RETROWURST: World Cup Image Boost July 2006

 

Back in October, I regurgitated this Extrawurst, written originally in October 2005. It was all about Du bist Deutschland, a noble idea but rather worthy in the campaign execution. The idea was to give Germans and Germany a kick of positive self-confidence about the country’s place in the world. And I commented that the following year, the job was done by hosting the World Cup. 

This month, I’ve dug out the piece I wrote 9 months later, in July 2006. The World Cup had just wrapped up. As I put it then (rather pompously) “... the repositioning of Germany has been achieved on the pitches of Dortmund, Berlin, München et al.”

I don’t think the media had got completely obsessed with the word Sommermärchen at that point, but you can sense the euphoria in my writing. Rattling on about inclusiveness and a “new Germany” - warm-hearted, friendly, welcoming and open, progressive, modern and humanly efficient.

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Well, it is over a week now since Germany crashed out of the World Cup to Italy. Since then, we have had the “little final” against Portugal where Klinsmann’s boys trotted out their stuff once more to the joy of the crowd, the real final in all its head-butting drama and even a “little victory parade” in Berlin the morning after the “little final”. Klinsmann has announced he’s standing down, but no-one here seems to begrudge him his decision and his life. The sun is still shining, the cars and houses are still sporting their flags and everyone, but everyone, is still talking about how fantastic it all was.

 

Turn the clock back three years and it was all a different story. The German Embassy in London, together with the Goethe Institute held a conference on improving the image of Germany in the UK. Numerous marketing experts were invited to discuss how Germany could overcome the dire perception the country has abroad, especially in the UK. I don’t know the outcome of the conference, but I think we can assume it was all talk and no Lederhosen.

 

Similarly, I wrote at length about the internal campaign here which ran at the end of 2005 to try and re-kindle some sort of national pride in a negative, depressed, Angst-ridden people, haunted by a past that most of them were not responsible for. If you want to have a look, check out Extrawurst October 2005. Although I claim no abilities as a clairvoyant, I did suggest that perhaps actions speak louder than words and that maybe one thing that would get Germany back on its feet would be winning the World Cup on home soil.

 

Well, what do you know? They may not have won the cup, but they all have nice little bronze medals to be very proud of (has anyone noticed that bronze is what happens if you mix the colours of the German flag together?) and Germany is still in a state of euphoria. Somehow, we could have saved the money from Bertelsmann & Co as Klinsmann and his merry men seem to have achieved a miracle. Just as the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, so the re-positioning of Germany has been achieved on the pitches of Dortmund, Berlin, München et al. Who would have thought it?

 

Internally, it seems that the German Angst has packed up its bags and left (with Sweden, or, more likely, Argentina) and people are actually smiling and talking to each other. No-one is ashamed of the black, red and gold flag anymore and people are talking with enthusiasm about how wonderful the whole event was, how splendidly the team played and generally how much fun it was to have so many visitors from around the world. No-one is even that bitter or twisted about Italy winning: the Germans believe they are winners, too.

 

The German embassy could have spared their conference, too as well as the German Tourist Board’s rather limp efforts in the Tube with Geoff Hurst as celebrity endorsement for what a super place Germany is (it is, really!). Externally, people and papers around the world have been deluged with images of a new Germany: warm-hearted, friendly, welcoming and open, progressive, modern and humanly efficient. Those that actually experienced it all first-hand seem to be unanimous in their praise and the effect seems to have been particularly marked with the English fans and the British media. So much so that, by the end of the tournament, any England fan who tried to provoke by singing “Ten German bombers” or similar would have felt a complete yesterday’s plonker.

 

I am sure there are many, many lessons that we in branding and marketing can learn from Germany’s self-generated re-positioning. I’ll just go through one or two that seem to occur to me immediately.

 

First and foremost, as I hinted in October last year, it’s all about actions and doing rather than saying and telling. How a brand behaves, what it does and how a person experiences it directly is far, far more important than what the brand tells you about itself, which you may or may not believe - if you’re even bothering to listen.

