‘Tis the Season for Pressure

Bring it on! The English Premier League is simply—the most high pressure pro-sports league in the world.

One reason for this is the chance of relegation.

Unlike major leagues in the U.S., each season the bottom three clubs get demoted to the lesser universe of the Championship.

The drop is the worst thing that can happen to a club and their supporter’s pride.

Financially it costs each of the unfortunates around £50 million in lost revenue every year until, and if, they win promotion back to the elite.

So the pressure on the bottom feeders is possibly greater than the pressure on the title contenders.

It’s a high stakes game, and Christmas ups the ante big time as the spectre of relegation looms like a rancid ghost of Christmas Future.

Only once in 21 years has the bottom club at Christmas avoided the ignominy of relegation.

And the coming of Santa heralds a footy bonanza, with clubs playing 4 matches crammed into 10 days.

That’s 10.5% of a 38 game season with 12 points at stake.

It’s the tipping point, and by the time New Year's Day arrives over half the season will have been played out.

Fortunes can change dramatically over this period, especially for clubs with less depth in their squads or carrying injuries.

This intensity is great for fans because every game is played at breakneck speed and demands physical toughness and mental sharps.

On top of this pressure at both ends, the Prem is the league where professional athletes also face the most public personal abuse.

It goes way beyond opponents trash talking each other, although that happens too.

This is abuse that comes in the form of chants sung by thousands of the opposing clubs fans.

Unless you’re playing badly, in which case it could come from thousands of your own club’s supporters.

And nothing is off limit in these bawdy sporting folk songs.

A player’s weight, mental health, sexual proclivities, are all considered fair game.

Hell, a player’s wife’s weight, mental health and sexual proclivities, are all considered fair game.

Here’s a chant they used to sing about Mrs. Beckham:

 Oh Posh Spice is a s*apper,

She digs another fella,

And when she's s*agging Beckham,

She thinks of Mike Grella!

Posh Spice is a s*apper,

She likes to suck a d*ck,

And when she's s*agging Beckham,

She thinks of Michalik!

I don’t think Peyton Manning has to put up with that kind of vulgarity about his missus.

Here’s another classic fans sing when their team plays Liverpool:

In your Liverpool slums

In your Liverpool slums

You speak in an accent exceedingly rare

You wear a pink tracksuit and have curly hair

In your Liverpool slums

In your Liverpool slums

In your Liverpool slums

Your mum’s on the game and your dad’s in the nick

You can’t get a job ‘cos you’re too f**king thick

In your Liverpool slums

And these are among the less abusive examples of a terrible poetry and savage wit.

Football’s working class roots are still the foundations below the shiny surfaces of the multi-million pound stadiums.

Wages are always quoted in pounds per week, as in Luis Suarez just signed a new contract for $200,000 per week.

This is a hangover from the days when a workers wages were paid weekly as opposed to management who got a monthly salary.

But the international oligarchs, who increasingly like buying Premier League franchises, don’t always appreciate the nuances of the game’s social history.

When you've got the private jet, the supermodel and the superyacht, you're not dropping half a billion to buy a bunch of losers.

And it’s not just players who can feel an owner’s wrath.

Managers get fired after the shortest string of bad results and even after decent results that don’t meet expectations.

So far in 2013, 5 out of 20 Premier League managers have been given the boot.

Only 2 out of 38, have held the same job since 2011, as opposed to 14 NFL head coaches.

There’s no such job security in the Prem, but there's loads of gut churning excitement.

So turn on the TV, pull up a chair, enjoy the pleasure that comes from pressure and good luck, unless you’re playing Spurs.

A very merry Christmas to one and all!

Branding in Five Words

Legendary branding pioneer Walter Landor once said, “Simply put, a brand is a promise.” When I first came across this, I fell in love with the poetry of it.

I was disappointed when I read the quote in context: “Simply put, a brand is a promise. By identifying and authenticating a product or service, it delivers a pledge of satisfaction and quality.”

It gets the job done, but it’s pedantic in comparison to the short version.

This version must have become embedded in my subconscious, because while conducting a branding workshop for a client I had a spontaneous moment.

