BREXILE: I left my soul in SW19

 

     New Year’s Eve 1995/6

This where I get personal. 

Not much about brands or ads, but a lot of me-me-me. (I’m entitled, though, aren’t I?)

Next year’s big project will be clearing out and selling up. Going into Brexile officially. I’m dreading it, but perhaps it’ll be therapeutic to jot down my feelings and experiences so I can look back and laugh.

It’s also a chance to regurgitate some of my creative writing. This first piece was written in 2010, so 14 years ago, but also 14 years after my move here.

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I LEFT MY SOUL IN SW19

 

In March 1996, I jumped the great ship Britannia as she sailed towards the island of Cool. My one-way ticket cut through the Heathrow fog like a landing-light. Terminal 1 echoed with finality – no going back?

 

London still slept but my mind already marched to the beat of the Teutonic clock. My heart followed more than willingly, long lost in the mists of a fairytale.

 

Only my English soul stayed stubborn. 

 

Like my mishandled baggage, it was wrenched kicking and screaming from the conveyor belt at Frankfurt. 

 

The tear could not be repaired.

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Just. Slop. I mean Stop.

 

I’m not sure how many predictions reports I can bear to read this year, but I started with WFA as it seems mercifully short. 

Under the heading of “Back to Fundamentals. Again.” came this thought from a WFA member at a recent CMO forum in Toronto:

So many of us are looking at the same Gen AI tools that we’re all doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes.

Well, yes. Alongside using the same Growth Flywheel template, Customer Journey template and all the other formats, templates and other paint-by-numbers gubbins. 

The big brands started their “show and tell, we’ve been playing with AI” kick some time ago, but as a LinkedIn friend of mine pointed out no-one is interested any more. 

And now the butcher, baker and candlestick maker on the corner (and the local nail studio) will be getting in on the act. 

Welcome to the Slop-o-verse. The Multi-coloured Slop Shop.

Maybe for my own part, I should stop with the negative blog posts about this stuff and try and find something a touch more worthwhile.

If this is the future of advertising, I’m underwhelmed

 

This new commercial for Vodafone describes itself as “groundbreaking”. 

Was the YouTube description written by AI? Highly likely, as the film itself was completely produced by AI - text to picture, picture to video, video to video - with a little bit of human help sprinkled here and there by the director, client and creative teams involved.

As a film, it’s OK. AI is definitely capable of better quality film than it was a few months ago. There’s nothing too alarming or creepy about this ad - or, indeed, the Coca Cola Christmas ad this year.

But while there’s nothing too much wrong with it, there’s nothing too much right with it either, in my view. It’s yet another one of those diversity vignette films. The soundtrack, The Rhythm of the Night, is a dance hit from 1993.

And that’s what this ad feels like to me - 1993. Back then, in the agency, we’d often cobble together (well, that’s unfair, as it took a lot of time and skill in those days) “mood films”, sometimes in the form of a “manifesto.” The purpose was to bring the core of what the brand was about to life. It was more entertaining than a brand onion, and more likely to win you a place on a pitch shortlist.

What these things weren’t, however, is creative ideas. They were usually briefed in by a planner and their audience wasn’t Joe and Jane Public - it was the client, to flatter them a little about their wonderful brand.

And meanwhile, in the spirit of “Everybody’s Doing It”, the ghastly stock photos of people joining hands, staring excitedly at their laptops, putting pieces of fruit in front of their eyes or cradling a tender young shoot in the palm of their hands have been replaced with AI-generated monstrosities.

I’m working with a client in the energy sector at the moment, where the visions seem particularly nightmarish:

I do hope I see a little more originality next year!

Sources, proof-points, facts and references - and how they get in the way of a good story

 

A few years back, I had a little whinge about the Mr Gradgrinds of the world. Specifically, the instance on backing everything up with “facts," taking up time I could usefully spend on telling a compelling story.  

It strikes me that there’s even more demand for all this today. Maybe it’s because of the epidemic of high-profile people doctoring their CV, or their Doctorate Thesis. Or because Mr “Fake News” is heading back to the White House, or the unstoppable rise of AI. But I do find it wearying in the extreme.

There are some amusing incidents along the way, though. I signed up to one of those freelancer platforms and was asked to produce (and upload) some questionnaire from the German Finanzamt about and confirming my freelancer status. I told the person who’d asked for it that yes, I believe I did fill something like that in, but it would have been in 2002. And it would have been on paper. And I would have sent it by post. And no, I wouldn’t have kept a copy as I didn’t have a photocopier in my home at the time (not many people did). 

They would just have to take my word for it - which, luckily, they did. I suspect the woman who asked wasn’t even born in 2002 and was embarassed and bewildered by the whole thing.

Taking my word for it. When I write a presentation, or an article, it’s the bird building a nest syndome. There are bits and pieces - from stuff recently read, things I’ve learned, things I just know, intuitively, from long experience etc. etc. I can’t remember the source or reference for each bit because it’s not important. What’s important is the finished nest, where everything fits together in a lovely integral whole and you think - ah, yes!

