UK needs to fix the plumbing
My wife and I have a fairly major difference of opinion when it comes to my mother country, the UK. It takes me all of about a day when I come back to be driven mad by the things that just simply don’t work. The plumbing really gets me. Take the showers. For some reason a dribble of water, alternating between scalding hot and freezing cold, is thought to be acceptable. And why do they have two taps in the bathrooms instead of a proper mixer tap? The transportation systems that just don’t – transport you that is, because they always seem to be broken, overcrowded or it just snowed a centimeter and the trains have been cancelled. My wife for some reason, probably the fact that she’s American, just sees it all as quaint.
Anyway, I’m in the UK at the moment for business and shivering cold in my hotel room, as the hotel I’m staying in doesn’t have double let alone triple glazing and the heating system is ancient. Anyway it’s interesting to scan the newspapers with regards the current economic woes of the UK. The Daily Mail, that bastion of English conservative thinking, announces ‘austerity cuts will cost £10,000 a family as think tank warns it may STILL not be enough’. The Guardian newspaper headline runs ‘Councils fear loss of 100,000 jobs from £2bn funding black hole’. Things seem dire in dear old blighty. And the USA seems to be in the same plight.
Interesting to contrast all that to the situation in Germany and their latest growth figures. The country is going through a boom as the economy grew 2.2% in the last quarter and unemployment falls. When you look at what is driving that recovery it’s down to mostly one thing. Brands. Great German brands who have helped the economy recover quicker. Brands like Porsche, where profits and sales are being driven through the roof. All this also neatly disproves the theory that manufacturing is dead in western countries because it’s cheaper to make things in low cost economies. The fact is strong brands will sell if you make great quality products that live up to the brand promise. Just makes me think that never has building strong brands and good quality products been more important.
I personally think that the UK’s problem with its plumbing is a pretty good indicator of the UKs problem with it’s economy.
Leaky, unreliable and too often botched.
Sigtuna. Where Sweden begins
Yesterday I was part of the launch of the new brand for my home, Sigtuna. Great reaction to it from the audiences and some very positive press coverage. it’s taken nearly two years of work to get to this point.
The tag line (which is in English) is – Sigtuna. Where Sweden begins.
What’s Your Favorite City Song?
What is the world’s number 1 song about a city? The Clash and London Calling? Freddie Mercury’s Barcelona? Frank Sinatra and New York New York? Tell us.
The fact is a great song can make a place or destination famous. Music has the most powerful branding trigger of all – emotion. Music and songs can really help put a place on the map and greatly influence awareness and perception of the place.
So what is your #1 city song? Take our poll.
http://www.facebook.com/?tid=1462378436887&sk=messages#!/pages/Favorite-City-Song/144941212214942?ref=ts
iPhone. iPod. iPad. iFailed (sort of)
OK, I have to start by coming clean. Six o clock Friday evening arrived, the start of my ‘black’ non technology day and I duly started switching off all of my various bits of tech, when my iPhone started ringing. The number recognition technology (see it’s really useful stuff) showed the name of a business colleague, ringing at precisely 6pm. Was it a test? Should I ignore it? Instinct took over and I answered. Two hours later and I was still working on my iMac, helping deliver some information for the person in question. So my black day actually started at 8pm and became a black 22 hours, but I reckon good enough for a first attempt.
In those 22 hours I’ve actually had some interesting moments. Such as a debate with my 8 year old son, Jools, over whether we should play new Monopoly, with electronic credit cards and no real cash or classic Monopoly, my set from 30 years ago with good old fashioned honest to goodness fake money! (we went for the old fashioned game in the end).
I realised that I had to make an important call Friday night, and we started looking for a phone box in Stockholm. Forget it. We looked for ever – there are none or at least none we could find. I guess in a country where there are more mobile phones than people it’s to be expected. Added to all this I have been cut off from BBC Radio Four for 22 hours of my life, which really is a major deprevation. But the very worse thing is when you have a question. One of those not terribly important but niggling little questions such as which city was the original game of Monopoly based on (I knew the answer – Atlantic City NJ, but frustratingly couldn’t prove it to Anne and Jools). With the internet everything can be answered. I love it.
What I also realised was how utterly habit forming technology can be. We decided to go for a walk and I put my jacket on and Jools asked me what I had in my pocket. Nothing I replied. He shook his head and dipped his hand into my pocket to pull out my iPhone which I had taken with me through force of habit as I was about to leave. I think I have a serious case.