A brand, I asserted out of the blue, any brand, can be reduced to five words: A sign and a promise.

This owes a lot to Landor's thought, but it adds something too.

It unites the visual and non-visual elements that make up a brand.

The sign is how you recognize a brand.

It’s usually referred to as a logo, but thinking of it as a sign encourages a different point of view, to some advantage.

Think about the attributes of a sign.

The first attribute is legibility.

Is it easy to read?

The second attribute is clarity.

Is its meaning unambiguous?

The best signs or logos share a simplicity that enhances their clarity, like the Nike swoosh, or the FedEx wordmark with its negative space arrow.

I don’t need to show them.

You can already see them.

They’re perfect because, to paraphrase Saint-Exupery there’s nothing left to take away.

When you think of a logo as a sign, you’re seeing it more like a consumer will experience it.

Not as a piece of marketing driven design, but as a guide to getting what they want.

There’s another advantage to thinking of a logo as a sign.

Signs can be metaphysical.

As in: “A sign from God” or “A sign from the universe”.

This type of sign is more than instructional or informative.

It carries a hint of promise with it.

And a promise is the core non-visual attribute of a brand.

Iconic brands have promises that can be summed up in a word or two.

Coca-Cola - refreshment

Volvo - safety

This degree of distillation doesn’t happen overnight.

And a promise of a single word, isn’t suitable for all brands, especially B2B and financial brands which typically market more complex offerings.

But brevity is what all brand promises should aspire to.

As Seth Godin said, “If you can’t state your position in eight words or less, you don’t have a position.”

Eight words or less is a good starting point (even if it took sixteen words to say it).

Defining its promise is the most crucial task a brand faces.

Because after reflecting on my spontaneous exclamation, I realized a brand is not just a sign and a promise - a brand is better positioned as: The sign of a promise.

That promise needs to be enticing enough to make a difference, yet credible enough to be believed.

And most of all it needs to be kept—your customer is trusting you on that.

This Blog is Shutdown

Sorry this blog is closed. The right brain and the left brain cannot find common ground and have stopped working together.

In fact they are no longer on speaking terms, at least not with each other.

But, strangely, point a camera or a microphone in their direction and they’ll find all sorts of things to say.

It’s just that most of it makes no sense.

RB: The left brain is overly logical and lacks empathy.

LB: The right brain is all passion and no process.

RB: The left brain is cold and calculating.

LB: The right brain knows the numbers won’t support it.

Nobody knows how it will play out.

In the meantime innocent readers just like you are being deprived of quality blogging.

While the author’s wife and eleven kids only have enough food to last until Oct 17th, or possibly November 22nd, depending on whose inventory of the larder you believe.

How could this happen to a blogging superpower I hear you ask.

And that dear reader is the 16.7 trillion dollar question.

But regrettably, it is not an answer.

RB: (together) I’m not sitting at the keyboard until you give me what I want.

LB: (together) I’m not sitting at the keyboard until you give me what I want.

It's deadlock, an impasse, a conundrum.

In the meantime, this blog remains closed.

Lessons From the World’s Greatest PR Man

 You won’t find him ensconced in a fancy office in New York or London. Or wining and dining journalists.

And you can't hire him; he’s contracted exclusively to a single client.

Like all great PR the media coverage he generates, may or may not be painstakingly orchestrated, but leaves a clear impression of spontaneity.

And PR isn’t even his full time job.

That is a little more involved as head of the Catholic Church and leader of 1.2 billion Catholics.

Because right now, the world’s best PR guy, hands down, bar none is—his holiness Pope Francis.

Being the first Pope to take the name Francis sent a message from the start.

After the aloofness of Benedict XVl, Pope Francis is strategically as well as statistically fresh.

In the six months following his election, he has spectacularly re-positioned the Catholic Church.

So successfully that in Italy he enjoys approval ratings of 85% among non-Catholics and 96% among Catholics.

In these six months, he has changed a brand persona of detachment and irrelevance to one of tolerance and inclusion.

He dramatically included Muslims and women in the traditional Easter foot washing ceremony.

