Having a moment

 

There’s one High Street slogan that’s been around since before the late Queen was born, but like Her Majesty, has recently become history.  Never Knowingly Undersold was not originally intended as a customer-facing slogan, but became so in 1925, when it was first used by the Peter Jones store in Sloane Square.

Although this slogan is not exactly slick (it’s a bit of a mouthful), it is unusual not just because of its longevity, but also because it’s a firm promise to the customer, rather than an imperative of how the customer should live their life, in the style of something like Just Do It, or a statement of attitude or belief as in Life is for Sharing.

The point about a customer promise is that, even if few customers go to the bother of asking John Lewis to refund the difference on an item bought more cheaply elsewhere, it builds trust in the brand and demonstrates serious commitment to its users.

Of course, shopping has changed beyond recognition since 1995, let alone 1925, and in these days of online retail giants and price comparison platforms, the slogan itself could not sensibly survive. John Lewis have undertaken an 18 month brand positioning process to find a replacement - something that will attract new and younger customers to the retailer.

With my nerdy branding hat on, I must say that it was fascinating for me to see the fruits of this year-and-a-half of branding labour. Some of the positioning statements/slogans (the source articles don’t make it completely clear whether these are strategic/internal or executional/customer-facing) that were considered were these:

• John Lewis: Life is beautiful
• John Lewis: Life well loved
• John Lewis: For every moment
• John Lewis: For the love of life
• For the joy of life: John Lewis
• Life & happiness: John Lewis
• For every beat: John Lewis
• Life made beautiful

And the final slogan is John Lewis: For all life’s moments.

I can’t be the only planner who has also played the “moments”, “life”, “happiness”, “joy” permutations and combinations game at some time in the quest for the ultimate positioning statement. I remember back in the 90s, there was a brand (it could have been chocolates) that advertised with the song Magic Moments, which would be hummed whenever an unsuspecting planner or account person strayed too close to generic “moment” territory.

But moments seem to be having a moment in marketing, if you’ll excuse the trite expression. I keep hearing conversations about targetting moments and have seen some rather contrived but frightening “moments universes” from research agencies to help in this task.

My concern is that the new slogan is terribly generic. IKEA could use it, but they don’t in the UK as they have something infinitely better - a slogan and campaign idea that’s a statement of attitude and a promise in one - The Wonderful Everyday. 

There’s nothing wrong with the new slogan, but there’s not a lot right with it either. It’s not a promise, it’s not a challenge, it’s not an attitude or philosophy. It has no edge, rather like “We’re there for you.”

The new ad to introduce the slogan is similar - sweet enough, hummable music, but ultimately rather beige and wallpapery.

Some new slogans grow on you over time, but I fear this one will simply go in one ear and out the other. 

RETROWURST: Chemicals in Home & Garden September 2004

 

In September 2004, I wrote on the rather unpromising-sounding topic of chemicals in home and garden. Nevertheless, the article references schoolboy bombs, drinking your own urine and packs of fags for under £2. So here goes:

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In September, everyone in Germany is back from their holidays, feeling a little glum as the first leaves start falling in the beer gardens and the mini-golf courses close up for the Autumn. People retreat back into their homes, start packing away the summer clothes, inflatable boats, garden furniture and barbeques. It’s the time of year to make a bit of an effort in the garden and a recent visit to the garden centre has inspired the theme of this month’s Extrawurst - the German war against chemicals.

 

It may seem a paradox that the country that spawned so many chemical and drug giants - Hoechst and Bayer to name but two - should be waging war on chemicals, but please hear me out. To illustrate my point, let’s pop back to the garden centre. I was after something to kill off a few weeds- in the lawn and growing up between the patio stones. I didn’t anticipate any difficulty and had the German word for weeds - Unkraut, literally ‘un-herbs’ – in my head. In the UK, of course, it’s completely in order to pick up products off the shelf to rid your lawn and garden of dandelions, thistles, slugs and even unwanted cats. Only the neat Sodium Nitrate (or whatever it is) that my brother used to combine sugar with to make schoolboy bombs back in the 1970s is probably under slightly stricter control these days. In Germany, however, I searched high and low and couldn’t find any easily accessible products on the shelves of the garden centre. I eventually saw a locked cabinet behind an information desk and enquired hesitatingly if they had anything to rid my lawn of a few dandelions. I was subjected to a complete interrogation as to the dimensions of my lawn (who, other than the average German, knows exactly how many m² their lawn is??!!) and given a lecture as to how the products were not to be let near any footpath, pavement, road or any other public place (accompanied by pointing at large handwritten signs to this effect) before the cabinet was unlocked and my weed killer handed over.