In the end, it’s a matter of trust. As a whole, I don’t tend to make stuff up, or twist facts and figures to suit my argument (well, not too much). Sources, references and “proof-points” do tend to trip up the reader in the flow of the story, and there's little way of including them elegantly without the article ending up like the aforementioned Doctorate Thesis.

On the other hand, with this kind of howler coming out from an outfit the size of Microsoft, maybe those Mr Gradgrinds do have a point? 

Condiments of the season

 

The clocks have gone back, the feather duvets retrieved from the cellar and the beergarden afternoons definitely a memory of sunnier days. At the weekend, I experienced a last stand in miniature from a Bavarian speciality that I associate firmly with the dog days of summer through to the autumn jollity of the Oktoberfest.

At a birthday party, we were served canapés of Weißwurst, Salzpretzel and a dollop of Süßsenf. Rather like this:

Weißwurst is a delicacy that doesn’t have the immediate appeal to Brits of a Bratwurst. I remember meeting a UK colleague in Munich at around 11am and his stomach definitely turned when I ordered this particular snack and started tucking in. The sausage itself is made from veal (I’m not over-keen to find out which particular bits), pork fat, parsley and spices. The discarded sausage skin does look particularly unappealing. Traditionally, these sausages were made in the morning and butchers and restaurants were keen to get rid of them by mid-day. Again, I’d rather not ask too many questions as to why.

They are, however, delicious and there’s a certain charm in the way they are served, floating around in a terrine-type bowl with lion’s head handles and maybe a Bavarian flag pattern:

 

Now, you may have noticed that mini-terrine of brown stuff to the right. Once again, I’ll refrain from saying what this resembles, but it is Süßsenf - sweet mustard. The mustard seeds are roasted and the mustard is sweetened with sugar, apple purée or honey. The first commercial producer was Develey, who are still going strong today. But the market leader is the one pictured above - Händlmaier. 

Karl and Johanna Händlmaier opened their first butcher’s shop in Regensburg in 1910, and Johanna created the Süße Hausmachersenf  in 1914, to go with the sausages they sold to eat on the premises.  Son Joseph and his wife Luise took over the butchers’ shops after the 2nd WW, and it is Luise who turned these into a thriving mustard and condiments business after her husband’s death in 1955. She’s the lady depicted on the label, of course.

The website is full of Weißwurst wisdom, including the etiquette for eating the sausages. In typical German fashion, it’s less about “how do you eat yours?” and more about orderly steps and correct procedures. 

Whichever way, it’s fun to be writing about sausages again on Extrawurst. It’s been a while!

  

RETROWURST: Baking November 2006

 

Advent is fast-approaching so it’s time to whisk yourself into the Home Bakery. 

I wonder if I’d have taken up baking if I hadn’t moved over here?

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If you were to wander around the shops in Germany at the moment, one thing that you wouldn’t fail to notice – apart from the explosion of Christmas decorations – is that the baking season is well and truly upon us. Every supermarket has displays of enticing baking ingredients and every Tchibo, Lidl or Aldi that does weekly products has a brochure with a picture of mother and cute daughter in red aprons, surrounded by an overwhelming collection of ingredients and gadgets from electrical cookie cutters to non-fat donut makers. This time of year, the just-before-advent season in middle to end-November is the absolute peak season for baking in Germany. It is expected that, by the first Sunday of Advent, that one should have baked enough Plätzchen – biscuits to you and me – to last you well until the New Year.

 

Although the pre-advent season is the peak of the baking-frenzy, Germany does have a strong culture of baking at most other times of year. Baking is one of those activities that combine a number of typically German values and obsessions. First and foremost, baking is an activity that has to do with family and togetherness: the idea of a gemütlich afternoon with advent candles, coffee and home-baked goodies in the close family circle is bound to get most Germans a little teary. Of course, most of the baking is done by women and this re-affirms many of the attitudes that the likes of Eva Hermann are trying to push back onto German women: that being a good Hausfrau should be the sole goal in life.

 

Another German value that baking reflects is that of tradition. Recipes are handed down through the generations and generations may come together to bake. The grandmother may be the expert on Stollen while the granddaughter may be a dab hand at the Zimtsternen. Most families will have very set traditions of where and when they enjoy their Adventskaffee. At other times of year, too, certain types of cakes and pastries come into their own:  Apfelkuchen and Pflaumenkuchen in the autumn, for example, or Berliner (doughnuts) at Carnival time.

 

Finally, baking gives wonderful expression to the German love of gadgets. It is quite amazing to see what even the average German household has in the way of baking gadgets. Several cake tins in different sizes, formats and materials are just the start of it. A waffle maker is standard, and cupboards and drawers will be full of everything from a plastic doily-like thing to make pretty icing sugar patterns with to a special “click shut and carry” plastic case for your Gugelhupf. German ingenuity really comes to the fore in the world of candied peel and chocolate hundred and thousands.

