25 June 2008, posted by George Crichlow
Power to your people
NESTA, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, recently produced a policy briefing on innovation in services. As you would expect from a policy report, it has a host of ideas of what governments should do to foster innovation – a bottom-up understanding of needs, open and flexible markets, better leadership, skills development and funding for start-ups. All good, if obvious, stuff.
Where it really hits the nail on its head is in a section titled ‘Services businesses innovate differently from manufacturers’. This difference can be summarised in one word: people. Service innovation depends less on some geniuses having aha moments, less on R&D, less on secret endeavours behind closed doors and more on creative front-end staff, flatter hierarchies and rewarding relationships with partners and competitors.
Service innovation happens in real time and each transaction is an opportunity to create and own new types of services. The best people are those who know the customer best – the staff on the sales floor, the nurse in the ward, the rep at the end of the phone. When brands understand this – as they do at First Direct, American Express and Disney – they give their employees not just the tools but also a philosophical platform that equips them to literally make it up as they go along, and deliver real innovation in services. They give their employees real power. Leveraging those innovations in the organisation then becomes a matter of having the right sharing and memory processes (including external sources), and humble management that recognises and celebrates ideas from the edge.
Of course, many businesses don’t do this – NESTA points out that retailers, hoteliers and restaurants lag behind traditional manufacturing in innovation. Crazy really. It might be they have the wrong people – not at the edge, but in the middle. It is more likely they have the wrong philosophy and have failed to equip themselves with a brand that drives through a culture of creativity at the edge, where each person understands the difference they can make in people’s lives.
Without that kind of power, front-line service providers become mere cogs in the wheel, instead of an army of innovators, daily creating and sharing new services that make real money for the organisation.
NESTA’s policy briefing Innovation in Services was published in March 2008. More at www.nesta.org.uk
16 June 2008, posted by Ije Nwokorie
Forest through the trees
Corporations know the benefits of being seen as green by their consumers, but is it just as simple as looking the part? There are a lot of brands that appear to be earth-friendly when they are far from it. Greenwashing can often be difficult for even the savviest consumer to spot.
The visual language of green began in the 1960s. Hippie culture popularized a natural way of life with products such as additive, animal-friendly Dr Bronner’s Magic Soap. It wasn’t until the early 1980s when the look of the green was made familiar to the mainstream with brands such as The Body Shop, Aveda and later on Whole Foods.
Looking like a sustainable brand is easy. Natural visual elements such as leaves, trees, earth circles and flowers, in tones ranging from moss to grass to bark, traditionally paint an environmentally-friendly world. Green as a color is commonly considered fresh. British supermarkets Waitrose, Morrisons, Asda and M&S all use green. Claiming a company is green seems to be easy as well. A recent study by TerraChoice Environmental Marketing, called the Six Sins of Greenwashing, uncovered 1,000 household brands that make false environmental claims. TerraChoice found that brands would claim to be ’Certified Organic’ when the product had no credible certification. Many products were making entirely irrelevant claims such ’CFC-free’, when CFCs or Chlorofluorocarbons were actually banned in the United States in 1978 all products in the US are CFC-free now.
Even the savviest consumer can be fooled by a strong set of ’green’ visual elements and messages. BP has a brand perception among consumers of being good for the earth when the reality is far from it, according to Pierre Berton, Professor of Marketing at Bentley College. He goes on to say, in a recent NPR interview, that BP’s ’Beyond Petroleum’ brand message is misleading, since over 95 percent of its business is still in petroleum.
Since then, BP has stopped using that tagline for that very reason. Aside from its messaging, BP’s yellow-green sunflower logo has a powerful impact on its green image. On the Brandtags site, where users are asked which words they associate with famous brands, ’green’ is the third most popular word for BP, after ’gas’ and ’oil’. Brands that look the part are clearly benefiting. However, if you don’t look green, you might be in trouble. Brands that don’t have green as their central look or message tend to be ignored as being sustainably responsible even when they are. IKEA’s flat-pack furniture means it gets more items on trucks, boats or trains, using less fuel and creating fewer emissions. However, ’green’ is not one of the words triggered by the IKEA logo on Brandtags. Nike produces a large quantity of its shoes with recycled materials. But according to Berton’s study, Nike is perceived to have a negative environmental impact.