He has reached out to gays, agnostics and atheists.

Six million people came out to hear him say Mass in Rio de Janeiro.

The latest installment came in the shape of a Renault Quatrelle with 185,000 miles on the clock, a gift from 70 year old priest Father Renzo Zocca.

Fittingly the Quatrelle was designed as a people’s car – Renault’s riposte to the Citroen 2CV.

Better yet, it came in symbolic Papal white.

Reportedly Pope Francis will use it for pootling around Vatican City.

It’s a cute story and the Pope’s PR halo is more remarkable given the bad press the Vatican itself has been getting.

Pedophile priests have regrettably, become part of pop culture.

While the Vatican Bank’s long flirtation with less than divine financial practices is like a bad running joke.

The latest gag involves a cleric, a private jet a couple of shady characters, and 20 million euros in cash.

The bank’s shenanigans have been receiving world-wide media attention ever since Roberto Calvi was found hanging from London’s Blackfriars Bridge in 1982.

Clearly there are some deep rooted organizational issues as well as PR issues here.

Pope Francis has pledged to reform or close the bank.

In the meantime at least he takes media questions on the subject.

It’s more than surface gloss.

This Pope has achieved something truly remarkable, something that eluded the Catholic Church for at least a generation.

And no blue chip PR firm could have done it with such authenticity.

Pope Francis has made the Church likeable.

And perhaps more importantly, signaled that a window of change if not wide open, is at least ajar.

On the flight back from his visit to Rio, where the Mayor spontaneously renamed Copacabana beach Pope-a-cabana for the duration of his visit, the Pope said, “I haven’t done very much”.

But little things make big things happen.

Perhaps he was just following the lead of one of his favourite saints, Thérèse of Lisieux, who said: “Do ordinary things in an extraordinary way”.

It may not be secret sauce but it’s certainly working.

A Tough Nut—Cracked

Here’s a good creation myth. A hung-over Peace Corps volunteer discovers the beneficial effects of coconut water’s amazing hydrating properties on a sun-drenched beach in Costa Rica.

He also falls in love with Latin America.

Fast forward a few years, our ex-volunteer now has an MBA from Duke and is managing a beverage packing plant in El Salvador.

By now Mark Rampolla is married with a couple of kids and he’s had enough of the corporate grind.

It’s time to move back to the States and start his own business.

After kicking around a load of ideas, he remembers coconut water.

He spends a year planning and finds a supplier in Brazil who can provide him the quality he wants.

He calls his company Zico and starts selling the beverage out of his New York City garage in 2004.

They’re not the first company to package coconut water.

It’s been available in cans from Asian grocery shops for years.

But the cans also contain sugar and preservatives.

Zico’s Tetra Pak contains no additives, just 100% coconut water.

It’s positioned as the natural sports drink and the timing couldn’t be better.

Unlike established sports drinks it isn’t loaded with sugar and sodium and food dyes.

It has no fat, no cholesterol and is a good source of potassium.

Zico is initially distributed through yoga studios and catches the curve of the yoga explosion.

Its fresh clean taste and excellent hydration encapsulate the zeitgeist perfectly.

And sales takeoff—exponentially.

In 2009, Mark Rampolla sells a 15% stake to Coca Cola for a reported $15 million and he sells them a majority stake in 2012.

This is all well documented, but there’s a bit more to it.

Turning a commodity into a brand is an established FMGC strategy.

Think Evian, Lay's, Tropicana, or Orville Redenbacher's.

And lots of gringos were guzzling coconut water all over Latin America but they didn’t connect the dots.

They certainly didn’t create a successful brand.

And actually Mark Rampolla didn’t create a successful brand.

He created something more substantial.

And he did in it in a really brutal marketplace where shelf space is fought over inch by inch, margins are thin and distribution, dominated by multi-national giants, is hard to come by.

He created a category.

And it’s quite the A list category.

The other major players are Vita Coco distributed by the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group and O.N.E distributed by PepsiCo.

Rihanna endorses Vita Coco and according to the Daily Mail, UK sales skyrocketed by 168% after Madonna invested in the same brand.