 

While baking seems to be something that has undergone a revival in the UK, in Germany, it never went away. There does not seem to be the cult of the celebrity chef here, although there are a couple of me-too German versions of Nigella or Jamie Oliver knocking around here, if that is not too unpalatable a thought. Perhaps this is because the real celebrities here are those millions of ordinary women who bake regularly for the Landfrauen stand at the town Fest, or the open day at the Kindergarten or simply for Sunday Kaffee und Kuchen, advent or not. Cakes and other baked goods are simply a part of life in Germany that “belongs to it” as they say here. At flea markets or craft fairs, the price to have a stand is usually a couple of Euros and a home-made cake. At every town or club celebration, there will be a cake stand. And any time that you invite someone around for coffee, no matter how informal the occasion, there will be at least some expectancy that you’ll have gone to a bit of trouble to bake something.

 

All this is not to say, however, that bought cakes have no place in Germany. Of course they do, but the homemade cakes are seen as the norm. In the supermarket, the range of pre-packed cakes is fairly narrow compared to the UK and is typified by the sort of cakes made by Bahlsen (www.bahlsen.de): relatively simple “slab” cakes. These are normally bought when you have a good excuse for not having baked yourself or for when people pop round spontaneously (not a very common occurrence in Germany, where everything is planned and double-planned). The cake is then produced with a rather apologetic face and comments will go along the lines of “well, of course these shop-bought cakes are adequate but it’s not nearly as good as your Aunt Waltraud’s.”

 

On the other hand, fresh “bought” cakes have a different status. Bäckereis and Konditoreis are sprinkled liberally all over Germany rather like flaked almonds or chopped pistachios. Cakes and Torten can be bought to be consumed on the premises or carefully packed for the Gemütlichkeit of one’s own home. The selection of cakes in these places tends to be extravagant to say the least but even here, there is often the feeling that, although the Torte may look like a work of art, Aunt Waltraud has probably still got the edge when it comes to the taste.

 

To get back to the business of home-baking, one brand really does rule the roost. While Maggi is the queen of the savoury kitchen in Germany, then Dr. Oetker is the king of baking. Dr. Oetker (www.droetker.de ) is an iconic, sprawling institution of a brand and seems to have dictated what goes on in German kitchens for over a hundred years. As well as providing all of the baking ingredients from baking powder to gelatine to flavourings to vanilla sugar – all carefully dosed-out and pre-portioned – Dr. Oetker also does a range of cake and pastry mixes and, importantly, for the role of the brand as bakery oracle, cookery and baking books. More than merely recipe books, these books have become indispensable classics in the “how to” art of baking. With increased mobility, these books can become a mother-substitute for young women wondering exactly how you do remove a sponge base from a 28cm Springform tin.

 

While Dr. Oetker is without doubt the leading player on the home baking stage, there is also a large cast of specialist supporting brands. When it comes to decorating your cake and specific ingredients, Schwartau (www.schwartau.de ), whose main strength as a brand is actually in fruit and jam, have everything you need from pre-zested lemon to poppy-seed filling. Toppits (www.toppits.de ) are specialists in baking paper products. And in the area of gadgetry, you cannot escape the presence of Fackelmann (www.fackelmann.de ) with their ingenious devices for the kitchen.

 

Finally, it is not all deep-rooted tradition in the world of home-baking, contrary to expectations. New trends and movements in other food and drink areas are seized upon enthusiastically in the baking world. In fact, Dr. Oetker publishes a book called Modetorten in which you’ll find – in addition to the expected Cappuccino and Latte in cake versions – cake recipes with Coca Cola and Fanta and even cakes in the shape of car tyres and snowboards.

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Of course, since 2006, Insta, Pinterest and TikTok have all become mini baking shows. Even I’ve joined in with my #sicklycakes 

Dr. Oetker’s Modetorten look as scrumptious and preposterous as ever online these days - anyone fancy an Aperol-Spritz Cake?

I’m leaving you, England. But we’ll stay friends, for old times’ sake.

 

There comes a point where you have to part company.

With a partner, an employer, a country, a way of life.

It’s finally come to that with me and England.

Is it Brexit? Is it AI? Is it me? Who knows?

I read this, the other day, in yet another excellent article by Ian Leslie:

We’re giving up our USP in order to meet the machines on their turf. Meanwhile we’re training humans to think and act algorithmically, following rules and checking boxes.

And that’s the issue. When I left the UK, in 1996, I was a human being. But now, the country’s systems are trying to mould me into a machine.

And I don’t fit.

My broadband and landline service in my UK home has changed to TalkTalk. Not my wish. I’m sent paper bills, for which I’m charged £33 a year, which I didn’t request. The problem is that TalkTalk don’t support or recognise any of my email addresses. 