How can ’green’ be represented without leaning on this overly used symbolism? Al Gore’s We campaign avoids using the same old green leaves and trees, but instead uses powerful statements that describe its main green objective. Brands, please stop trying to fool us! We are all getting confused by what’s really green. Governments in the UK, Canada, US and Australian have all fast-tracked efforts to address false environmental claims, according to WorldChanging.com. Until then, if your business looks green, then live up to how you look. The way your brand looks means a lot to the world.
9 June 2008, posted by Lily Williams
Re-packaging India: is corporate identity enough?
Recently, Jet Airways, Godrej, Shoppers Stop, Deccan, Ceat, Canara Bank and Air India have all been re-branded, and are currently running advertising campaigns to tell Indians how interesting and important this is. Some companies, like Jet Airways and Shoppers Stop, are very young and others, like Air India and Canara Bank, are heritage brands. A new corporate identity and mass advertising are bold steps. We should applaud them for taking these steps. Change is welcome: it can help create employee pride and a real buzz in the market. It can also signal that these brands want to be a part of New India. So far so good. Good looks and advertising are the easy bits. The snag is that the buzz will not last for too long if the reality does not change for staff and consumers. And frankly, who needs another logo in an overcrowded market?
India’s great opportunity is to build service businesses. China will naturally be big in products: India can be great in services. But a common mistake both in India and in the west is to treat a service brand as it was a consumer product. It is one thing to repackage Sunsilk shampoo; it is another thing to brand a service. The key for any service brand to succeed is delivery. This takes time. So the opportunity for these leaders is to take the lead, to invest and to create India’s first globally successful service brand – in proposition and delivery, not just looks.
This change will truly move the leaders from representing Old India to New India – a New India where the customer comes first and no longer says in frustration, ‘This only happens in India!’ Where people start talking and saying, ‘You should try them. They’re great’. And where employees say, ‘I want to work there’. This change will not come from copying ideas from the west. Instead, India’s service companies should build on their philosophy and vision to create something that works specifically for the Indian market, and that can then resonate beyond India. Currently there is no Indian brand listed in any of the various global brand rankings. As an Indian, I would like to see a great Indian service brand listed within the top 500. That’s India’s great opportunity in the world.
29 May 2008, posted by Zia Patel
New style?
Style magazines and fashion columns have already started predicting what will be hot for the coming season. Yet again, styles and trends are repeating themselves. Whether it’s boating or safari, block colours or crazy patterns, the rules don’t change fundamentally and we just end up having a revised, updated version of the last year’s fashion. Same goes for macro trends. Over the past ten years we’ve seen a resurgence of 60s mini-dresses, 70s wide-leg trousers and 80s stripes and shoulder pads. No real newness, just the past with a modern twist. Can fashion brands really drive style innovation? Is there a genuine need for a new millennium style? Designer brands such as Prada, Miu Miu and Hussein Chalayan have introduced new materials and production techniques to deliver exquisite pieces of design. Comme des Garçons explores new ways of integrating fashion with architecture and visual communication. But the only innovation in look sits in different combinations of elements we’ve already seen. Fashion brands should look back at what makes them unique, and use their brand to inspire a genuinely new style.
23 May 2008, posted by Giorgio Rondelli
Mis-Application
This week, Facebook announced that it had raised £51m to expand its server capacity, to help the social networking website cope with yet more explosive growth rate in user numbers. Growth is certainly something Facebook does well, and despite ongoing concerns over privacy it now has more than 70 million active users and is the sixth most-trafficked website in the world.
Ensuring longevity with users in an increasingly crowded marketplace was always, and still is, a major concern for all social networking websites. In May of last year, and whilst other social networks like Bebo, Friends Reunited and Myspace stood relatively still, Facebook took the bold and innovative step to launch the Facebook platform from which software developers could create their own unique applications to sit alongside original Facebook features.
