A survey commissioned by Sun Life Direct, which sells life insurance and funeral plans, has produced statistics to help sell their pre plan funeral products. The survey found that 30m Brits admitted to feeling frustrated and stranded when talking about death. It even claimed that the emotional stress involved in us avoiding the issue and leaving funeral plans to the last minute is dangerous to one’s mental health, with 41% of people still worrying about a love one’s funeral months after it has taken place. The insurance industry has not figured out a way to sell end-of-life related products in a straightforward, modern way, worried that it will be seen to be profiting from death. A far better approach is The Co-Op campaign. The company collaborated with poet laureate Andrew Motion to provide a booklet entitled ‘How to write a Eulogy guide’, bringing the subject of death into a cultural and literary context. In the current mood of austerity, ageing population, and realisation that good things have to end, death is acquiring a new cultural relevance and proactive debate. The subject of death needs to catch up.

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We’re based on a street (Redchurch) that Vogue once heralded as the coolest on the planet and look, two years later we have a selection of identikit, washed-up shops. The period drama home store that is Labour and Wait is even turning chain by setting up shop down our way. Brands are now embracing this desire for the authentic and non-homogenised. The obvious example of this ‘re-connection’ would be Levi’s We Are the Workers embrace of authenticity. Here we’re invited to roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty and get down to work at a series of print shops where local people get crafty. Instead we turn to Nike’s Precious campaign that follows on from the success of their post-digital placard Chalk Bot. For Precious we are invited to follow, in exacting detail, the journey of a cyclist’s journey – the data visualisation geeks that caught Newsnight last week, you’re going to love this. David McCandless watch out! And while we’re on our bike, be sure to check Rapha’s new batch of films.

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Get a load of this so-called ‘tribute’ to my everlasting memory – Eating off the People’s Princess. Some joker has taken one of my beautifully crafted souvenir plates and desecrated it by decorating it with different kinds of food. They probably think they’re making some kind of clever statement about my well-known inability to keep my grub down when I was alive while at the same time making me look like a fucking idiot. What they’re actually doing is breaking the terms and conditions that come with every single piece of merchandise with my mush on it. They won’t be hearing from my lawyers obviously, but once I’ve tracked down the wankers behind this, they’ll be getting a visit from my bad self in the middle of the night, an experience they’ll never forget.

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Flight booking has historically been the least enjoyable part of going on holiday, but a beta site from British Airways aims to change all that. Rather than starting with a destination in mind and working back, you start with where you currently are and work forward to see all the travel possibilities. Once you’ve typed in the city you’re travelling from, how many hours you want to fly, number of stops, and the type of holiday you want (cultural, family etc), a world map then throws up a host of possible journeys that match your criteria. We like it because it shows how airlines could be used as inspiration tools, as opposed to just getting from A to B. And it makes the journey part of the adventure. Perhaps it’s due to the slump in business class bookings, or simply a dedication to the pleasure of flying, but it seems that BA have rediscovered their love of travel.

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Great news for Europe’s fashion powerhouses and bad news for China’s enterprising counterfeiters this week as new research shows that wearing fake designer goods actually makes you into a worse person. In a study by the University of North Carolina, volunteers were told they were either going to wear a pair of real designer sunglasses or fakes while doing certain tasks, and given the opportunity to cheat. 30% of people who thought they were wearing genuine shades cheated, but a dramatic 74% of those who thought they were wearing fakes cheated (despite the actual shades being the same in both cases). And not only that, the “fake” group were more likely to feel that people in general were dishonest tax evaders and Post-it thieves. It seems that people feel subconsciously “inauthentic” when they know they’re sending out false signals and this inauthenticity infects their behaviour. Other studies show that this attachment to the genuine article may be a core human trait even in babies.

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Rule Number 7 (the first 6 are obvious) of this amateur-loving world we live in, is, don’t piss off the amateurs. They have the power to make or break brands…and they wield this power without remorse. As we all clamour to harness the power of the novice fan and have them help create and celebrate our brand, we mustn’t forget that it is the amateur who is in control. This comes to light very quickly when a brand behaves badly and leaves itself open to criticism. And what brand has behaved more badly than BP of late? It didn’t take long for the amateurs to set up a Twitter feed parodying the oil company with the slogan ‘BP Cares’. Now to take the irony levels up a notch, a crowdsourcing logo project has been set up by some of them with the brief to ‘Help Redesign BP’s logo! They need a NEW Brand.’ It’s a reminder that for all the opportunities that the world of the amateur offers to brands, it is a world with new rules and unpredictable consequences.