The council has seen fit to impose a 100% premium on my Council Tax and given me precious little warning. Oh yes, easy to clear, pack up and sell a home that’s been in the family for 60 years. Especially from abroad. Only need a couple of months to do that, don’t you?

I liked the idea of monitoring my home from afar, to avoid any more frozen pipe disasters. So I had a Hive thermostat fitted. All fine and dandy, except I need a UK phone number to receive all the authentification messages. 

Undeterred, I set off to Vodafone to get a basic Nokia that’ll do the job. All well and good, yes, I do have a UK bank account, marvellous ...until ...

That account needs to be registered at a UK address. So end up having to get a pay-as-you-go phone where the number runs out if you don’t use the phone in the UK within 3 months. 

Tiresome doesn’t begin to cover all this. It’s the same frustration you feel filling in a form and you’re given a set list of options, none of which apply. And no open-ended questions.

It’s left me feeling like this:

I’m trying to live with tech in peace, honestly, I am. And I know I have agency, it’s not personal and all that.

But it’s grinding me down, and it shouldn’t.

So it’s going to be toodle-pip.

I miss my freedom to be a European, with my two passports and two homes.

The time has come to lean into my humanity and lean away from England. 

And the brands played on

 

ideo.com

It all started at the end of summer. It must have been this story that sowed the seed - the much-shared latter-day Cautionary Tale of Nike. Massimo Giunco posted Nike: An Epic Saga of Value Destruction - I echoed the thoughts of many, muddled in with my own ...

 

Sacrifice human relationships, specialist knowledge, experience, informed judgement and insight - from employees to suppliers to customers to shoppers - on the altar of "data-driven”. This is a sad tale, brilliantly written (“a cannibal ecosytem”, “... less effective but easier to be measured vs. something that was more effective but less easy to be measured ...”). But not without hope that one of the greatest brands of our time can survive this self-inflicted malady

Hot on Nike’s heels, this came along - an article by Anders Indset on the theme of Marketing is dead - long live Marketing! The author starts by reflecting back to the glory days of German ad agencies in the early 2000s (a nice little nostalgia trip for me). And then, how brands faded into the background as years of CpCs, click-marketing, Customer Journeys and search optimisation took over. But, he concludes: The world of platforms and click-optimisation has reached its logical endpoint. When everyone’s on the stage, no-one watches any more.

 

So, what now, in the age of ChatGPT and LLMs? Anders hails a return to the good old marketing of Kotler and Aaker - investing in brands, the 4Ps, good ideas. I’m definitely all for this, and will even forgive Anders his rather bizarre inclusion of the “American” Kevin Roberts and his Lovemarks amongst the marketing and advertising greats.

 

The next thoughts that flitted into my consciousness were those of Paul Worthington of invencion, on Quantitative Destruction and The Efficiency Delusion. In these articles, he writes of “quantitative myopia” - a dangerous and arrogant myopia that ignores complex reality while focusing intently on a simplistic, quantitatively measureable model, which they believe represents everything that matters.

 

The “they” in all this, the quantitative myopics, are the executives rising to the top of companies. Nike is one example. Starbucks is another losing value in its aim to become a closed-system, “category of one”, where it doesn’t matter if customers have a rotten experience as they have no choice.

 

Meanwhile, all this is exacerbated by marketing budget cuts and “having to do more with less.” Anything to do with the customer - marketing, experience, branding - is now on a very thin shoestring.

 

All of this is opinion, of course. So I’ll bring in some data. I'm not against data. But it doesn’t drive me. Or even inform me - only humans do that. The 2024 McKinsey report on the state of Marketing in Germany is called Back to the Future. What are the big topics close to the hearts of Germany’s marketers in 2024? AI? Marketing ROI? Yes, these are important, but they don’t make the top three most important. And these represent a return to the core competencies of marketing:

1. Creative content - a renaissance of originality

2. Brand-building

3. Authenticity - in word and deed.

 

The evidence reels in thick and fast - the brands are back in town. System1 have recently demonstrated how creative consistency (which doesn’t mean matching luggage, by the way) leads to creative quality, stronger brands and greater profits.

 

Which brings me right up-to-date with Interbrand and The Best Global Brands 2024, celebrating its 25th anniversary. There’s plenty to celebrate, but also a warning or two: performance marketing tactics can drive short-term financial gains, but an increasingly short-term mindset has cost the world’s most valuable brands significantly.

 

Interbrand’s advice is good - look behind the clever-cleverness of this phrase: the fastest-growing companies are not branding their businesses - they’re businessing their brand.

 

So, there we are. Branding being back in business is in the air. I expect the quantitative myopics would explain all this through a mixture of the algorithm, the Extrawurst echo chamber and she-would-say-that-wouldn’t-she. 

 

But I prefer to put it down to synchronicity.