Tremendously successful applications like iLike (which allows you to add music to your profile, has 299,183 daily active users) and Scrabulous (the word game, has 623,732 daily active users) were born, and subsequent growth has been exponential. Nearly a year on from this decision there are, of today, 24,814 applications. This helped reinvigorate Facebook, giving it a different dimension to other social networks and adding a further stage to its phenomenal development. But at the same time, I think this growth has also been chaotic, and from a user perspective it has created a far more crowded interface. These applications are everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
What made Facebook so successful in its early stages was what it enabled users to do. In their own words ‘Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you’, and it did this brilliantly. However, increasingly these applications can get in the way of the core Facebook brand. It can even be likened to Google putting anything on the homepage other than the search engine itself.
Facebook does need to innovate and to continue to develop its social network to keep users engaged, but it must ensure that this innovation is not only focussed but authentic. Facebook must stay true to what made it stand out from the crowd in the first place.
13 May 2008, posted by Richard Houston
The big idea is dead
Blogger Seth Godin says the big idea is dead. As author of a book called The Big Idea, I have to say...Actually, I agree.
Godin writes: ‘The secret of big-time advertising during the 1960s and ’70s was the “big idea” [but] today, the advertiser’s big idea doesn’t travel very well. Instead, the idea must be embedded into the experience of the product itself.’
The television drama Mad Men romanticises this great age of advertising, when Madison Avenue first realised that you could talk about anything. Not deodorant but closeness. Not lipstick but possession. Mad Men shows marketing people becoming philosophers: everything is superficially deep, and deeply superficial.
David Ogilvy called for big ideas in his 1983 book, On Advertising: ‘You can do homework from now until doomsday, but you will never win fame and fortune unless you also invent big ideas. It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product...Research can’t help you much, because it cannot predict the cumulative value of an idea, and no idea is big unless it will work for thirty years.’ And this thinking influenced branding as well as advertising, through to the end of the last century.
But now, sceptical consumers buy reality, not image: products, not advertising. Yes, you need an idea to drive your reality – to determine what kind of products and services you’ll make. But pure idea is dead.
www.sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/big-ideas-meatb.html
www.fastcompany.com/blog-post/ogilvy-vs-godin-big-idea-advertising-dead
30 April 2008, posted by Robert Jones
Cashing in on crowdsourcing
Consumers are increasingly becoming sick and cynical of the age-old ad game of ‘push, push, push’. Today’s consumer, or consommacteur, doesn’t want to be a demographic or a subject of research and testing. Today’s consumer wants to be an active participant, a resource that generates and contributes ideas. Welcome prosumerism.
This willingness to participate and connect has enabled more brands to succeed from crowdsourcing – reaching out to consumers and inviting them to collectively design, develop and sometimes produce products and services. We know this model well and have seen its success for companies like Craigslist and Wikipedia. With crowdsourcing came newly engaged and empowered consumers, incentivized by the opportunity to take part.
In comes Kluster. Its premise is to incentivize participants to help solve a given need (a new product, a new marketing campaign, etc.) in a market-like environment that has real cash rewards. What sets it apart from similar companies, such as Innocentive, Ideablob, and Crowdspirit, is that participants don’t have to create the winning solution to cash in. The cash prize is distributed to everyone who supported the idea, based on how much they contributed to it, how early they got behind it, and what percentage of their given points they invested in it.
You might stop and ask: will customer-driven really lead to greater levels of customer satisfaction? I suppose it really all depends on the class of talent that platforms like Kluster can engage. From my perspective, the real truth of the matter is that consumers have been given the opportunity to shape the way in which they consume – and there’s no turning back.
25 February 2008, posted by Eliza Blank
Consommacteurs v technocrats
I learned a new word this week consommacteurs. It’s the French for consumers who are also actors, or even activists, the millions from the YouTube generation(s) who don’t just consume but also create, who don’t merely partake but take part, and who don’t so much buy brands as use them.
Then yesterday I experienced the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, the biggest annual mobile-phone trade fair. This was a sea of unsmiling men, the technocrats who are quietly changing the world. As one of them said, in a couple of years as many people will have a mobile as have a toothbrush. It’s an incredible new power in people’s hands, opening up commerce on an unprecedented scale: another speaker claimed that whenever an emerging economy installs a mobile network, GDP goes up 5%.