 

Maybe some of this attitude can be put down to the inherent closeness and responsibility that Germans feel for the Umwelt, or environment. There are many words that exist in German which relate to the environment which don’t have a direct English translation- such as Mülltrennung, or ‘rubbish-sorting’. But the war against chemicals is also fought on fronts with a less direct connection with the environment. Some of you may remember my piece about the Kräuterhexwhich looked into the reluctance that Germans have about treating ailments with something that might actually work. While it’s quite easy to sneak into Superdrug in a UK high street and buy copious quantities of Anadin and Alka-Seltzer (or your preferred poison) to deal with the hangover from Hell, in Germany it is rather different. None of these remedies are available in the Supermarket or even the Drogerie. You are expected to go to the pharmacist where you will be questioned carefully as to the nature of your headache and will be asked which dosage level, pack size and even possibly dosage form (don’t think about this too closely - let’s just say suppository or Zäfpchen and be done with it. Yes. For a headache.) The moral of all this is, go easy at the Oktoberfest.

 

Within the household cleaners category, the same rules seem to apply. Finding an oven cleaner that is at all effective is hard work, almost as hard as cleaning the oven itself. Ditto stuff to unblock drains - everything proudly promotes its Bio mode of action, which seems to actually mean elbow grease and sheer man (or woman) power. Needless to say, the lurid Oxy-this and Vanish-that types of products with their day-glo packaging haven’t really caught on here. At my last ‘real’ job I remember hours spent trying to convince brand managers at a well-known US detergent company that ‘anti-bac’ variants of washing powder were the ultimate turn-off to German Mums - this is the country, after all, where quite normal women’s magazines run articles about the health benefits of drinking your own urine (although marginally preferable to drinking someone else’s, I suppose.)

 

The reluctance to spray chemicals everywhere also has its consequences when buying fresh produce. It is not unusual to buy a lettuce and find it crawling with caterpillars or buzzing with bugs, and this is not just from the Bio, or organic section - I imagine one would find a whole menagerie lurking in the Lollo Rosso there! Rather than throwing up their arms in horror and demanding a refund, most Germans would find this reassuring that their salad leaves had been properly raised in a natural ecosystem.

 

Of course, it is easy to be lulled into a false sense of security and suppose that, as long as we stay away from chemicals and unnatural substances, then we are giving the Germans what they desire. But there are always exceptions to the rule. While paranoid about polluting the environment, many Germans have no such qualms about their own bodies when it comes to smoking. Smoking still bears almost no social stigma here, cigarette vending machines are on every street corner at a height that a four-year-old can reach and even Aldi Süd have capitulated and are now selling cigarettes. At €2.90 for a packet of 19 ‘Giants’ (that is just under £2), there is not much financial motivation for anyone to give up!

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Covid has made a little dent into the “germ/ans are good” perception, but other than that, the view on chemicals is just as strong as before.

Plus ca change? Well, not exactly. Remember those £2 ciggies? In your (pipe) dreams. At last, it appears, the tide is turning and we may well be at the fag-end of the great German smoke-fest (to mix more metaphors than is good for me). 

News of the World

Back in the last decade, it was social media - Facebook, Mumsnet, various writing forums - that were my trap for getting tangled up in when I should have been doing something better. These days, I’m more likely to end up scrolling through endless articles and related comments on regular news sites.

It’s easier to justify because:

1. I’m paying a subscription

2. It’s a good thing to be informed about what’s going on in the world, surely?

Yet these news sites often leave me with that nasty bingey mental junk food feeling that I used to get from Facebook:

    - that wasn’t paricularly nutritious or satisfying

    - and I couldn’t stop: the “enough is enough” button was having a day off

I’ve been reading How Modern Media Destroys Our Minds, from The School of Life, which analyses this phenomenon and offers a few curative suggestions. 