RETROWURST: Bionade October 2006

 

I wrote a piece about Bionade in October 2006, just as the soft drink brand with a difference seemed to demonstrate that “the only way is up.” Sales in 2004 had been 7 million bottles, in 2005 20 million and 2006 was looking to at least triple that.

Rather cheesily, I wrote that “this is the story of what happens if you follow your dreams, believe in your product and stay true to your roots.”

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Rather a lot of people in Germany are nursing hangovers at the moment, following the Oktoberfest and the celebrations in connection with the Tag der Deutschen Einheit on 3^rd October. And what better way to nurse a hangover could there be than with something healthy, refreshing and German? This is the success story of a new German brand – Bionade. 

 

Bionade is a non-alcoholic drinks brand that has taken Germany by storm in the last few years, interestingly, with very little traditional advertising investment. The story of Bionade is the story of what you can do if you follow your dream, believe in your product and stay true to your roots.

 

The Bionade story started twenty years ago, in the little 3,000 inhabitant town of Ostheim vor der Rhön, which is in the North-Eastern part of Bavaria: brewery country. In this area, there are, or were, numerous small, family-owned breweries. The Braumeister of one such brewery was the inventor of Bionade. The Peter-Brauerei was struggling in the 1980s and was not far-off bankruptcy. As a desperate measure, the family opened a disco on the brewery grounds which just about kept the business afloat. As he pulled pints – or half-litres – for bored young locals until 5am, the Braumeister Dieter Leipold dreamed of inventing a drink which would not just keep the brewery going but give the whole family a comfortable existence.

 

Herr Leipold’s dream was of an alcohol-free refreshing drink that would be like “Fanta without chemicals”. Using his skill in the processes of brewing and fermentation and his knowledge of organic ingredients, he started to experiment with fermenting organic barley and in 1995, Bionade was born.

 

The family were proud of their product and wanted to offer the licence to other breweries to ferment the product themselves, using their existing skills and equipment but, in the early days, no-one was particularly interested. So, the Peter-Brauerei started producing Bionade themselves. The other breweries are probably kicking themselves now, as Bionade has been a runaway success in the last three years with 7m bottles produced in 2004, 22m in 2005 and a projected 66m for 2006. The brand is estimated to be worth €100m.

 

Bionade is a simple enough idea – a soft drink made from fermenting organic barley and malt, then diluting and adding organic sugar and concentrated juice. The drink comes in a variety of flavours – Elderberry, Herb, Lychee and Ginger-Orange. Bionade got its real breakthrough in 1998 when the owner of the über-trendy Gloria Bar in Hamburg discovered the drink at a Gastronomic Fair and started offering it to the movers and shakers who frequented his bar. In fact, most of the marketing that Bionade has carried out is non-traditional. There were no glossy T.V campaigns, rather, the brand has relied on word-of-mouth, personal recommendation (face-to-face and via Internet) and guerilla activity (promotions in “happening” bars).

 

The success has been phenomenal: sometime last year, Bionade crossed from being cult to being mainstream but has lost none of its appeal. The major grocery retailers even dropped their normal listings fee, so keen were they to get Bionade on their shelves. 

 

The Peter-Brauerei is finding it difficult to cope with demand, but plans are afoot to substantially expand their premises. Perhaps one heart-warming side to the story is that success does not appear to have gone to the family’s heads. Unlike others in their position, they have not yet been tempted to sell-out, even though it is known that Coca-Cola has offered them a substantial sum. Herr Leipold still owns the patent and his wife and stepsons run the company. Behind their decision not to sell seems to be an acknowledgement of the jobs and prosperity that they have brought to their little corner of Germany and certainly the future plans seem to be to support local farmers by buying all the ingredients from the Rhön area and to expand abroad slowly and step-by-step.

 

Bionade is a drink that not only tastes good, but one has to feel good on hearing the success story of Herr Leipold and his family.

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It’s been a long time since I’ve had a bottle of Bionade. I may have had one last year - I can’t really remember. 2007 proved to be the peak in the brand’s sales, at 200 million bottles. In 2008, the brand had a price rise (maybe to fund the first real ad campaign, which was along the lines of The official beverage of a better world).

Sales started declining. In 2011, they were down to 60 million bottles. The brand was part- and then completely sold off to Radeberger in 2012. Dieter Leipold died in 2014. 

Plenty of factors contributed to Bionade’s fall from grace. Too many wannabes, trying to get in on the act? A perception that the brand had sold out? 

The brand made a fresh start in 2018, with its purchase by the Hassia Group. I couldn’t find any recent sales figures, but there seem to be signs of a slow comeback. Apparently sales did well during Covid and the brand is riding a little - shock horror - retro wave at the moment. 

And yet ... I feel as if it’s lost its quirkiness and bite. Ice Tea, Mate and various “cloudy” versions have joined the flavour line-up. The brand slogan is translated as The most honest fizzy drinks in the world. Bionade: Honestly Good.