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Images like this anti-Tesco demo are real brand nightmares. But is Tesco really all bad? What about the Tesco Community Awards? Computers For Schools? The Race For Life? A recent Demos report argues that the big supermarkets can make a positive local contribution – reducing stigma, boosting community morale and bringing low-cost quality produce into the area. It’s a positive view but many people think supermarkets are tax avoiding, farmer-hating monopolies that drive local businesses out of communities. The New Economics Foundation responded that supermarkets “spell the end of civic life”, and Andrew Simms, author of Tescopoly, said that supermarkets don’t help communities, but “hoover money out” of local economies. But why are local people so anti-Tesco? It’s about community identity. The latest Citizenship Survey shows that 77% feel they belong strongly to their neighbourhood and this number is rising. Even more, 85% feel their community is cohesive. People fear that losing their local shops means losing some local identity. Some brands have learnt this already. As Forum For The Future puts it, Corporates go local. It’s the big idea behind Starbuck’s turnaround: to individually design each store so that no two Starbucks will look the same. A big rethink for a company synonymous with corporate homogeneity.


Image Credit:
Stokes Croft

The National Magnum Mint Shortage was a bit of a bastard. I’ve spent too much of my adult life as I know it hooked on sex, drink, drugs, carrot salad, football, Scrabble on Facebook and Haribo, and a lot of time and money learning to combat my impulsive need for these things to go and let a fucking ice cream topple life as I know it, but that’s what happens when ice cream companies sneak out a new product and then the supply chain falters. Magnum must be one of the great brand successes of the last two decades. It’s essentially a choc ice on a stick but the quality of the chocolate and the feel of ad campaigns have made eating these things feel like you’re locked in a room at Claridges with Raquel Welch or Robert Pattinson. The Magnum Mint has a hint of ‘Noshtalgia’ about it. Something about the taste takes me back to my formative years as an ice cream and sweets eater when life, non-school time and World Cups seemed much simpler, hotter and more amazing. Having tonsillitis in a heatwave gave me a good excuse to get more Magnum Mints but could I find any in London, East Sussex or Kent? I might as well have been talking Gujarati to the country and seaside ice cream vendors. I tracked down the Walls Press Office and even they’d run out of the fuckers but sent round some other stock instead. Meanwhile, my mate Dead Bloke in Bradford taunted me with revelations on Twitter that an Asda near him were selling packets of six. That customer ‘Need to feed’ feeling is the gold all products long for.

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This week we were intrigued by the discovery that Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo has recently adopted what appears to be a ‘cultish’ service strategy.  Renowned for its innovative advertising platforms and smart utilization of social media,  The New York Magazine reports that they have created a scientific formula for how their employees interact with customers. Calling it a ‘singular spoken mandate’, every day every Uniqlo store worldwide, customer advisers repeat what are known as ‘the six standard phrases’ whilst on floor. The advisers pair off, and repeat: “Hello, my name is Uniqlo, how are you today?”; “Did you find everything you were looking for?” ; “Let me know if you need anything. My name is …..”; “Thank you for waiting.”, “Did you find everything you were looking for?”; and finally “Good-bye, we hope to see you again soon.” Each customer is expected to hear at least four of these phrases (of course, with the advisers’ own names) as they go about their shopping excursion. The second and fifth are repeated because they are required at two points—on the floor, and at checkout. The verbal tactics are only small piece of Uniqlo’s strategy. Physical design and aesthetic, too, are paramount. Uniqlo employees are tested regularly on in-store action items and executions, even being offered incentives to maintain the official organizational mantra: ALWAYS FOLLOW COMPANY DIRECTION. DO NOT WORK IN YOUR OWN WAY. Whilst it’s all a bit creepy, this approach to customer service and sales strategy is clearly working, the brand has enjoyed four years of growth despite the recession.

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Monitoring conversation and culture using online tools has become an increasingly important component in a brands marketing activity. The benefit being real-time feedback and an opportunity to really engage with your consumers. At Mother we have our very own tool for monitoring culture. Called Mother’s Milk, it tracks the latest trending topics and streams in the latest news, information and opinion of a 100 blogs and networks. So when we saw what sports drink brand Gatorade have built we had a bit of ‘social media monitoring envy’. In their Chicago headquarters they have created the Gatorade Mission Control Centre, a room within their marketing department that monitors their brand across social media in real-time. Six large monitors screen data visualizations and dashboards, looking at Twitter and blogs, tracking tweets and posts about the Gatorade brand, competitors, athletes and sports nutrition-related topics. Tech blog Mashable reported on how the tool had been useful for monitoring the brand’s ‘Gatorade has evolved’ campaign. Picking up on conversations about the love for the commercial’s soundtrack, they were able to react and work with the musician, rap star David Banner, to get a full-length version released in just 24 hours. Whilst other uses have been around facilitating live interactions with Gatorade Athletes and having sports nutritionists answer questions via Facebook and Ustream.


Thanks to Sara Tate

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