In their own way, these billions of phone users are consommacteurs too, using mobiles as a way to take part in the world to get work, do their banking, share photos, even (as in Burma) expose injustice. And at some point soon, these consommacteurs will become even more powerful shapers of the world than the Barcelona technocrats who made it all possible.
15 February 2008, posted by Robert Jones
Poker’s new face
Stereotypes are hard to break. In the case of brands, it can be even harder. All too often, you see a company whose business has evolved to such an extent that their original brand is no longer relevant. It is important to have a vision of the future – of where the market can and may go, so that the brand is flexible enough to evolve as the company evolves. The more controversial the industry, the more important this becomes. A case in point is the online gaming industry.
A few months ago, I was unexpectedly introduced to the world of poker. I trod cautiously, nervous that I was entering a world of smoky back rooms frequented by middle-aged men with names like ’Texas Dolly’ and Dave ’The Devilfish’ Ulliott. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The 2007 World Series of Poker (WSOP) tournament was won by 18-year-old Annette Obrestad from Norway who walked away with over £1 million. And if you look at the winners of the WSOP in the last few years, you will see that a new breed of poker players is emerging. They are young. They could be Vietnamese or American. They could be academics or accountants. They could be women. The number of entrants in the WSOP main event has grown from around 800 in 2003 to over 8,000 in 2006. In the United States poker is now the third most watched sport on cable television.
This phenomenal rise in popularity is not restricted only to tournaments. Last year, the London Business Forum held a seminar about the similarities between poker and business; and Harvard Law School launched an initiative to promote poker as an educational tool. The world has finally discovered what poker aficionados have long known – poker is a game of skill. You have to know whether to call, raise or fold. You need to know how to calculate your pot odds, and you have to manage your bankroll. It requires a grasp of mathematics and psychology.
Much of this rapid growth in popularity has been fuelled by online gaming companies. You can play from the comfort of your home, whenever you want, for as long as you want. The two biggest obstacles to the adoption of poker – learning and an intimidating environment – have been removed. Poker now represents over 20% of the $20 billion online gaming market, making it the most popular game of the industry.
As poker has clearly become respectable and mainstream, it presents an interesting challenge for online gaming companies. The leading online gaming brands began as start-ups in offshore tax havens, often employing tacky ad campaigns. Today, they are publicly listed companies with management teams, accounts and operations to match those of respected blue-chip corporations. However, to the public at large, they still carry the stigma of ’gambling companies’, complete with erroneous images of questionable accounting and unsavory executives.
As the appeal of poker continues to grow, the challenge for online gaming companies is whether they will be able to make the transition to mainstream entertainment brands just as their most popular game has done. In the long run, the ones that do will be the ones that survive.
12 February 2008, posted by Ayesha Malhotra
Governance not guidelines
The face of brand management is changing for ever. Global brands have begun to recognise that in an era of Facebook and YouTube it is no longer possible to control every aspect of a brand and that, moreover, there is a growing need to adapt and metamorphose to connect more successfully with changing markets and cultures. Brands of the future need to engage with people on their terms, and integrate their world more directly with other brands and their consumers. Clearly this has a huge impact on how a brand needs to be managed.
80s and 90s ’best practice’ for brand management drove for regimented visual uniformity (following the mantra that a consistent appearance implied a consistent experience), controlled by explicit identity guidelines and a ’logo cop’ attitude. This approach, championed by major global consumer brands like Coke in the 70s, misses the mark today as it leaves no room for flexibility – and ultimately the focus on the logo detracts from caring enough about the content.
Brands of the 00s have to work harder than this. They have to know what they stand for well enough to confidently allow interpretation and adaptation, so that they can build the relationships they need to stay relevant. This apparent freedom implies complexity, which will need to be managed more dynamically. Best practice going forward will rely more on governance than guidelines and market representative co-creation than centre direction.
An example of this approach is McDonald’s who recently adapted the famous ’Golden Arches’ to create three options tailored to suit the different needs of each of its key markets – an adaptation that was supported by a ’free to air’ toolkit including templates and assets for the 30,000 restaurateurs and suppliers who use the brand day-to-day, making the transition easier and creating a platform for ongoing review, co-creation and control.