But I still have a soft spot for this soft drink. It was new in Germany when I was. It was a sustainability pioneer among brands and had a well-deserved Golden Age around the time of the football Sommermärchen. I do hope it can find a sunny future.

Extrawurst finds its (AI) voice

 

I’m trying to keep up, honestly I am. But sometimes I just have to rely on younger (more switched on?) friends and colleagues to point me in the direction of the AI gizmos developed in the last 5 minutes.

I do very vaguely remember being very excited when I first saw Powerpoint back at Saatchis in the last century. You may find that laughable, but it’s true. Having said that, I wasn’t overkeen to get down and grapple with Powerpoint myself - that took another decade and necessity (self-employment).

But this time, when one of my strategy network chaps started waxing lyrical about Google Notebook LM , I thought I’d better get my hands dirty.

Mr Trump thinks they’re eating cats and dogs in Springfield, but the fact is that Google Notebook LM has eaten Extrawurst. I’m not sure how many posts it ingested before it could take no more, but I hope you’ll forgive me the self-indulgence of showing off the results.

There’s this for starters:

The provided text consists of a series of blog posts written by Sue Imgrund, who is a British strategic planner living in Germany. The posts explore a range of topics, from the circular economy to the German school system, using a blend of personal anecdotes and observations about German society. Imgrund frequently draws on her experiences as a mother in Germany, and often references trends and cultural phenomena within the German context. The posts offer a unique perspective on German culture and societal changes, providing insights into consumer behaviour, marketing trends, and the evolution of specific brands and products.

And, for the main course, something that really stopped me in my tracks. A sort of podcast thing. Some of the segways are a bit questionable, but, blimey ...

And for dessert? Can’t fit any more in for now, but do come back later ...

BILLY and the circular book club

 

Pre-owned is growing like nobody’s business. Second-hand clothing, for example, was worth $141 bn in 2021 and will likely reach $230 bn this year, with an estimate of hitting $350 bn by 2028. 

IKEA, whose 20th century war-cry in the UK was “Chuck out your Chintz” is now a paragon of sustainable thinking and doing - and strives to be a circular company by 2030. Joining the IKEA Buy-Back Service is a peer-to-peer marketplace, IKEA Preowned. It’s starting off in Madrid, but aims to roll out globally in the next few months. This is a good example of how AI is helping make good ideas a reality. 

And what better way to celebrate your new-old BILLY bookcase than to fill it with a few new-old books? But don’t sleepwalk your automatic pilot to Amazon. There’s a new way now which benefits both indie bookshops and authors. It’s called Bookloop and it has been set up by Bookshop.org partnering with the Society of Authors and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. This means that a % of royalties will go to authors - something that Amazon wouldn’t dream of doing.

All aboard the literary carousel and off we go!

I wonder if you’ll find this one there?

RETROWURST: Women September 2006

 

Now and again, I find something in the Retrowurst files that I genuinely can’t remember writing. A symptom of ageing brain? I’m not convinced, as much of the category and brand-related stuff seems to have been filed away in a readily accessible place. Discounters to drugstores, beers to burgers. Maybe there’s an element of denial at play, as these pieces tend to be about social issues rather than marketing and brand communications. But what they have in common is that, reading them back nearly two decades later, they feel as if they hail from a different world.

This piece, taking the not-particularly-niche subject of “women”, used two self-help type books (one light in tone and tongue-in-cheek, the other sadly not) to introduce the theme of the lot of women, especially mothers, in Germany in the early 2000s. 

Does anyone remember Das Eva Prinzip by Eva Herman or Das Uschi Prinzip by Meike Rensch-Bergner? I wonder if the books are even still in print ...

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A well-known news reader and TV presenter is causing a storm here in Germany with a book that very few people have yet read but that on which almost everyone has an opinion to offer. The lady in question is called Eva Herman and she has called her book “Das Eva-Prinzip”. It really doesn’t matter one jot if you’ve never heard of Frau Herman as she and her book only really play a catalytic role in re-lighting a fire that has been smoldering away here for years.

 

In “Das Eva Prinzip”, apparently (as I also haven’t read it as the publication date seems to keep moving backwards and forwards like a silly girl who can’t make up her mind), Frau Herman sets out the case that feminism was a big mistake and has only led to women being unhappy, denying their innate womanliness and losing out on having children. It is a call to recognize that men are men, women are women, and men should be out working or hunting and bringing home the bacon and Bratwurst while women should stay at home and look after the children. If we all stuck to the way things should be, a lot more children would be born in Germany, and it would be a much happier place.

 

This jolly little tome, incidentally, is hot on the heels of another sort of Prinzip, “Das Uschi Prinzip”, which was a sort of German version of “The Rules”, giving tips and advice to young women on how the “catch the man of their dreams” by using their womanly wiles to the full rather than behaving like some sort of aggressive second-rate man. (See www.uschi-und-uschi.de where the author has made a whole concept out of this, offering seminars, workshops and the like!)