 

Within a brand, you do have to be careful about choosing which of those facets of the brand to put on the public stage and I am more and more convinced that how to choose these is more a case of gut feel and experience than any amount of analysis or research. Let’s look at the managers of the German team 2002 and 2006, Rudi Völler and Jürgen Klinsmann. Although of roughly the same footballing generation, the two characters couldn’t be more different. Völler was a fine footballer but his appeal was mainly to German males. Unfortunately, his perm, moustache and very German old-school approach sent out the wrong signals to the world at large. Klinsmann, on the other hand, is known to have a more world-open approach and his lack of macho and aggression gave him appeal to the world at large with his earlier diving antics forgiven and forgotten! Or take two players at random – Oliver Kahn, the star of Völler’s squad who spent all but one game of the 2006 tournament on the bench, is an aggressive, snarling macho titan who threw a hissy fit when he wasn’t picked as number one goalie. Contrast him with Klinsmann’s favourite sub, David Odonkor, an agile, creative, African German whose sheer delight in running up and down that pitch couldn’t have been clearer.

 

Only plan so far: plan what can be planned. It is important for all the hygiene factors to be in place, but you have to leave room for luck, spontaneity and, importantly, people’s participation. People have to choose themselves whether they join in, and the brand has to grow of its own accord. We can only plant the seeds and guide the plant in the right direction. I heard that there were already plans for England’s victory celebrations in place before the kick-off of the first game. Mistake.

 

While we’re on the plant analogy, we can do a lot to provide the right conditions for a brand to grow and flourish. In Germany’s case the arrangements made for the fan fests, travel and policing were superb. And I didn’t hear any stories about the beer running out at crucial moments! Of course, there are other environmental factors that we can’t do much about, such as the weather.

 

One of the reasons for the success or turnaround of the brand Germany via hosting the World Cup was its inclusiveness. The motto about friends and guests really was lived-out: everyone felt welcome. There was never a feeling about football being an exclusively male domain or something just for those-in-the-know. Everyone really was invited, and it was extraordinary to see how many German women, including Frau Merkel, got caught up into the spirit of the whole thing.

 

An optimistic attitude carries a brand a long way. Before the WM, it was all doom and gloom here about Germany generally (the ageing population, the pension reform, the tax increases), the WM (hooligans, terrorist attacks) and Klinsmann and his team (hopeless) but Jürgen and the football fans carried on regardless, giving the critics and doom-mongers a sympathetic smile on the way.

 

Finally, I think you have to judge when enough is enough. From a P.R point of view, making it to 3^rd place couldn’t have been bettered. I think that, if Germany had made it to the final, particularly through yet another “clinical” display of penalties, the new-found warmth for the country may have started cooling down as the old clichés about Teutonic invincibility crept back in.

 

And Klinsmann, too, has timed his exit well. He has saved the football team and the country. What is there left here for him to do?

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Well, in 2024, Klinsmann has deserted his homeland for California. But Rüdi and Olli are still doing the football dinosaur stomp around press and pitches. English fans are still being warned to go easy on “10 German Bombers”.

The tournament so far has been rather plagued by crappy trains, bad weather, tales of beer running out and rumblings about right wing extremism around Europe.

Germany has had bad luck in the draw. I’m wondering how much longer they’ll be in. And how long England’s good luck will last.

Reading about Summer 2006 has made me feel nostalgic for a pre-social media age. The focus was on the big screens back then. 

But ... it’s not over until the final whistle in a couple of weeks. 

9 games is plenty of time to make history.

Give them all a rest

From the days of the much-maligned Brand Onion (which occasionally shape-shifted into a pyramid, or a key, if you were at Unilever), I remember very few specific good examples.

But I can remember the endless debates:

Is X a functional benefit or an emotional benefit?

Does this go in Personality or Values?

What's the difference between an attribute and a benefit?

Is this meant to be how we're seen now, or where we want to be?

Fast forward a decade or two, and enter Kipling's "honest serving men" - or some of them - in a glorious glowing Golden Circle. It was all going to be simple - chuck out those endless debates and start with Why?