Other interesting brands leading the change are London 2012 and (RED), both of which were created specifically to interlace and merge their brands with others. The complexity of implementing this day-to-day for London 2012 across many partners is managed through a clear governance process, supported by a full -time resource and a dynamic approval and briefing toolkit.
For businesses who currently ‘do’ brand management through a 250-page logo manual and the occasional row over colour, the change of tack might seem daunting. But – particularly as we all know that guidelines really don’t get read until there is a problem – effective brand management in the 00s quite simply needs to be smarter than this.
31 January 2008, posted by Miles Perkins
Beware the wolves in sheep’s clothing
With the launch this week of the new Xerox brand, we’re seeing the continuing trend of a B2B brand of stature borrowing the trappings of a B2C cousin, much like AT&T before it. And why not? Consumer brands are cool, dynamic, fun, and the really good ones create the kind of emotional attachment to their customers that’s really hard to compete against.
It’s a little unfortunate, then, that these B2B brands seem hell-bent on borrowing the wrong things. A friendly logo, a curvaceous typeface, the use of friendly language, and a library full of as many images of smiling friendly people as possible have become the oh-so-predictable signs of a formerly staid corporation undertaking a ‘transformation in customer-centricity’.
The irony, of course, is that the best B2B brands are anything but friendly. IBM doesn’t want to be your friend, nor McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, and certainly not someone like Oracle. What these brands all have is a very clear culture that drives their business, a clear focus on what they do for their clients (and what they don’t do) and, critically, a very clear value proposition. They ask for your respect. They don’t ask to be your friend.
As we move forwards into the future, and B2B brands increasingly pursue a genuine desire to be more customer-centric, what matters won’t be the creation of a new friendly face. For most B2B brands, what will be needed is greater clarity, greater honesty and greater simplicity around who they really are, what really defines their internal culture, what they really do for their customers, and what their value proposition really is. (And this, by the way, is what B2B brands can really learn from their consumer cousins such as Nike, Apple or Starbucks.)
After all, if you’re really a wolf, much better to celebrate your wolfishness.
24 January 2008, posted by Paul Worthington
The buck stops here
The mighty greenback is an American icon whose value comes in part from the fact it’s one of the most recognized brands in the world. For decades, as the international reserve currency, it has fueled growth, allowed countries to do business, enabled globaliization on an unprecedented scale, whilst simultaneously playing an unwitting ambassador for America around the world. More than that, it has deep emotional resonance. It has had elegance and unique beauty combined with myth, legend, adventure and mystique.
But as with all brands, image is no longer enough. For a range of reasons, including debt, the reality behind the dollar brand has been sullied. And now it looks as though the greenback is going out of style.
Just take a fleeting glance across an array of media and you’ll groove to a hip hop music video with Jay-Z clutching a handful of euros, read news that middle-eastern countries plan to move to euros as their reserve currency, hear about Iran’s Ahmadinejad mocking the dollar as a worthless piece of paper, learn about supermodel Gisele publicly refusing payment in dollars, and be in disbelief to know that even international drug dealers are preferring to do business in the euro.
Clearly, as this trend demonstrates, trust is an essential ingredient of all brands and their reputations, including currencies. The notion of trust (in the commercial world) has been mainly centered on the transaction itself, but not any more. It has dramatically moved on from trust in the product (or dollar in this case) to trust in the people behind the product.
So will the Fed reverse the dollar’s fall from grace and reassert its global role as the world’s reserve currency? Or does it acquiesce to domestic pressure, relieve credit-crunched Americans, and fuel investors’ desires for increased corporate profit? It’s a crunch time for the dollar, both as a currency and as a brand. As Churchill once said, ‘It’s only when you risk losing what you can least afford to lose that you learn to play the game’.
14 January 2008, posted by Dean Crutchfield
Where are the Arab brands?
Something interesting is happening in the Middle East. It has nothing to do with religious extremism or the price of oil. Arab nations are regaining the confidence and pride that they lost nearly 2 centuries ago.
Leaders from certain parts of the region have an ambition and economic vision, which, although seemingly farfetched, is becoming increasingly credible. At the most basic level, it is reflected in their creation of the biggest shopping mall or the tallest building or even a ski slope in a dessert. It is all too easy to dismiss such exuberance by calling the region Las Vegas or Disneyland for adults, but that is to miss the point. And the point is that a new economic power is emerging.