The click-baity title I could have done without - another example of the mismatch I wrote about here. That aside, the book shows how the modern media preys on the less desirable aspects of human nature - passivity, celebrity, nastiness and distraction, which encompasses all sorts of stuff like helplessness, outrage, mawkishness, schadenfreude and sanctimoniousness.

It’s a relief to know that my own reaction to the modern media diet is not unusual.

On to the suggested cures. There are 9 of these, of which two particularly appealed to me:

Become an aristocrat (of the spirit)

This is inspired in part by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly who declared that “the most beautiful destiny: to have genius and be obscure.”

The book says of Aristocrats of the Spirit: they are set apart not by haughty contempt but by a melancholic certainty that the disputes of the populace will be chaotic, brutal, partisan, deeply illogical and unfair because this is the normal, unfortunate lot of the human animal.

And that obscurity leads to the idea:

Never Be Famous

I’ll admit it: 10 years ago I loved the idea of collecting clicks and likes, for blog posts to go viral, for my books to be picked up by a top publisher and top director and all the rest. But the idea of that now is quite hideous. I like retreating back into obscurity, which is my “safe place”.

In a world without fame, certain books, sofas, cheeses or lamps will still be better than others, certain ideas will still be more valuable, certain people will still have hearts that are kinder and more sensitive, but none of these would have to be identified by the destructive and manic spotlight of the media.

Having said that, of course, this is one area (or many) where brands are not like people.

Mismatch

 

Among the many newsletters I subscribe to, those from The School of Life are less likely to be binned straight away than almost any other. (The most likely to be binned, by the way, are those that appear at the weekend, despite multiple attempts to unsubscribe).

What do I like about The School of Life? Well, I think it’s the tonality and attitude of the articles - calming, reassuring and wise. Universal, the opposite of throwaway. A recent article alerted me to the subtle difference between self-acceptance and self-love. Others talk about the value of melancholy, or failure, or other contributions to the human condition. It’s all so much more insightful than all that “being your best self” blah. I’ve always wondered - “best” in whose judgement?

However, what I encountered on my last visit to The School of Life was a rather unseemly mismatch between the tone of the articles and the website itself.

Hardly had I got into the site when a box popped up and more-or-less grabbed my wallet:

Not so much self-hatred as a disregard for the reader as a human being in favour of a nice source of income.

It got worse. The money-grabber was quickly pushed out of the way by the stalker:

“No” is the answer. It irritates me that many in the Anglo-Saxon world seem to think Berlin is the be-all and end-all of Germany. 

And to complete the mismatching tonality, the “feedback” for a site that is all about the depth and complexity of human emotion is reduced to a few silly emojis:

I’m not a huge fan of Brand Books the size of War and Peace that give strict instructions about style and tone, but surely an organisation like The School of Life could use their insight and understanding  so that their content and design isn’t quite such a case of chalk and cheese?

RETROWURST: Grillen August 2004

 

It’s going up to 36°C today and 39°C tomorrow, and I am rather wondering if our garden BBQ will fire up on its own accord. It was no surprise to me, shuffling back in the Extrawurst archives to find that I wrote about BBQs and Grillen from the German perspective back in August 2004. For more on this meat-and-mayo-fest, read on ...

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Now that summer has finally taken hold of Germany in a big way, after a couple of false starts, the season of barbequing or Grillen and general al fresco eating is officially open.

While we are used to a BBQ being a rather special event (and, out of necessity, often a moveable feast, with the moveable element often consisting of moving rickety old garden chairs, burnt sausages and a lukewarm box of white wine back into the kitchen to escape the unexpected downpour) the average German family will probably eat outside in summer four or five times a week. Given the frequency of this event, there is much bigger business to be had in Germany than in the UK with the food and accessories associated with Grillen. Just a cursory look at Heinz’ website dedicated to the joys of Grillen,the Heinz Mitgrillzentrale (www.unverzichtbar-zum-grillen.de ) will give you just a little taste of just how seriously BBQ-ing is taken here.