I've noticed in the last few years that those "honest serving men" are getting about a bit. Almost every presentation on a process or strategy is peppered with Hows and Whos and Whats.

However, the debates remain:

Do we mean Who or To Whom? (The grammar fanatics love this one!)

Is that the How or the What?

Is When important?

And in this article by Thomas Kolster the author (previously a proponent of Pupose and Why?) suggests that it's now all about the Who a brand can help people to become (so a kind of Who in the future). A brand is a coach, helping people "be more, do more, see more, experience more!". This Who "focuses on the role you can play enabling their beliefs and dreams, whereas Why focuses on your organisation's beliefs and dreams."

The "honest serving men" have done a sneaky pivot from a circle to an arrow (perhaps still golden?). Why has disappeared and taken Where with him:

This all feels suspiciously like a return to "what's in it for me" - or a simple statement of what your brand does for people - benefit, if you like.

Kipling's poem continues - and this is not often quoted -

But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine to five,
For I am busy then ...

I think he had a point, and don't intend to discuss the Whys and Wherefores ;)

Goodie-goodie brands

The current COVID-19 crisis has brought them all skipping out across the daisy-strewn meadow - the oh-so-virtuous po-faced brands with their interchangeable #inspiringhashtag films, beautifully parodied here.

The films aren't the end of it, either. All the goodie-goodie brands in class have their hands permanently raised to get the teacher's attention. Look what I've done, Miss, look-at-me, look-at-me, aren't I a good little boy/girl/whatever? Actions speak louder than words, but most of these actions aren't for their own sake, but to shout about on social media, or to get on "great things brands are doing" lists.

It's said that the current crisis will accelerate a few things that are happening anyway, like digital transformation. I suspect another is brands raiding the virtuous dressing-up box for values which they'll try (in a not particularly virtuous way) to "own". Interestingly, some of the classic virtues seem more in demand - humanity, kindness, empathy, compassion and charity being top of the pile - while others are relegated to the bottom of the said box - can't see many brands positioning themselves on diligence, patience or humility these days.

There's an interesting extract from an article here entitled From Gorilla to Generosity about the Cadbury brand. Back in 2007, everyone was raving about the Gorilla commercial, but it now seems that history is being rewritten - the ad "failed to reflect the brand", despite being hugely memorable and successful in its own way.

It seems to me that the Cadbury story was a classic case of planning post-rationalising an inspired piece of creative that in all probability just happened, with no rhyme or reason. Someone, somewhere worked out that maybe Gorilla was about "joy" so that became the positioning officially in 2012.

But by this time Cadbury had been taken over by Kraft/Mondelez, adding all the complications that a global owner brings. What's happened to our chocolate, came the cry as factories were closed. This may or may not have prompted the move from the generic, somewhat self-orientated and distinctly unownable "joy" to a "reconnection with the roots" and the current positioning, based on kindness and generosity flowing from the product truth of "a glass and a half."

There's been some nice work done for the brand, but part of me questions the credibility. Can you go back to your roots and be accepted there if you've turned your back on your origins for the global high-life?

And is something like "generosity" a bit too goodie-goodie for chocolate? I miss the silliness and humour of chocolate advertising that played, not with the virtues, but with the sins - envy, greed, gluttony - in a light-hearted and very human way.

Immersed, wrapped or trapped?

The latest theme or buzzword from Interbrand to characterise their Best Global Brands is "Iconic Moves." It's nothing to do with John Travolta, though, rather that brands today are operating in a world where "people are moving faster than businesses". I agree with some of Interbrand's issues with Brand Positioning as an idea. It does imply a couple of things that don't work so well in today's world of brands - the concept of well-defined categories as well as the notion of static rigidity. However, I wouldn't go as far as to say that "positioning is dead" - rather that brands should take the metaphor of the mobile searchlight these days instead of the lighthouse.

The king of Iconic Moves, for Interbrand is Amazon. Over the years, these include the 2005 launch of Amazon Prime, the 2007 launch of Kindle, the 2014 launch of Echo (Alexa) and the 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods.