Western companies have not been slow to see the potential. Most international professional services and hotel brands have a presence in the Middle East. Some of the biggest European and North American fashion retailers have franchised their brands in the region.
Saks Fifth Avenue, Banana Republic, Club Monaco and Forever 21 have opened stores in Dubai before hitting European high streets. Similarly, Harvey Nichols, Topshop and Debenhams are present in Riyadh before they opened anywhere in America. And this is not simply a retail phenomenon. The same is true for cafes and restaurants like Johnny Rocket’s, The Blue Elephant, Paul, Costa and Marble Slab.
Malls are being built across the Middle East. But from Cairo to Dubai to Damascus, very few international Arab brands are visible. Yes, Damas, Patchi and Bateel have small outlets in London but, presumably, they cater to Arab expats and tourists? The sad truth is that there are few Arab brands to match the region’s economic power and wealth. Emirates Group or Al Jazeera are rare exceptions to the rule.
The combination of massive wealth, new confidence and a vibrant art scene in the Emirates and Lebanon creates an interesting opportunity for brands in the Middle East. Not simply for copycat Western or Aladdin pastiche brands but for strong, authentic Arab ones. Lets hope we soon see some genuine, world class, modern, Arab brands.
2 January 2008, posted by Zia Patel
The Masque of the Red Death, Battersea Arts Centre, London
Un-expected.
Un-coordinated.
Un-ending
No, not my annual foray into the local gym, but the jewel of a performance currently running at the BAC.
On arrival, we were ushered in via the back door and a bulbous nosed mask was thrust into our hands. Once I had overcome my innate, teeth clenching resistance to ‘join in’, I found the mask a rather freeing proposition. The voyeurs in us all seemed to kick in.
What lay ahead in the next three hours was a journey of one’s own creation. There was no route, no instruction, no divine path. An unending labyrinth of spaces were entered and exited with only your own mind producing the tricks of fear/expectation that often never materialised.
You could linger or run, hunt or wander, stare or recoil.
I found rooms littered with eye-catching oddities, banshees beseeching their own curses, bedrooms entertaining enamoured siblings and stages fanfaring ebullient artistes! And all this before the watershed.
I won’t explain the detail or the finale (if there is one).
Needless to say, the show is sold out. E-bay only.
10 December 2007, posted by Beatrice Vears
Look at the floor and not the ceiling
British craft is certainly not dead at St.Pancras.
So, the champagne bar is mediocre and the retail facilities are what you might expect, but you can’t help being impressed by William Henry Barlow’s amazing engineered ceiling. Best of all is beneath your feet. Here set in the floor sit beautiful circles of carved typography. It’s really worth a trip just to marvel at this extraordinary craftsmanship.
28 November 2007, posted by Luke Gifford
Emotional journeys
The relaunch of St Pancras as London’s rail gateway to Europe has put this once sadly neglected station back on the map. It has also shown how new importance is being put on the experience and the emotion of travel.
Whether you like the soaring gothic architecture of the place (I personally prefer the simplicity of Cubitt’s Kings Cross) its presence has always seemed at odds with the area and with the rail links it served. But when built, St Pancras Station and the adjoining Midland Grand Hotel made a bold statement – that the Midland Railway was the grandest way to travel. For people arriving in the capital it was a display of opulence, a signal that London was a thriving, wealthy city. Not surprisingly it was soon dubbed “the cathedral of the railways”.
St Pancras’ gradual decline mirrored the decline of the railways that it was built to serve. As passenger services were withdrawn and the hotel closed, it became a white elephant and came close to demolition in the 1960s. For many years, it, like many other railway stations, became functional – simply a way of getting from one place to another. The focus was on getting people on and off their trains as effectively as possible. For a while it looked like it would stay that way. But the prospect of the new channel tunnel rail link breathed life back into the station.
The vision of those who saw what St Pancras could offer should be applauded. They understood that this cathedral could once again make a bold statement about London and its place in the world. They saw that the grandeur of the station would add value to those companies associated with it. And they saw that St Pancras could become an essential part of the journey, a destination in its own right.