Anyway I’ve spent my 22 hours of ‘blackness’ happily enough, playing a bit of football, reading a book about the Mitford girls and attempting to fix the broken toilet in our Stockholm week-end apartment – and failing. Luckily a friend popped in and recorded some of it with a few pics. I’ll post them on Facebook.
So we’ve decided to do this once a week (and for a full 24 hours) and once a month go the whole hog and do without electric lights, cars or any electrical consuming technology – which puts us back about 120 years or so. Now if I could just convince a few million other people to do the same I’ll have done my little bit for the planet I guess. I might even help put the population in a few western countries up – if you get my drift. A very satisfying thought indeed. Switch off to turn on…so to speak.
What Colour Technology?
Mid-August to mid-September is white. At least it is for me. One of the few Swedish habits I’ve adopted in my time since moving here is having what the Swedes call a white month. Basically that means you give up alcohol for a month, which I must admit isn’t too much of a hardship as I only tend to have a couple of glasses of wine at week-ends and that’s about it. But it seems like a good idea and so I have three white months a year. Now this leaves a few of my friends, mostly Brits, mildly horrified as they think Sweden is starting to do strange things to my head. They reckon it’s the effect of eating too much pickled herring. I was on the phone last week to one of my good Swedish friends and told him of my month off drink and he ended the conversation by saying ‘I’ll see you when you can drink again.’ Great support.
Anyway last night after dinner and over a glass of carrot juice (yum!) a new idea was proposed along the same lines as a white month. We were watching a movie on iTunes (Ferris Buellers Day Off, which actually disproves some people’s theory that mid-westerners don’t have a sense of humour – John Hughes was from Michigan and a genius) and my dear wife Anne started off down a path that she had been exploring for a while. Technology. Her thought was that maybe, just maybe, I’m a technology junkie. What me?! Admittedly I was sat there browsing on an iPad and answering the odd text message as we watched the movie, but doesn’t everyone? Anyway my wife (who also happens to come from the flyover zone herself and has a pretty fair sense of humour) pressed on. And she had facts to support her argument. She pointed out we listen to all our music via iTunes on the iMac we have on the kitchen bar.
Well actually one of the two iMacs we have on the kitchen bar (I feel we need two – for multitasking) and we have three additional work computers. We don’t really watch TV anymore as we access all our media via our macs, listen to BBC Radio over the internet, have iTunes for TV and movies, Spotify for additional music and use social media as our connection to keep in touch with distant friends etc.
Um, just maybe she has a point.
So then came the moment. The big proposal. She paused as she took a sip of her chilled sauvignon blanc (she’s not on a white month). Why not have a day a week when we don’t interact with any technology what-so-ever. Twenty four hours of zero technology. She’s serious as well.
Anyway, it’s now Sunday afternoon and after considering it I think she has a point. A technology free day could be a good idea. Not easy, but good. It’ll be a bit like my non-drinking white month – except far more difficult. But the question is if I have a white month for non drinking what colour should a technology free day be? Green? Black? Blue? I’m leaning towards black, as in black hole.
Anyway, I’ve decided I’m going to do it. I’ll text Anne right now and say Saturdays, starting next week. However I might just need to take up drinking again to get through the day.
So any other ideas on the colour a technology free day should be, please let me know. Text me or post it on my Facebook or Linked-In pages.
But just don’t do it on a Saturday.
(P.S. I’ve set up a page on Facebook for like minded souls. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Non-Technology-Day/146409755399240
Open the window and stick your head out.
Sweden, like most other civilised nations, has a national weather service. They go by the name SMHI or, to give them their full handle, Sveriges meteorologiska och hydrologiska institut. Very nice, as long as you don’t have to say the whole mouthful. Anyway as the saying goes ‘everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.’
Anyway SMHI are driving me crazy. Have been for several months. I mean I understand that trying to predict what the weather is actually going to do can’t be all that easy, but it is actually their job. And they don’t even come close by a zillion miles. I’d have a better chance of getting an accurate forecast by listening to my aged Mother’s daily predictions after peering into her morning cup of tea and watching the tea leaves. This morning was a good example. They predicted heavy rain and thunderstorms all day. I peered out of the window and the sun was shining brightly in the sky. I asked myself do they ever actually open the window and stick their head outside?