But: I wonder - why is Interbrand celebrating this stuff? Presumably because Amazon is No. 3 brand on their list, with a gob-smacking growth of +24%,  and they feel duty-bound to. But outside the impressive statistics and Iconic Moves, there are other stories.

People feeling they've been tricked or trapped into signing up for Amazon Prime.
Amazon taking a 60%+ cut, putting many small players out of business.
What used to be a super opportunity to review books turning into a annoying ratings system.
And that's before you've gone behind the scenes.

And on a personal note, I complained to amazon when a number of tacky-looking soft-porn books appeared under one of my children's books as "sponsored products related to this item." I asked for an explanation in what way these tawdry titles could be "related to" a book targeted at 9 - 12s. I have heard nothing in reply.

Why is Amazon continually held up as a paragon of branding? What Amazon is about is immersing customers in a complete shopping/lifestyle/search/payment ecosystem. There are now over 100m Amazon Prime subscribers in the US alone.

Amazon want to "be the world's most customer-centric company: to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they want to buy online."

"Customer-centric" sounds all well and good, but there's a huge difference between that and "people-centric". It's not just semantics. Amazon couldn't give two hoots about its business customers, or its staff. In Amazon's case, "customer-centric" is looking more and more like the customer trapped in the middle of the ecosystem, with no choice, helpless and unable to get out, while the vultures (or eagles) feed.

Amazon can go on making Iconic Moves because the customer sure as heck can't.

Aufschnitt 4: How brands are changing 1999

My latest offer from the cold cuts counter is a very special one. It's not technically a cutting, because it's one of my very own charts from twenty years ago, back in the last millennium. I apologise for the way it looks - there are no fancy graphics, cute icons or co-ordinated colours. The title is everything but snappy: How Brands are Changing - Positioning Spectrum.

The idea here was that different brands take up different positions on this spectrum when communicating. Some just shout in a loud and cheerful voice that they're here while others try and press-gang you into their mission to change the world. In the middle are a whole host of functional and emotional benefits and attributes of the sort beloved by onion-builders.

My point was that a brand doesn't need to have all of this - well, it probably does, but you don't have to sit through ten hours of Post-It deluged workshops to define it all.

I'm quite begoggled that the word "experience" is there, and that what's sitting under "mission/philosophy" could quite happily pass for a description of "purpose" today.

I honestly can't remember if I made this up, or whether I pinched it from somewhere but nevertheless:

Here you go - start planning like it's 1999.

What's the point?

I've been spending more and more of my time reading and talking about Brand Purpose in the last few years. And it occurred to me the other day: what would I say if asked what the difference is between Brand Purpose and Brand Position?

Tricky. Those hours I spend these days on Purpose used to be spent on Position and Positioning. Are they maybe one and the same?

I'm not sure, in the end, that the terms are interchangeable. I'm beginning to think that Purpose is maybe a more relevant term for the world of brands and branding today. I've already written here about the static nature of the idea of a Brand Position.

Furthermore, taking a position, or positioning a brand suggests we're looking at things in a market or category, in comparison to other brands in that category. It's the Spice Girls principle: oh, that's the expensive one, that's the fun one, that's the cheap and cheerful one, that's the grown-up one. It's all about differentiation of items that are all basically similar.

But with categories today such as 'mobility', or brands like airbnb, does that really work? I'm not sure.

What I like about the idea of Brand Purpose is that it gets you to nail down what is unique about that brand, not merely what differentiates it within its (artificially-defined) category. And it's something active, that can inspire and drive everything you do with the brand, rather than merely defending your corner, which positioning sort of implies.

I don't think Purpose necessarily has to be high-falutin' and about saving the planet. It is, in simple terms, the answer to the question: what is the point of your brand? Why does it exist (beyond making money)?

To continue the Spice Girls analogy, I suppose finding their purpose is what each of them had to do when the band split.

Answers on a postcard!

Post-modern Positioning

I blogged last year about the Japan Post's Watch Over Service whereby friendly local postmen and women keep a watchful eye on the elderly.