Some £800m was invested in the transformation. The original splendour was restored, with new additions sympathetically integrated. Shops, markets and bars were added, as well as platforms for international and domestic services. The publicity around the transformation – including advertising and even a TV series - got people talking.
If you’ve not been there you should - not just to marvel at George Gilbert Scott’s gothic details and William Barlow’s audacious engineering, but also to see how emotion is once again seen as a pivotal part of the experience of travel.
21 November 2007, posted by Mark Radda
New kid on the block
It seems more people than ever are gripped by Formula One. It’s been a season of thrills, high jinks, conspiracy and enigmatic new drivers whatever next! F1 is starting to captivate a wider audience, and why not, it has the excitement, the speed, the smell of burning rubber, and the glitz and glamour that puts it in a unique space within the sporting world.
This year Britain and F1 have found a new hero. Lewis Hamilton’s story appeals to both the working and middle classes - he has brought motor sport to the masses and like Tiger Woods did for golf, has nudged F1 from its elitist perch.
Yet F1 could do so much more; bring the brand up to date and inline with what’s going on in the wider world. Motor sport has a lot going for it, but needs to engage and capture a new audience while it still has a window of relevance.
What is the wider impact of the sport beyond the obvious? What message could it send out to the new generation, to the environment, to a street driver? Look at how FIFA have tackled kicking racism out of football and everyday life; what could F1’s message be to the world?
I can’t wait for the new season to start. Now imagine if the bosses at F1 started to dream in Technicolor? That would be interesting.
13 November 2007, posted by David Bruce
Post Frieze
After the hyperhype and hyperactivity of the Frieze Fair, two shows which offer a complete contrast in content and atmosphere, both at Tate Modern in London. One, a major retrospective by Louise Bourgeois- covering 75 yrs of her work, the other a major intervention in the Turbine Hall by Doris Salcedo. Both shows oblige consideration and contemplation as opposed to consumption. Go see and feel.
17 October 2007, posted by Brian Boylan
The other 90%
This summer, the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York had a small, brilliant show in need of a much bigger stage.
‘Design for the other 90%’ is thankfully a misleading title. This is not design of the West rescuing the third world but is instead a show of genius innovation ideas emerging from communities all over the developing world, some as independent ventures, some in collaboration with nonprofits. The common themes are the most basic and hard fought needs of all – food, energy, health, housing and education – and the results are breakthrough. A drum of water you can roll rather than carry, furniture for churches built from the debris of Hurricane Katrina, little sheds which work as safe houses in disaster zones, energy to fuel a stove produced by a parabolic mirror dish on the outside of a small house, a treadle pump to irrigate fields – there are endless examples of sheer inventiveness which are cheap to make, easy to use and ease the grind of daily life.
For every startlingly obvious problem to solve, there’s one which we in the developed world might struggle to see, like the simple need to mark out a space where before there was none. This produced Public Architecture’s Day Labour Station – a mobile unit built as needed by US day labourers to create a place to wait, meet and study. It is a quick and simple way to make a temporary community.
There’s a big lesson here about how innovation happens, about designing for real needs rather than inventing new ones, even design which is first about function rather than aesthetics, but most of all the show’s message is one of massive commercial opportunity. Since 2.8 billion people live on less that $2 a day, making life-transforming products which can sell for less than the price of a chicken, and then distributing them on a massive scale, is a lucrative opportunity for everyone. It is a vital shift towards embracing developing countries as consumers, producers and industry leaders rather than the recipients of charity.
6 October 2007, posted by Suzanne Livingston
Where’s the trust?
Peter Drucker once said ‘if you find an executive focusing on CSR, fire him and fire him fast’. That’s all changed. The merging of the economic and ethical is transforming the meaning and context of trust. Hitherto, trust has been an essential ingredient of all brands and their reputations.
However, the notion of trust (in the commercial world) has been mainly centered on the transaction itself, but not any more. The notion of trust has dramatically moved on from trust in the company’s product to trust in the people behind the product. Now it’s less about ‘can I trust them to deliver?’ but ‘are they the sort of people who would...?’ And a plethora of words can fill in the missing space. Are they the sort of people who would tell me it’s 100% organic when it’s not; who would use child labor to make their products cheaper; test on animals; and pollute the environment in the search of a big buck?