Anyway, this brings me to a more relevant focus for this blog. Marketing. As these weather related thoughts were running through my brain at 6am this morning, I was reminded that when it comes to marketing and branding we all too often don’t stick our head out of the window. There is nothing like leaving your warm comfy office and actually getting out amongst where the action really is. I had a client years ago who insisted that before you could work on his account you had to spend several days walking the isles of a supermarket watching consumers taking his product, or not, off the shelves and really look the consumer in the white’s of their eyes. Very good advice I’ve never forgotten. I still find too many people expect to understand consumers from ‘lifeless’ market research reports.
Get out and see it like it really is. And right now the sun is shining, so I’m going to pop outside and prove the weather men wrong. Again.
Powerful impact from Apple’s iAds
Apple’s mobile advertising platform, iAd, has now been officially launched in the US and is generating immediate interest. Steve jobs introduced it at the launch session for the new iPhone 4. Nissan, Unilever and Chanel are among the advertisers that have committed to spending a collective $60m on this new approach. The system promises the emotional punch of television but in the mobile advertising sector, something that advertisers have been lacking for some time.
This is when it gets interesting.
Stockholm Love 2010
Gave a short presentation yesterday evening on the branding of Stockholm (The Capital of Scandinavia) at one of the Stockholm Love 2010 events. The royal wedding is this coming Saturday in Stockholm, and there are celebrations and events happening all week. The venue for last night was right on the waterfront by the Royal Palace and we had a full house. One of my fellow speakers for the evening was Ingrid Rudefors the film commissioner for Stockholm. It looks like the Stieg Larsson book The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor in Swedish) will be remade in English with an all star cast and that will certainly be good for Stockholm. We have been pushing for some time to get some big international productions made in Stockholm – the place looks like a movie set already, so it’s about time.
One of the guests at the event was Lars Rambe a new Swedish crime novel author. With the success of Stieg Larsson the whole crime novel genre seems to have really taken off in Sweden. Check out the latest book from Lars Rambe ‘Skuggans Spel’. He’s working on a release in English shortly. I was at the book launch a week ago, picture below with Lars.
Do They Honestly Care?
I’m in the business of helping organisations build brands. Helping them define what they are all about, what they are best at and then converting that into a promise to take into the marketplace. And as we all know, branding is all about delivering on that promise to the consumer.
Now this has led me in recent years to examine closely not only some of the brands I’ve personally worked with but some of the brands that I chose to buy myself. Over the years I suppose I’ve become a bit cynical when I hear marketing people talk about their customers and how much they really focus on them. Customer focus is obviously a good thing and the logic is that if you talk about it enough, people will believe you genuinely put customers at the top of the agenda. What I’ve discovered is that for too many companies it’s pure mouth music. They say it but don’t genuinely mean it. Truth is I’ve come to discover that most companies are far more interested in themselves than their customers.
All this came home to me personally in an incident with Louise Vuitton. My dear wife bought me a beautiful, and extremely expensive, LV carry on flight bag. Well to cut a long story short a wheel on this elegant piece of luggage literally dropped off on a trip to London less than a year after having bought the bag. I couldn’t believe it. Literally it fell off. I spent the rest of the day dragging and carrying the bag around the city. I was sure it must be a freak occurrence and that LV would make amends. The store that my wife had bought the bag from however refused to offer any replacement or even to repair the bag for free. They didn’t seem to care at all. I was shocked. We then tried the Swedish consumer protection agency, but they proved to be worse than useless. After twelve months of frustration and complaining I decided to resort to the only course of action I could. I wrote a letter to the Chairman of Louise Vuitton, M. Bernard Arnault. It took me two hours searching on the internet and a phone call to get his personal office address but I did. A hand written envelope addressed to him, for his eyes only, was then dispatched to Paris. The letter is below.
M. Bernard Arnault
LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton
Dear M. Arnault,
In December 2007 my dear wife bought me a Louis Vuitton carry-on travel bag as an expensive, but wonderful, Christmas gift. As someone who travels a lot, I was delighted. It looked beautiful, and coming from Louis Vuitton, I imagined spending a lifetime with this particular item of luggage. Growing old gracefully together, aging beautifully with it as my constant travel companion. Maybe I’d even end up looking just a little like Sean Connery in your advertisements.
Ten months later things had gone very sadly wrong. On a trip to London in October 2008, the wheel fell off my bag. Literally fell off. I spent the rest of the day dragging and carrying the bag around the city. My immediate reaction was that the bag was, to borrow a car analogy, a Friday bag. The artisan French worker who had crafted my $1200 bag must have just had a bad day. Maybe he didn’t feel too well after a heavy night out with his friends and a little too much Pernod perhaps? Anyway, I was sure the Louis Vuitton store where my bag was purchased would immediately replace or repair the defective bag. Ten months old and only used on about eight trips as cabin luggage. Louis Vuitton must have a lifetime guarantee right? At $1200 a shot, I expected it.