 

Let’s start with meat. In the UK, we’ll typically throw a few sausages, hamburgers and chicken legs on the BBQ to get nicely black outside and raw inside, accompanied by a few ‘grilled veggies’ as a concession to the trendy and vegetarian amongst us. However, steaks seem to be regarded as ‘a bit of a waste’ to BBQ by a lot of in the UK. Maybe it’s because our barbeques themselves are not quite up to the technical standards of the Germans (and any self-respecting German has at least two BBQs – from a rustic briquette burning device built into the garden to a sophisticated gas grill to cater for parties of fifty hungry people) or maybe it’s because we don’t get quite so much practice on this rainy little island at the art of barbequing, but somehow we don’t quite trust ourselves to throw anything costing a reasonable amount of money onto the barbeque.

 

In Germany, however, steaks are staple barbeque fare. Either pork or beef, they are bought in huge catering packs of at least six large steaks, even for a family of three. The steaks themselves are bought ready-marinated in a range of different flavours from herby-garlicky to spicy-peppery. In summer, butchers offer a wide range of ready-prepared steaks, including steaks stuffed or filled with mozzarella or bacon for example. In fact, apart from a few Bratwurst, usually just provided for the children or for adults as a sort of appetizer for the real feast to come, you won’t see much on a German barbeque other than steaks, more steaks and even more steaks.

 

If steaks have the starring role at a German barbeque, then the role of the best supporting player must always go to the salads. There is a whole strange culture relating to salads in Germany, with its own idiosyncrasies, rules and regulations. While ready-made salads are available in vast variety at the butcher’s, in the deli counter at the supermarket and pre-packed in the chill counter, it’s really not the done thing to turn up at a barbeque with a salad that someone else has made. In fact, there are some very close parallels with baking - just as every mother in the UK is expected to bake some creation for the school fair or nativity play, mothers in Germany are expected to produce a salad as well as a perfect Schwarzwälderkirschtorte for the Kindergartenfest. And there are many other occasions on which one is simply expected to appear mit Salat - at the local street party, for example, or at a Polterabend, which is a sort of informal pre-Wedding party where everyone smashes plates (don’t ask!) or even for someone’s birthday do – in the UK we have PBAB whereas in Germany it’s more likely to be ESMB (eine Salat mitbringen, bitte). I have even recently invested in an interesting device called a Salatkurier- a salad bowl with a lid and carrying handles which allows one to transport salads from one Fest to the next in complete safety.

 

Part of the salad culture involves a strange pecking-order which you are only likely to find out about if you contravene its unwritten rules. For example, you may make the mistake of providing a salad involving something quite acceptable to our tastes - a potato salad with new potatoes, skins on and a bit of mint - only to find that, in your circle, Frau Schmidt and Frau Schmidt alone is allowed to make her potato salad - a calorific concoction involving buckets of mayonnaise garnished with hard-boiled eggs - and that anything in the food and drink category other than tea involving mint is viewed by most Germans with deepest suspicion.

 

In typical fashion, while Germans are very proud of their homemade salads, they are also a little rigid when it comes to experimentation. It is often quite fun to slip in a slightly unexpected creation just to see how they react. It’s probably true to say that there is a fairly standard repertoire of salads to be had in Germany. There’s Frau Schmidt’s potato concoction as mentioned above plus its Bavarian cousin (no mayo but stock, oil and vinegar, bacon bits and a few radishes and certainly no potato skins), a Nudelsalat which I normally avoid - noodles with more mayo plus chopped ham and cold tinned peas, Wurstsalat, of course, which normally involves slivers of sausage drowning in more mayo (although there is a slightly healthier Swiss cousin with cheese slivers, sliced gherkin , onion and vinegar/oil dressing) or a plain Mix- or Bunte-Salat which is normally a mixture of leaves, carrot and tomatoes smothered in yoghurt dressing.

 

You’ll have noticed that few of these salads would win many prizes at Weightwatchers. Although you’ll occasionally see a green salad, or perhaps a Bauern- or Hirtensalat (which is rather like what we’d call a Greek salad, with peppers and feta), generally German salads are a bit of a mayonnaise fest, filled with danger for unsuspecting vegetarians (it’s difficult to find a German salad without some meat content). While there has been a bit of interest in flavours and ingredients from, say, Italy, the staple calorific salads still have pride of place.