Now here's another great example of the re-positioning of the postman, this time from Finland's Posti. They are offering a weekly lawn-mowing service, on Tuesdays, the least demanding day of normal post delivery. The postman/woman will turn up and mow your lawn for you if you book up. It's a win-win situation, filling a gap in a less busy day for the postman, and getting your lawn done on a regular basis by someone you trust for the customer.

Posti are also already in involved in meal delivery, and may partner up with care services and providers as an extension of this idea.

It's a great example of re-positioning away from product (physical post) and more towards qualities and values - local, friendly, daily, trust and so on. The lesson for brands is one of adaptation - are you too tied to your product? Imagine if Kodak had been less tied to physical film and cameras and positioned more towards sharing memories - they might have invented Instagram!

Maybe milkmen are due for a renaissance in another guise. And, incidentally, when I first came to Germany, I was interested to hear that 'eggmen' were more commonplace than milkmen!

Axe your magic?

After 20 years of a positioning that could be summarised as 'Get sprayed, get laid', Unilever's male grooming brand Axe/Lynx has been repositioned. A new commercial from 72andsunny, Amsterdam features a guy with a prominent nose, a hipster with kittens (of the fluffy rather than the sex- variety), a guy wheelchair-dancing and a catwalk model (male) sporting killer heels. There isn't a bikini-clad babe in sight.

It's a nice-looking ad, and ticks all the 'inclusivity' boxes - except the lack of subtitles for hard-of-hearing, as one YouTube wag pointed out - and the message is less about getting the girl and more about 'finding your magic.' 'Find your thing - now work on it!'

Unilever and their agency say it's all about 'inspiring and supporting' young men, and the 'e' word that we know and love from Dove has already been used. Only 5% of men in the UK, according to Unilever's research, agree that they 'feel like an attractive man.' Well, that could have been something to do with the way the question was phrased, but there we go. Unilever say: 'The pressure to conform has gone up. Guys have lost their confidence to express themselves. The moment you show individuality then people get bullied, and this is the big issue.'

Hmm.

Maybe that could be re-phrased as 'the moment you show something that could be construed as sexist, then you get bullied.' I have seen no evidence that Axe sales are on the slide, or that the product is no longer relevant to the target group. What I have seen is plenty of commentary of the sort - how can Unilever promote Dove as empowering women, while producing those awful sexist Axe ads?

But were they? History seems to have been rewritten here. Yes, Axe have produced some notoriously sexist ads (although I always regarded them as tongue-in-cheek) that probably don't belong in the 21st century any more than Benny Hill or Carry-On films. But there have been some brilliant films, too. which have shown how the basic brand idea can be brought up to date and executed in a way more fitting to the values of the day:



This one is over 10 years old and still looks good.

Or this, from a couple of years back:



If I'd been on the Axe team, I'd have asked what was the magic of Axe, what was its 'thing' and tried to bring it up to date. There are plenty of examples of that around - James Bond, Sherlock, Star Wars, even Old Spice.

As it is, I worry they have diluted the magic, or lost it altogether. From moving from sexual attractiveness (which doesn't have to be exclusively to women, by the way) to being a 'beautiful human being'/empowering/building confidence or whatever the idea is now, they have lost the link to the product and the uniqueness of the brand.

In fact, the whole campaign seems to smell a little bit of 'attractiveness to yourself', but maybe that's the method behind the madness - to appeal to the narcissistic generation.

Perfectly Positioned?

I'm often called upon to think of parade examples for great campaigns, and top-notch examples of brand positioning, and the more I read about Airbnb, the more I think I'm going to be including this one as a brand that's doing rather a lot right.

It's very much a brand of its time, tapping into several of the megatrends for the early 21st century, with a degree of healthy tension - between belonging and individuality, between exploration and feeling at home.  The slogan 'Live like a local, not a tourist' taps into something many can identify with. And it's all made possible by connection via technology, such that the digital and real worlds are seamlessly linked.