In keeping with their sporty roots Zico have recruited Olympic skier Julia Mancuso for their marketing.

So it’s Divas vs. Athletes as battle lines are drawn and campaigns developed.

The Wall Street Journal reports 2011 sales at $400 million and given the category’s 100% plus growth rate, 2013 sales should be well north of $1 billion.

Looks like the coconut water wars are just beginning.

Does Your Square Peg Fit That Round Hole Yet?

A buddy told me a story. He was having a deck built.

The contractor quoted the job by the square foot.

When it came to determining the exact size of the deck the contractor said, “People usually wish they had it built a couple of feet longer”.

My buddy, having what you might call a suspicious nature, figured the contractor was just trying to pocket a bigger paycheck.

That was seven or eight years ago.

Every summer since then, my buddy wishes he’d had that deck built a couple of feet longer.

I work with words instead of wood.

Businesses often ask me to write web copy.

Typically their needs fall into one of two scenarios.

They’re refreshing an existing website or developing a new one.

In either case, I often find myself explaining that they need to work on their branding first.

Sometimes because it's weak or non-existent and sometimes it’s no longer appropriate because the business has evolved.

I’m not talking about a logo here, as much as the non-visual attributes that go into building a brand.

People aren’t always receptive to the suggestion, which brings me back to my buddy’s unfounded suspicions about the carpenter.

To some extent it’s understandable because branding is development heavy.

Sometimes you get lucky, but usually it requires a bit of thought.

And thinking is intangible and hard to quantify.

As a rule, the earlier in any process - the more thought or development as opposed to execution - is involved.

Now it doesn't require much development to arrive at an end result that's workmanlike.

By workmanlike I mean running with an idea that makes enough sense, as opposed to working through it, to arrive at something that truly makes sense.

It's worth pursuing the latter because, when you really get the branding right, it's much easier to get the marketing right.

Get the branding even a bit wrong and you'll forever have the feeling of trying to push a square peg into a round hole.

Or end up with something that works fine on paper, but just doesn't have that little spark that connects with people.

It's a process and you can drill a few dry holes before you strike oil.

That makes some clients nervous.

Of course when you do strike oil the return on your investment is exponential.

But not everyone wants to ante-up.

That’s OK.

You can only advise people who are open to advice.

The ones not holding onto a square peg.

Or wishing their deck was a couple of feet longer...

Innovation in a Vacuum is a Bumpy Road

Innovation has become a demigod. Management gurus worship it.

Businesses universally lay claim to it, with varying degrees of credibility.

Even when it’s genuine, the results can be unpredictable.

In the early 1960s the development of PVC vacuum tubing was a game changer for the central vacuum industry.

Prior to this the industry had used copper tubing and the systems were expensive.

Now they were affordable for the average home owner.

So central vacuum manufacturers and installers thought this was the start of something big.

They envisaged a future where every house would come with central vacuum as a standard feature, like a dishwasher or air-conditioning.

It made sense.

A centralized motor allowed more power than a motor built-in to an appliance that had to be carried from room to room.

More power, plus cyclonic separation technology, originally developed to remove dust particles from sawmills, produced more suction which meant cleaner floors.

And there were other advantages to a central vacuum system.

A larger canister usually installed in the basement or garage held more dirt and didn’t need emptying nearly as often as a hand-held machine did.

The cleaning attachment and hose that plugged into inlets set into the wall was less cumbersome than a regular vacuum cleaner.

But in spite of their superiority central vacuums had a hard time gaining traction.

Consumers were resistant to retro-fitting them, and 7 out of 10 systems were installed in new build homes.

So the central vacuum industry was actually in the construction business.

In the 1990’s the vacuum cleaner industry experienced another innovation.

The Dyson DC01 arrived.

Here was a vacuum cleaner that claimed never to lose suction.

It worked with the same cyclonic separation central vacuums had used since the 1960s but didn’t require installation.

The futuristic design was sexy in a way no household appliance had a right to be.

So sexy it’s now in museums.

It looked like something the Jetsons’ maid Rosie would use in their Skypad apartment.