 

Overall, taking the barbeque/outdoor eating category, it is big business in Germany. Aside from all the ‘hardware’ of barbeques, utensils, salad bowls, briquettes and so on, there is a huge market in sauces, dressings and ingredients, flavourings and other accompaniments. The big players in this area are partly the multi-nationals we know, such as Heinz, Knorr and Kraft, with the omnipresent Miracle Whip (see www.miraclewhip.de ) but there are also some local players who are onto a fairly sizeable portion of the cake (or steak!). These include Kühne (see www.kuehne.de )  Develey (see www.develey.de ) and Feinkost Dittmann (see www.feinkost-dittmann.de ). There seems to be an opportunity to help Germans to expand their ‘outside eating’ repertoire by taking them by the hand via countries and themes. For example, a huge range of Italian-influenced anti-pasti and ingredients from Deluna (Switzerland) has appeared in Supermarkets this year and the Greek flavour of this summer’s sporting events has clearly had an influence on the nation’s palate with supermarkets putting together their own displays of feta for grilling, tzatziki and stuffed vine-leaves.

 

While Frau Schmidt’s potato salad is unlikely to be completely usurped by Moroccan Couscous and Coriander salad in the near future, there certainly does seem to be an opportunity for food manufacturers to take advantage of the German love of eating al fresco for as long as the sun shines.

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Eighteen years on and there’s been something of a shift - but as with all these things, it’s been a shift to more variety and choice rather than a “From-To” thingy as beloved of strategy powerpoint charts, where stuff gets swept aside into obsolecence and replaced with new shiny stuff.

Turkish, North African and Mediterranean influence has grown, with the inevitable Halloumi and other cheeses for grilling, as well as Merguez and a wider choice of sausages that don’t involve pork. Plenty more lamb, poultry and beef cuts to grill are available.  And yes, couscous has made an appearance on the German grill accompaniments scene. 

Ditto vegan/plant-based alternatives to meat, for example from The Vegetarian Butcher  . But those marinated pork steaks are here to stay - you’re just going to need a bigger table for the greater selection of grilled goodies.

In 2004, it seems, I hadn’t discovered the mayonnaisy horror that is Schichtsalat, (or maybe I just blocked it from my consciousness) but that’s alive (probably with listeria) and kicking, too.

Good Pop Bad Pop Good Book

 

I’m back in the UK, in the old house, busying myself with sifting through junk. Well, not really junk, rather my past, which makes the task simultaneously more fascinating and more tricky.

I’m being accompanied by Jarvis Cocker. Not musically, but in a literary sense. I’m part way through Good Pop Bad Pop which is described as “An Inventory”. Another way that Jarvis puts it is “self excavation” - a sort of archeology of the self via artefacts rediscovered in the loft.

In Chapter 9 of the book, those rediscovered artefacts are FMCG brands, starting with a sliver of soap, worn down to the “distinctive brand asset” and not much more:

Jarvis kept this soapy remnant because the Imperial Leather design changed. Other examples he cites are Marmite, which used to have a metal lid and Rose’s Lime Juice, which had a glass bottle with tiny limes in relief. All of these packs and designs were tied up with memories.

And while I’m not a famous musician, so my Castrol and Rover tins will never end up in an art gallery or hard-backed book, I’ve got a few branded memories of my own.

Most people of my age are nostalgic for the crinkly orange cellophane of the old Lucozade bottle. And what about the Strepsils tin? The empty tin was repurposed by resourceful children for all sorts of things - I kept dried shredded sunflower leaves in one - maybe it’s best not to ask.

Jarvis Cocker’s analysis of why he would have kept a useless scrap of soap is about the aspect of his personality that resists change. He concludes (in one of my favourite passages of the book so far):

I am “over” my problem with change. I embrace change. (Maybe “embrace” is too strong a word: more like “I awkwardly shake hands with change.”) I can move on.

I’ll awkwardly shake hands to that. 

Take out your earpods and listen!