 

But let’s get back to Frau Herman. Interestingly, she doesn’t seem to have lived her own life so far according to her own principles and one can only imagine that she has written the book out of the kindness of her heart to stop young women from making the same foolish choices and mistakes that she did. Eva Herman studied for a career in hotel management and moved into journalism and TV. She has already written a number of books on such subjects as breastfeeding and how to get your child to sleep through the night (A sort of German Gina Ford.). In between she has gone through four husbands and has one child from the third of these. Just the sort of person that you want to have telling you how to run your life!

 

Some commentators have gone as far as to say that Frau Herman’s book has nothing to do with German society as a whole but is her own personal outpouring or sort of therapy to still her longing for a perfect family life that seems never to be satisfied. Eva Herman’s father died when she was only 6, her mother worked and it seems that, to compound this unhappiness, little Eva was not breastfed.

 

Whether we choose to agree with her or not, Eva Herman’s book argues for one solution to one of the main issues that is facing Germany in the 21^st century: one of the largest countries in the E.U also has the lowest birthrate at just 1.35. The future economic implications of this are clear so maybe we shouldn’t criticize Frau Herman too much, whatever her motives, in at least addressing the issue and presenting one way forward (or backward, depending on your perspective!).

 

There is a strange paradox in Germany whereby men and women have equal opportunities as long as the women are childless. In the school and study years, girls are even ahead of boys in terms of academic qualifications: there are more girls than boys with Abitur, which is like German A-Levels and it is expected that, by 2010, more women will go on to further education than men. But it seems that more and more intelligent and well-qualified young women are opting out of having a family:

 

26% of 37-40 years old German women are childless.

33.5% of women with further education in Germany are childless.

42% of women born in 1960 who have higher education are childless.

 

The reason for this is not, perhaps, as Eva Herman suggests, that these young women are making a mistake by pursuing a career, but more because German society in its structure and attitude makes it extremely difficult for women to have a career and a family. Structurally, it starts with the availability of pre-kindergarten childcare which is almost non-existent. Women are encouraged not to go back to work for the first three years (they are not financially rewarded but are at least assured of a job when and if they go back, although the job may bear little resemblance to the one that they left.) It is not unusual for those women that can to plan their children at 3-yearly intervals so that they can start the next round of Erziehungsurlaub as soon as the last one finishes. Employers, with odd exceptions, aren’t exactly welcoming when women come back, and one gets the feeling that a woman who comes back and works part-time is resented as a cost who probably needs re-training and who almost certainly is going disappear punctually each day rather than being appreciated for what she can bring to enrich the company.

 

You may have noticed “part-time” there. Why can’t these women come back and do a full-time job, you may wonder. The answer lies in the German school system, another example of an element of society that has not kept pace with the modern world. The fact is that in Germany, most children, from the age of 6-19, only attend school in the mornings. It is expected that someone will collect them at lunchtime, feed them, supervise their homework (which also starts at age 6) and then organize and ferry them around to any sports or hobbies in the afternoon. While most UK schools have sports teams, children in Germany have to join a club independent of the school to play football, hockey or whatever.

 

Some day-care places are available for primary school children, but these are few and far between, and even then, these places tend to be until 2 or 3 o’clock and only if you are very lucky, for a “whole day” which usually means until 4:30 or so. Priority is given to single mothers and cases of financial hardship, not to “dual earners”. With this kind of system in place and no signs of change in the near future, it is no wonder that many bright young women are choosing career over children. And if the system itself wasn’t bad enough, the overwhelming attitude from society in general doesn’t make things any better. There is an expression that seems only to exist in Germany – Rabenmutter – literally “Raven Mother” for any woman that dares to think that she might be able to carry on her career and let her children play happily and supervised by professionals in the company of other children until the late hour of 4pm! Why ravens should be party to this sort of insult is beyond me – there seems to be no biological basis for this and one would have thought that maybe a cuckoo was a better analogy. But perhaps the Germans just love their cuckoo clocks too much to use the bird’s name as an insult!

 

Interestingly, IKEA have timed their latest advertising campaign here impeccably to fit in with this controversy. Posters have appeared around the cities with provocative messages such as “Women must combine household, children and career!”, “Women who want children must give up their career!” and “Men must go to work, women must change nappies!” This is all a teaser, of course for the IKEA way of a more individual and comfortable life at home, whatever way you choose to live, work and have a family. And that’s the key to it, of course. German women don’t need any more Principles from Eva, Uschi and the rest, just flexibility in the system and support and tolerance from society to run their lives in the way that suits them.

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Eighteen years later, many of the mums I knew from the Elterbeirat or Kinderturnen are now Omas. And yes, that is reflected in the German birthrate. The lot of working mums has improved a little, with more Kindergarten places available, for children aged 1-3 as well as the 3 - 6 traditional age group. With increased female leadership in politics and business, and fathers playing a bigger role in Erziehung, society attitudes are shifing. Slowly, but shifting never-the-less.