Airbnb is the world's 3rd most valuable privately-held start-up, operating in 190 countries, 34,000 cities with over 1m hosts. And they've only been going since 2008.

Those 1m+ hosts are the core of the brand, and Airbnb is completely dependent on them. This is what makes Airbnb so different, and potentially brilliant or disastrous. 1m+ human beings in all their diversity and irrationality. There can be no 'consistency guidelines' here.

It's interesting that the brand positioning or purpose, 'Belong Anywhere' taps mainly into the guest mode or point of view. Is it a weakness that the hosts (or people in host mode rather than guest mode, as I am sure there is plenty of overlap) have entirely different motivations (and a far greater risk) than the guests, yet they are not addressed in the core positioning?

It's certainly a brand to watch, but I have one other reservation (if you'll pardon the pun) before I use this an example. I haven't even tried Airbnb as a guest, let alone offered myself as a host.

Maybe one resolution for 2016 should be to give it a go.

Schade & Schade

The last time I was in London, I made a nostalgic visit to Charlotte St to see the old Saatchi building, which I blogged about here. And, at the end of last week, I heard about the next of my old workplaces to go - Saatchi Frankfurt. They'd long moved out of the building I'd worked in, but that still didn't stop the nostalgia-tinged sadness, especially as I imagine the remaining staff will be offered 'come to Berlin/Düsseldorf or get out'.

I spent a couple of years using the Frankfurt office for my base, jetting around the 'new' markets of Eastern Europe for P&G, before settling in as Head of Planning in 1998. Account Planning was the latest thing in Germany in those days, and I was amused, and a little sad, to dig out some bits and pieces from early management away-days. Life really was so simple then.

Positioning the agency. No ghastly 200 slide Powerpoint, just a couple of hand-scribbled overhead transparencies. A brand personality with 5 elements: creative, innovative, no rules, little bureaucracy, 'nothing is impossible' attitude. We weren't the biggest or even necessarily the best, but what we could do - and had proved this - was 'Being First' - from First over the Berlin Wall to First ad on the moon. We were going to lead a communications revolution: everything would be new - new ways to focus on what is true, new media opportunities, new targets, new creativity.

We didn't muck about. Someone came up with the brilliant sperm visual - a bit provocative, a bit cheeky, very powerful and very Saatchi (after all, we'd conceived the Pregnant Man) and the plastic cards were produced:

 Know more than the client, get the idea before anyone else, solve problems before they turn into the same, discover talents before they develop, have ideas before they are needed, look for new opportunities where no-one has looked before, think what no-one else has thought, be first to clear the path for others ... and so on.

And these days we talk about agility. Agility, for me, means dog shows.

Maps and Metaphors

I read a very interesting blog post by Martin Weigel on his Canalside View blog recently, in which he argues for scrapping the "brand as human" metaphor in favour of a new metaphor more applicable to the 21st century - "brand as software."

The argument goes that human personality traits don't really differentiate brands and quotes Guy Murphy: "the democracy of information has allowed consumers to focus on more rational and "real" aspects of the product itself" - the observation here that a string on one-star product reviews can destroy even a strong emotional brand.

It's a thought-provoking article and well-worth reading, as are the comments relating to it.

But maybe I'm not geeky enough, or simply too old, but I didn't feel an overwhelming urge to adopt the "brand as software" metaphor.

A few reasons. First of all, I have never bought this "brand exists just in the consumer's head" stuff. All brands, as far as I am aware, exist in the world as products or services. I can't think of any brand that has no concrete products or services attached to it. And surely getting the product or service right was always the basis. In all the various models and metaphors that I have had the dubious pleasure of using over the years, all of them had some sort of stuff about what the brand is or does, or benefits, or attributes before you got onto all that airy-fairy personality and values stuff.

And, in the end, although metaphors may help marketers to think about brands, we shouldn't be held prisoner to them. And brands and marketers are different. Some brands may suit the software metaphor,  if it simplifies the thought process. Others not. Some marketing people like all those pyramids and onions and keys. Others find them self-indulgent intellectual you-know-what.