The answer when I returned the bag to Louis Vuitton was non! Forget it! LV does not have a lifetime guarantee, nor does it have even a 12-month guarantee. In fact it has NO GUARANTEE WHAT SO-EVER! None. Zippo. Zilch. After two years of complaining, I’m just totally appalled at the service LV offers its customers. But I haven’t given up hope.
I write to you to find out if the LV store in question and its response reflects the standards of Louis Vuitton. Can you help me?
With Regards,
Julian Stubbs
enclosed photos of my wheel-less LV bag
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Now I wrote the letter as a last resort, not expecting much from it, but about a week after the letter had been sent the most amazingly helpful and concerned manager of the local LV store contacted me. She wanted to apologise personally for what had happened and have the bag fixed, at no cost of course, as soon as possible. She was genuinely concerned.
Amazing what a letter to the chairman can do. Anyway it made me ponder the question again how many companies and brands really do care? Really understand that to be better than their competitors takes much, much more than just running advertising saying that you do.
Anyway, I think I’ve also discovered that I’m not bad at complaining and it seems to be a lost art.
Power to the people.
iPhad or Two Thousand Lumps of Dusty Pulp?
Well it’s here. The iPad has finally landed, descended from on high, well from Cupertino at least, and all the hoopla and hype surrounding it’s launch is beginning to settle like the dust in my library. But more on that later.
As an unrepentant early adopter I’ve had my nose pressed up against the Apple store window in NY for a month, figuratively speaking. I have been waiting for them to open the store so I could get in and buy one. Well that’s not strictly true, as I couldn’t be in NY for the great day I had my brother in laws nose pressed against the window last Saturday, and having bought it he dispatched it to me courtesy of FedEx. I’d decided to buy the full fat 64GB version. Friends told me to wait for the 3G launch, but no I wanted to play with one of these at once.
So, I’ve now spent the last few days playing on the thing, tucking it away in small, very small, bags when I go anywhere. Leaving it lying on the sofa when I’m sat there, or by the side of the bed, in the kitchen in fact anywhere and everywhere. You see the thing is truly the ubiquitous tablet we’ve all waited for. Once you’ve got one, you want it with you all the time. E-mail, calendars, address books and music all sync effortlessly and with little need for technical understanding beyond having the ability to tap it’s touch sensitive screen. It also plays, and sells you of course, movies, TV shows, music and hundreds of thousands of apps.
Then, for me there is the killer app, the reason I actually bought the thing in the first place. iBooks. I’ve played with Sony Readers, flirted with a Kindle and tried even earlier attempts to make e-books actually work. All of them, so to speak, were not worth the paper they weren’t printed on. Remarkably last year sales for e-readers were still up around 5 million for gadgets that were still functionally pretty useless. The problem with e-readers up to this point has always been a choice between long battery life or vibrant living colour.
So, back to my dusty books. Well they’ve been like family members to me each and every one loved, written in, read and re-read. I remember the first book I actually paid my own hard earned cash for (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – but I was only eight and it was actually pocket money). The first business book I bought (Kotlers Marketing Management). I have first editions of James Bond, a complete set of Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples and over two thousand or so other books in my dusty library.
Which brings me to my dilemma. The iPad is by a long way the best reading experience I’ve ever come across. The screen is bright, and you can adjust it, and the response time to page turning is, to deploy a much over-used word, phenomenal. I bought my first iBook yesterday, Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, and can now lie in bed at midnight and read it without having to strap a small flash lamp to my head. So now for the first time I look at my library and see the equivalent of 2,000 VHS video tapes or 2,000 vinyl LPs. Is my beloved library now only filled with 2,000 lumps of dusty pulp? Will I still buy printed books? That’s the question. It seems that finally technology has caught up with the printed book after around five hundred years of dominance. I can carry my ‘book’ and indeed entire library around with me where-ever I go and read where and when I want. That’s remarkable.
And when technology shifts in such a dramatic fashion, you can be sure there will be huge impacts and opportunities in a brand and marketing perspective. The ability to target and develop true relationships with consumers has never been more attainable or immediate. That’s the exciting bit.
The iPad is quite simply a game changer. Nothing, at the moment, comes close.
(P.S. the keyboard is also good enough for me to be able to write this blog while traveling on the Stockholm underground!)