The birth rate reached its low point a couple of years after I wrote this article, in 2008. It crept up a little, due to increased immigration, but has crept down again in recent years, although not below the 2008 low point.

The rate of childlessness rose up to around 2012, but seems to have stabilised, with around a 20% incidence of childlessness amongst all cohorts born 1966 - 1977 (women currently aged 47 - 58). But the rate is much lower amongst women with a low level of education - at around 11%.

And what of Uschi and Eva? 

Meike Rensch-Bergner is still writing, and also busy coaching, podcasting and running businesses connected with sewing, tailoring and body-positivity in general. 

As for Eva Herman, well, she was sacked from her prominent position as a news anchor by ARD in 2007. She made some unwise remarks about gender roles in Nazi Germany and has now drifted into writing and podcasting outside of the mainstream on Telegram. Topics cover everything from politics and gender roles to spirituality and health.

I haven’t ventured in to see if she’s got anything worth saying, or whether it’s all conspiracy theories and bonkers rants. But then again, I never read her book, either.

  

Seek - and WHAT will you find?

 

Something has flickered at the edge of my attention for the last few weeks when I’ve been on Amazon. Up to today, my brain had noted “oh, there’s what looks like an AI summary of reviews” and I hadn’t bothered to read further.

But today I had a look. The feature is headed “customers say” and is “AI-generated from the text of customer reviews.” I started with a music stand I’d bought a couple of years back for £14.99. Here’s what the AI rehashed from thousands of reviews:

Customers say

Customers appreciate the value, ease of folding, and ease of assembly of the product. They mention it works well, is easy to put up, and adjust for all heights. Customers also like its lightweight design. However, some customers have mixed opinions on its sturdiness.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

My pernickety side would probably take issue with some of this, but it’s useful enough for a relatively low-price, functional purchase.

But how would the AI fare with something more literary? Amazon did start out in books after all, whatever their plans for world domination.

I took a book I read last year which, to fit the topic, features a robot as the main protagonist: Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro:

Customers say

Customers find the prose wonderful, flawless, and incredibly readable. They also find the story interesting and engaging. Opinions are mixed on the character development, with some finding them well-drawn and unforgettable, while others say they're thin and not satisfactorily described. Reviews are mixed also on the boring plot. Occupants have mixed feelings about the emotional content, with those who find it sad and heartbreaking, while those who say it's unconvincing.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews 

Who are those “occupants”? Something to do with inter-planetary craft? This bland and badly-composed summary would hardly help me in deciding this was a book I’d love - or hate.

For contrast, my review of the novel is here. I even get an IKEA reference in!

Now, I know Amazon will be working to iron out bugs, and I may well eat my words when I look back in a couple of years to re-read this. But, to me, it’s yet more evidence of the tendency to lump ratings and reviews together, to go for the lowest common denominator, to smoothify and blandify everything, to dock the long tail and snip off all that’s individual, quirky, odd-but-fascinating, the bits that don’t fit ...

And this is what’s happening in the area of Search. I listened in to a Gartner seminar yesterday on the Future of Search. After some initial and well-publicised hiccoughs, Google now provide AI overviews, (along with a resource carousel of links) to typical search queries. The feature is available in the US and some other markets. The example shown by Gartner was a simple “electric vs gas dryer”:

   

Helpful enough, I guess - and Gartner gave plenty of marketing tips to make sure your brand ends up in the overview or the carousel. 

The functional advantages of electric and gas dryers are one thing, though. Whether to read Klara and the Sun or Brave New World next is quite another - as is any question or decision that involves human intellect, taste, culture, emotion, past experience, hopes, dreams and anything else full of nuance and impossible to measure. 

I’m all for AI providing information that could be helpful when choosing what to buy.  I look forward to Google (and others) rolling out this kind of overview as an option. But, in the race to be first, I hope they don’t cut down the inspire and discover side of search in favour of definitive answers. 

Cory Doctorow’s vision of the AI Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, and the metaphor of feeding cows a slurry made from the diseased brains of other cows is grim, but not entirely implausible. 

Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer

A short and sweet post today as the weekend and the high summer outdoors are calling. For those living in Hessen, that will inevitably involve apple-based drinks, with or without that alcohol stuff.

Aren’t the designs for Possmann’s apple juice just perfect? There are so many sludgy, dreary colours around attempting to convey naturalness, making this burst of bright primaries shine even more brightly in comparison. 

Possmann have been making Äpfelwein and juice since 1881, under the slogan “the best thing that can happen to an apple.” The 5th generation of the family is now in charge, and they’re not only the largest apple processing company in Hessen, but the most award-winning cider company in Germany, too. They’re responsible for one of my favourite sights around Frankfurt, too - the colourful tram known as the Ebbelwei-Express.

An apple or five a day (in liquid form) really does keep the summertime blues away.