The map is not the territory. It's one way of looking at it. You use the right kind of map to suit your purpose.

I wonder if "brand" has ever been used as a metaphor?

Brands on the Black

Do you ever get paralysed by process, fed-up with frameworks while working on positioning a brand?

In the past, I can remember long debates about semantics - was "long-lasting" a benefit or a feature or a reason to believe? And, if it was a benefit, was it an emotional benefit or a rational benefit?

This kind of discussion usually leads nowhere and is often missing the point: what is really important about my brand? What makes people love it? What makes it indispensable?

Ulli Appelbaum is currently developing a new way (I hasten to call it a tool as actually it's more like a game) to help position brands and tell brand stories. It's currently in beta mode, so Ulli is open to thoughts, additions and subtractions.

It's called Positioning-Roulette. The thought behind it is that the act of brand positioning is as much about creativity and ideation as it is about intellect and process, although pre-given frameworks, agendas and philosophies often force marketers into thinking only along certain lines.

Positioning-Roulette helps you to find more creative solutions in a shorter space of time to a Brand Positioning task.

It's all about approaching the task from different angles - 25 of them, in fact, which are selected by random. These 25 areas include the usual suspects, such as Brand Purpose and Benefits, through to areas that you may not normally consider, such as Appeal to the Senses or Romancing how the Product Works, through to turning the task on its head - Conventions Disrupted, Problems & Paradoxes.

Just what you need, maybe, to move your brand from the red to the black.

I am what I do?

In these days, when brands need agility above all else in order to succeed, I often wonder about the wisdom of spending hours, days or months defining a Position. And then sticking there.

The very word Position suggests something static, set in stone - maybe in pyramidal form - and not really agile at all. By the time you have defined it, the world has moved on and you are left rather like Ozymandias.

Some sort of statement of what your brand is and what it stands for in people's hearts and minds is important. But the next step is to work out what that means for how your brand behaves - what it does. What is your brand's role in people's lives?

There's a useful presentation, Brand as Verb by Ben Grossman, in which he gives 5 principles for a brand as more than a noun - "Brands must see themselves as verbs."

Just do it!

Brand Bauble?

Bored of Brand Onions? Peed off with Positioning? Miserable about Missions?

Then look no further than this wonderful seasonal antidote to Marketing blah-blah, The *Santa* Brand Book, from Quiet Room.

My favourite pages are the one that discovers that Hagrid is encroaching on *Santa*'s space, based on the dimensions of fattiness and beardiness. And the instructions, with example, in "How to deploy language in the customer relationship."

A couple of choice quotes:

*Santa* - the industry standard for child-cenric gift-delivery solutions

and

Our brand essence is the very essence of our brand

Ho, ho, ho!

Bright sparks

Brand models have their uses. It's good for everyone working with a brand to know what it stands for, long-term. But I have always felt that most models lack dynamism and energy. They are usually something two-dimensional on a piece of paper, with lots of words that have been carefully honed and slaved-over. When I worked on the agency side, it was difficult to take a client model and develop creative work from it that was stunning, brilliant, breath-taking - and relevant.

Quite often the breath-takingness would come from somewhere external - a clever film technique, an audacious topical joke, some cute furry creatures. Mainly because the agency wouldn't know where to start. Yes, this is your brand positioning for the next five decades, but what is it that we want to focus on right now?

I recently dug out a paper I wrote twenty years ago at Saatchis which proposed a way of thinking about people and brands and the energy that connects them. I found that I still go back to this again and again:

* a brand has many properties
* a group of consumers may have a variety of human motivations or desired end benefits
* one brand detonator can deliver the energy from the brand to consumers to achieve the desired end benefits - this energy is produced when the the brand and user come into contact and, once experienced, it acts like a magnet to draw the two together.

This "spark" should be the basis of the communications proposition.

So, it comes back to overlap and connection. What are all the properties of the brand? Everything from character to physical attributes? What is the user focused on? Wants, needs, desires, motivations?

And what's the connection? Find it and push to detonate.