And whether people bought it for design or function or both, they bought it big time in spite of the hefty price tag.

It was so successful; soon it was hard to find a vacuum cleaner that didn’t look like something from the Jetsons.

Then something counter-intuitive happened.

Because of the Dyson’s hefty price tag consumers were more amenable to looking at other high-end vacuums.

And the central vacuum industry unexpectedly enjoyed a decent bump in sales.

But still nothing like the huge potential they continued to believe in.

Since the 1960s the industry had focused on convenience as their core benefit and it wasn’t really delivering.

Something had to change.

So around 2000 the industry leader, Beam audaciously repositioned themselves.

A clinical study from the University of California showed that a central vacuum had significant effect in reducing symptoms from allergies connected with household dust.

Beam made the inspired decision to re-position their product line around the health benefits of better indoor air quality.

Their inspiration paid off and between 2001 and 2005 sales doubled.

The future looked rosy, until in 2007 the U.S. housing market crashed - and sales crashed with it.

The current recovery in U.S. housing has led to a decent recovery in sales.

Beam is optimistic again.

They’re launching a new system, Beam Alliance this month.

It’s 20% more powerful and 30% more energy-efficient than their current range.

This is one tough, persistent industry.

And it’s hard not to wish them luck.

The Chef who Fuelled an Empire

The British army currently deploys 16,000 soldiers in logistics. Their job is to get whatever is needed to wherever it’s needed so the combat troops can fight effectively.

And a major part of their job is supplying enough food.

As Napoleon famously said, “An army marches on its stomach”.

He subsequently forgot his own advice when he invaded Russia, but such is the razor’s edge between genius and madness.

The Russians adopted a scorched earth policy so the French were unable to live off the land as they had in previous campaigns.

In October 1812, Napoleon’s starving army was forced to retreat from Moscow.

Seasonal retreats were not unusual.

The problem of supplying an army in the field meant that for a long time in history, warfare was a summer pursuit.

Malnutrition and food poisoning were at least as likely to destroy an army as the enemy.

So generally armies tried to avoid fighting wars in winter when the severity of these conditions naturally intensified.

A couple of inventions were to change this.

The tin can was invented in 1810 and by 1814 the firm of Donkin, Hall & Gamble were supplying canned rations to the British army.

As with much early-stage technology, the idea was better than the execution.

The early cans were made of tin-plated iron and they had to be hacked open with a cold chisel or bayonet.

(It took another 50 years to make them thin enough for a can opener to become practical.)

They were also dangerous, the seams were sealed with lead solder, and lead poisoning was not uncommon.

Nevertheless it was presumably an improvement on starvation.

Then in 1855 Alexis Soyer invented the Soyer Stove for use in the Crimean War.

Soyer was one of those polymaths the Victorian era seemed to effortlessly produce; a celebrity chef, entrepreneur, humanitarian and innovator.

As a chef, Soyer naturally designed his stove based on years of practical kitchen experience.

And it proved to be a beautifully engineered example of bottom-up product design.

At the bottom was a clean-out that also incorporated a damper to control air supply and regulate temperature.

It was versatile and would run on just about anything - wood, coal, gas, peat and even camel dung.

Above the sealed fuel chamber, sat an integral 12 gallon cauldron for soups or stews, which could be replaced by a shallow tray, creating an oven to bake bread or roast meat.

Thanks to a capped chimney, the stove could operate even in heavy rain and it also doubled as a space heater.

A single stove could feed 50 men, and its use would save an army of 40,000 men 90 tons of fuel a day, compared to the normal practice of cooking on open fires.

The stove considerably increased an army’s health, mobility and morale.

And to top it off, Soyer established the post of “Regimental Cook” and trained the first cooks personally.

The Soyer Stove fed troops from Rangoon to Ruislip, all across the British Empire, where of course the sun never set.

The contribution it made to the well-being of those men who served their country is incalculable.

The biggest accolade came from the army itself, they used the stove for 120 years, up to and including the First Gulf war in 1991.

You can find one today, proudly on display in London’s National Army Museum.

It’s hard to imagine anything created by today's celebrity chefs enjoying such longevity.