Clearly, there is a market for trust. Most organizations refer to the meaning of share in terms of market share, profit share and share of wallet, etc. Simultaneously, however, they are competing with other organizations for share of trust. So in today’s world, full of litigation, accusation, scandal and bankruptcy, evidence and counter evidence, when it’s down to the wire, whom do you trust? Which of the organizations you are doing business with are and have the sort of people who would tell the earnest truth in this matter?
Times have changed and all around us there is a battle for share of trust and it’s a very large market worth billions.
1 October 2007, posted by Dean Crutchfield
Fashion conscience
This year’s New York Fashion Week showcased eco-friendly clothes and conscious consumption as 2007 proves to be more global, more giving and more green. Peter Ingwersen, a Danish designer, has collaborated with the Ugandan government to produce organic cotton that will be used in his Noir fashion brand.
Linda Loudermilk’s collection, which featured a wide range of materials from Japanese sasawashi to human hair, is one of several green fashion shows and green fashion events about town. SANS, a NYC label, also showcased innovative eco-friendly designs.
On the giving front, Glamour magazine’s initiative Fashion Gives Back partnered actresses like Amanda Peet in collaboration with designers to create limited-edition T-shirts benefiting Malaria No More. The designers at the event, both large and small, also reflected a more diverse and global range, representing cultures from every corner of the globe including Russia, Japan, Taiwan, India, Spain and Australia. For more information visit www.olympusfashionweek.com
5 September 2007, posted by Eliza Blank
Seeing mankind’s footprint
In an era of disengagement where many individuals are incognizant of the lifecycle (fabrication, transportation, disposal) of most material things that surround them in their daily lives, the documentary ‘Manufactured Landscapes’ shines some light into the effects that global economy has had on our planet.
The feature documentary by Jennifer Baichwal captures Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky’s images as he travels through China showing what this massive industrial revolution looks like. He simply tries to bring awareness to the issues without looking for specific solutions, with the hope that we may be a little more conscious about the way we live in this world. This is particularly topical given the recent attention placed on China with the upcoming 2008 Olympics. In fact, Hi Jintao, China’s communist party leader, has put the environment on the top of the party’s charter where it will receive high profile attention.
For more information, click here
Movie trailer
10 min of the documentary on YouTube
Economist article
5 September 2007, posted by Sylvia Vaquer
Switching off
According to a recent study by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, Americans consumed 0.5% fewer hours of media in 2006 than they did in 2005. While not statistically significant, the data does show that consumption is flattening. Consumption of broadcast television, recorded music and newspapers all declined.
Are people any less interested in media than they used to be? Not at all. In fact, people remain quite interested in what media has to say about the world around them. However, people have learned how to leverage digital media alternatives to consume media more efficiently. Why watch the entire episode of Saturday Night Live when the funniest clips will be available on YouTube the next day? Digital media allows for place and time shifting and enables people to be choosy about what media they consume. People can weed out any information that is not of interest to them and focus instead on only the most salient topics. More than ever, people are only limited by the speed of their mouse.
As a result, spending on alternative advertising is increasing while traditional advertising spending is relatively flat. According to Mediaweek, alternative advertising spending, including mobile and video games, increased by 36.6% in 2006 to $26.53 billion. Leading advertisers will have to continue to find ways to combat audience fragmentation and decreased attention spans by taking advantage of new media forms.
For more information, visit http://www.mediaweek.com and http://www.nytimes.com
5 September 2007, posted by Lindsey Zuckerman
Optimism and the West
We’re moving rapidly into a post-western world, and Suicide of the West by Chris Smith and Richard Koch is a great primer on what that could mean. Now in paperback, this is a short and lucid polemic on the achievements of western civilisation over the last 2000 years, and the threats western liberalism now faces. The book isn’t as pessimistic as its title suggests – in fact, Smith and Koch argue that optimism is one of the great western principles, one that we must keep alive. An exhilarating read. More at www.amazon.co.uk
1 August 2007, posted by Robert Jones