Blooming Amazing!

There used to be a joke that BA stood for Bloody Awful, and I have to admit that I found the official ad to celebrate the centenary of British Airways this year, if not completely awful, then certainly underwhelming.

Retailers, airlines and other service brands are highly dependent on their people. Employee Engagement is often spoken about in conjunction with Purpose when it comes to brands with a significant public interface. But is Engagement enough? I read an interesting document from Imperative - The Workforce Purpose Index 2019 recently, which puts forward the notion that perhaps we should move on from Employee Engagement to Employee Fulfillment. Probably not a bad thought - "Engagement" for me has connotations either of busy bees or toilets. The report also contains a radical suggestion - "put employees before customers" - which is definitely worthy of discussion at a later stage.

Cut back to BA, and I was delighted to discover another idea to celebrate the centenary. To me the film above - and the idea behind it - couldn't say more about the ingenuity, creativity, dedication, skill and teamwork of BA people. 

BA Quality Engineer Lyndon Ooi is also a composer, violinist and leader of the BA Colleague Orchestra. He has taken the Flower Duet aria from Delibes' opera Lakme, that everyone associates with the airline, and composed/arranged 10 variations to take the listener through 10 decades of the airline's past, present and future.

What a supersonic idea - blooming amazing, in fact!

Past my sell-by date?

Last week, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. There, in my local REWE store was a giant array of wine bottles, on sale for the price of €1 each. Just in time for Mother's Day, I thought. I started rummaging through the bottles, slightly embarrassed that I appeared to be the only customer with any kind of enthusiasm for these bargains. There was a lot of dross, but also some good-looking labels, possibly past their best but certainly worth taking a chance on at that price.

Amongst my haul were three bottles of Schloß Johannisberg Gelblack Riesling 2015, which my Vivino app tells me normally retail at around €15. I felt almost heroic, rescuing these wines of noble pedigree from the rummage sale in a one-pig town where hardly anyone would recognise their class, quality and heritage.

The experience, for some reason, brought to mind an article I'd read about ageism in the ad world, particularly in relation to creatives. It's by Madeleine Morris, who has formed a Society of Very Senior Creatives to strike back at feeling of being "invisible and expensive."

Normally, when I'm feeling bright and chipper, and have plenty of work, I don't take too much notice of these articles about ageism, in the same way that I take a lot of the sexism articles with a pinch of salt. I get the feeling that such articles send out messages about how I should be feeling and what I should be experiencing, and there's a slight sense of victimhood about it, which makes me uneasy. I'm sick, for example, of hearing that "women over 50 are invisible in the media" - turn on any medium and you're likely to see Angela Merkel or Teresa May within the first headlines. I think planners may have it easier than creatives in general - it's easier to play the "wisdom and experience" card when you are a strategist.

But sometimes, when I'm having one of my pathetic days (and I do have them), when people don't reply to emails, when I come up against closed doors, when I hesitate about filling in an application form as I know some algorithm has been set up to chuck out anyone born before 1970, then I do start to have nagging doubts.

We drank the bottles of Riesling at the weekend, by the way. The first was distinctly musty and I began to get depressed.

But the second, and third - we couldn't stop at two - were deliciously splendid - in their absolute prime.

Gordon(s) Bennett!

You can't beat a good G&T, and it has long been a tradition in our family to knock back one or two on Christmas Eve. It's always been Gordon's and Schweppes, mainly because, until a few years ago, that's all you could lay your hands on in rural Germany.

When the gin craze started, both here and back in Blighty, I felt a little smug, but also pleased that gin was becoming more available as an alternative to the ubiquitous Aperol Spritz. But as time went on, I wondered about Gordon's and how it would fare. The brand did seem to feel a bit staid and dusty in comparison to all the new pretenders to the throne down at the Gin Palace.

But while all those new pretenders are trying to outdo each other on authenticity and pedigree and  credentials, Gordon's have gone unashamedly for the mass market. It's a move that I am sure will rake in the sales short-term, but what will it do for the brand?

I tried Gordon's Premium Pink Distilled Gin  the other day and rather wished I hadn't. It tastes of sickly strawberries, a bit like what they call Gummibärchen here. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I know as Pink Gin, beloved of retired navy officers, Royal Air Force heroes and people from Somerset Maugham stories. That was made mixed with Angostura bitters.

But back to the sweet new abomination. It is promoted with a rather questionable nod to authenticity: Inspired by Gordon's original 1880 pink gin recipe.  That's on the bottle. On the website, however, it's slightly different: Inspired by an original Gordon's recipe from the 1880s. This makes it clear enough that this concoction has precious little to do with any original recipe for Pink Gin. Most of the "usual suspect" 21st century descriptors are used: "crafted" "balance" "blushing" "berries" "vibrant."

This stuff is undoubtably enjoyed by overgrown girls at Ladies' Day and the Gin Bar down at the Brexit Arms, and I am sure it will rake in some good short-term profits. I can't help thinking, though, that they might as well have put a unicorn on the packaging instead of the traditional wild boar and been done with it.

Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I think Gordon's have sold out.

Just right

Sometimes advertising and communication ideas feel just right. Perfectly simple and hit exactly the right spot. No more, no less.

That is how I feel about the IKEA campaign The Lagom Collection from Proximity London. What's clever here is that it's not about products as much as ideas - ideas and inspiration being as much in the IKEA DNA as the unmistakeable product range. And of course, the Swedish concept of Lagom fits beautifully to the Swedish retailer. The simple executions reflect typical IKEA style and that quirky lateral thinking humour.

Finally, the message of reuse, recycle, repurpose couldn't be more spot-on for today, culturally. IKEA may have been responsible for the perpetration of a "throwaway" mentality in days of yore, and, yes, you could argue that this is another example of Homegrown Problem:Solution advertising.

But when something is done with such charm and aplomb, that would surely be churlish.

Accentuate the negative?

I've always found going into a T K Maxx store rather like stepping into a Baz Luhrmann musical. You're not quite sure what will happen, but it will certainly be vibrant and colourful and over-the-top. The latest ad in a series of quirky films for the store uses the creative ploy of turning doubts into full-blown dance-til-you-drop "definite dos."

It's an off-the-peg creative strategy, to turn potential negatives into unique positives for the brand, but the execution is definitely made-to-measure for T K Maxx. It's completely in brand character, and there's never the risk of the brand taking itself too seriously.

Which brings me to my second exhibit. Carlsberg. The Orson Wells voiceover "Probably the best lager in the world" signed-off one of the classic campaigns of the 70s, 80s and beyond. That "probably" was a word that said 10,000 other words - understatement, wry humour, self-deprecating amongst them.

But what have the Carlsberg marketers and their agency partners done now? Taken a classic advertising line at face-value, re-brewed and redesigned their product and all that goes with it and "launched its most ambitious and honest consumer facing campaign ever." The line is now:

Probably not the best beer in the world. So we've changed it.

This article by David Mitchell sums up much of what feels simply not right about this approach. As he says, "Probably the best lager in the world didn't feel like a serious claim - it just made you fond of the brand because it was humorous."

Fond of the brand - that's what marketers want, isn't it? Instead of the understatement and wry humour, will all the hand-wringing and hair shirts and po-faced blah-blah about honesty and higher purpose really lead to people having a little place for the brand in their heart, at least now and then?

Probably not.

Fighting with Algorithms

LUSH UK announced last week (on social media, of all places - Instagram, Twitter and Facebook) that they would be stepping back from social media. The reason? Social media is making direct conversation with community and customers more difficult: We are tired of fighting with algorithms, and we do not want to pay to appear in your newsfeed. If you want to talk to LUSH UK, from now on, you can do it through live chat on their website, email (remember those?) or by - shock horror - picking up the phone.

There is a sense of disillusionment with the internet in general these days, particularly in terms of authenticity and trust. Should people really trust in the stars? This article illustrates the prevalence of fake ratings (I am reluctant to call them reviews) which isn't just an issue for cheap electronics: business books are No. 3 in the "highest % of fake reviews Top 10". Presumably because the people who write and market them also know how to manipulate the system, and have the cash to do so.

Are we really heading for The Inversion, where the internet becomes more bot than human, not only numerically, but perceptually, too?

With an author named Max Read, this article has really made me wonder.

Cheers to Purpose!

Like Brexit, the debate on the subject of Purpose seems to be on an ever-loudening crescendo. Sticking the word "Purpose" into the headline of an article that's about something completely different is guaranteed clickbait for the marketing community, in the way that "digital" was a decade ago.

And, like Brexit, both sides - as this is what it has become - are capable of persuasive argument and rhetoric.

My own view is that, in many of these articles, the language is wrong. The use of the words "higher" and "beyond" and "above" suggests a judgement that purpose is noble and profit is dirty.
Whereas surely they should work symbiotically?

A brand does something positive for the individual user. This can be practical, cognitive, sensory, emotional, or some combination. Some used to call this the benefit.

And that brand - or business - does something positive on the collective level - for the family, community, society or the world. For many brands and companies, this was always so, but maybe not vocalised. Changes in the world, in society, and in technology mean that this collective positive contribution - purpose, if you like - is becoming an imperative, rather than a nice to have.

It doesn't have to be about the UN sustainable goals. It doesn't have to be a "cause." It doesn't even have to be totally exclusive to your brand or company, as long as you do it in your own distinct way. But I believe it does have to relate back to the product or service your brand offers, and what it does for the individual.

A good example, for me, is what the brand Carling have done in the UK. 3 pubs a day there close their doors for good, and with the high level of Beer Duty in the UK, that will continue or worsen.  A movement has started via Britain's Beer Alliance to celebrate the positive role that Britain's pubs play in individual lives and communities: Long Live the Local

As part of the movement, Carling have produced a music video with the band Slaves, who started in pubs, which looks at the role pubs - and beer - play in music and creativity as well as community. It's not high and mighty, yet reflects brand belief and values, moving from the individual to the community.

Mine's a pint, thanks.