 

Back in the last century, when such things were aspirational and fashionable, I was a high-flying young advertising executive. I have undoubtably been in the British Airways Executive Club more years than those runningit have been alive, and made it to the dizzy heights of Gold Card Level.

Things have changed, to state the obvious, but I still hang on in there in the club, clutching my meagre points in the hope of having a “free” glass of fizz next time I fly to the U.K. However, given the grim news on cancellations and airport chaos, I’m not sure I risk booking a flight, let alone one with BA.

What are my Executive Club friends doing, meanwhile? Sending out cheery newsletters. OK, we all need cheering up, and they must have enough data collected on me by now to be able to make some reasonable guesses about what kind of content might be the most cheering. 

A recent newsletter offered me “inspirational stories from LGBTQ+ writers and explorers” as well as “luxurious and remote desert hotels.” I was invited to “take a peek at family-friendly pads” and to do the “which cabin bag is right for you” quiz and fill it with “this season’s must-have travel essentials.”

The ghastly, cliche-ridden trash journalism style is bad enough (written by AI?) but as for an attempt at empathy or customer-centricity or whatever marketers are meant to be good at? It sounds as if they are writing for a not-so-bright 12-year-old with stinking rich parents. Which I’m not.

Equally dreadful is a recent email from P&O Ferries who say: “We’d love to still be your preferred ferry operator for your next trip, and are truly passionate about showing you all that travelling by sea has to offer on board our ships.” Like heck you are. Why would I be enanmoured of a ferry operator that sacks hundreds of its staff without consultation, then replaces them with desperate people paid peanuts?

I don’t want to take transparency to extremes and know every last little detail of corporate comings and goings, but surely people can be treated like adults? 

I breathed a sigh of relief when I got this from Lufthansa’s Executive Board. By no means perfect (these things never can be) but at least they are talking the right language:

Dear Ms. Imgrund,

Two tough years of perceived and actual grounding lie behind us in aviation. All our Lufthansa Group employees have been wishing for nothing more throughout than to finally be able to welcome you back aboard our more than 750 aircraft.  Unfortunately, however, as the Northern Hemisphere summer begins and with global travel restrictions now almost all lifted, everyone involved in aviation worldwide is reaching almost daily the limits of the resources that are currently available. And the ramp-up of the complex air transport system from almost zero to now almost 90 per cent is clearly not proceeding with the reliability, the robustness and the punctuality that we would like to offer you again.  We can only apologize to you for this. And we want to be completely honest: In the coming weeks, as passenger numbers continue to rise, be it for leisure or business travel, the situation is unlikely to improve in the short term. Too many employees and resources are still unavailable, not only at our infrastructure partners but in some of our own areas, too. Almost every company in our industry is currently recruiting new personnel, with several thousand planned in Europe alone. However, this increase in capacity will only have its desired stabilizing effect by the time winter comes.  In addition, the ongoing war in Ukraine is severely restricting available airspace in Europe. This is leading to massive bottlenecks in the skies and thus, unfortunately, to further flight delays.  In the summer of 2023, we not only expect to have a much more reliable air transport system worldwide. We will be welcoming you back on board our Airbus A380s, too. We decided today to put the A380, which continues to enjoy great popularity, back into service at Lufthansa in summer 2023. In addition to this, we are further strengthening and modernizing our fleets with some 50 new Airbus A350, Boeing 787 and Boeing 777-9 long-haul aircraft and more than 60 new Airbus A320/321s in the next three years alone.  We promise you that our more than 100,000 Lufthansa Group employees will be doing everything humanly possible to provide you with the best possible air travel experience in the coming weeks, even under the current difficult circumstances. And they will be doing all this with a commitment that deserves the highest respect, not only from us on our Group Executive Board.  So on behalf of all our employees, I sincerely hope that you feel very welcome on board after your return, which is something we have all been keenly awaiting. We thank you for your loyalty; and we hope we may count on your understanding, too, should your journey not yet go quite as expected or planned.  We are doing our utmost to again offer you the quality, the punctuality and the reliability that you can rightly expect from your Lufthansa Group airlines as soon as we possibly can.  Stay with us.