Brand it Like Balotelli

After Italy’s Euro 2012 semi-final win against Germany no one can deny that Mario Balotelli is a superb footballer. In case you missed the match, he scored twice within 16 minutes of the first half, effectively killing the game and propelling Italy into the final.

The first goal was good – the second was spectacular, a contender for goal of the tournament.

Granted, Italy hasn’t won it yet but Balotelli has already eclipsed Ronaldo, as the striker of an admittedly somewhat lacklustre Euro 2012.

Of course what’s got everyone talking as well as the goals is his celebration.

The history of goal celebrations makes an interesting footnote in the annals of football history.

From Roger Milla’s dance in the 1990 World Cup, to Bebeto rocking the baby four years later or Jurgen Klinsmann’s satirical dives in the mid 1990’s, goal celebrations are about taunting and intimidating the opposition just as much as celebrating goals.

They’re about imposing the striker’s personal brand by being smarter, cheekier, more outrageous, more athletic, more…something.

But this celebration is different.

It’s a negative celebration, a celebration that isn’t.

A beautiful example of less is more.

By standing as still as a statue of a svelte Mr. T and impelling his team mates to come to him, Balotelli has defiantly re-defined the category with an inspired example of predatory thinking.

And if you score spectacular goals, they will come running.

He’s out-competing by not competing, by literally doing nothing.

There’s confidence verging on arrogance in this demonstration of apartness.

And as much as the ritual is calculated to gain our attention and maybe our animus, it is also evidence of steely self-awareness and presence of mind.

Because the natural thing to do, the thing you’ve been doing since you were a kid, is celebrate a goal in motion with your arms raised.

And when Balotelli first started scoring for Manchester City that's exactly what he did.

But sometime during the 2011/12 season the celebration evolved into his current celebration of minimalism.

Overcoming the natural impulse to actively celebrate and overturning a life-long habit can’t be as easy as it looks.

And I think we can learn some lessons from Mario that have nothing to do with football and quite a lot to do with branding.

Because whereas Balotelli the footballer is all about power, skill and athleticism, Balotelli the brand is great example of contrarian positioning with a goal celebration built on stillness.

The thinking is every bit as predatory as his footballing instincts.

As a brand Balotelli is a brand leader that still thinks subversively like an emerging brand.

That’s how to dominate a category.

That’s how to distinguish your brand.

And sometimes it doesn't take much.

But you need the intention.

You need the confidence.

Pedals and Poodles in the French Concession

Bicycles were introduced to China by Shanghai’s original expat community in the late 19^th century. Many of whom, and not just the French, lived in the French Concession.

The French Concession is made for cycling.

Its gently curving boulevards are shaded by a panoply of plane trees that keep the streets considerably cooler than other parts of town.

True, the traffic is still the typical chaotic Shanghai mix of bicycle rickshaws, motorized rickshaws, hand carts, scooters, ebikes, motorbikes, cars, vans, trucks, buses and super capacitor buses.

But the French Concession’s quiet alleys and laneways yield unexpected retail treasures and culinary delights, nestled among secluded courtyards and gardens.

You’ll still find lots of expats riding bikes in the French Concession.

You’ll also find lots of Chinese riding bikes.

But by and large the Chinese riders will either be western educated, or from the poorer end of society.

Unlike the expats who associate riding bikes with fun, fitness and environmental awareness; the Chinese associate them with poverty and the bad old days.

When if you owned a bike, you were lucky and if didn’t--you were walking.

There’s a great Shanghai cycling website http://peoplesbike.com  it’s so popular that in 2011 they launched a magazine called 48 x 15.

Tellingly both are exclusively available in English.

Because bikes just don’t have the same cool factor, for upwardly mobile Chinese, as they do for expats.

Little wonder when for the fanatically upwardly mobile, a VW that’s made in China doesn’t have the same cachet as a VW import.

And of course a BMW or Lexus is infinitely preferable.

So a bike doesn’t stand a chance.

What scores upwardly mobile Shanghainese their cool points are dogs.

So in addition to bikes, the streets of the French Concession are swarming with cute little pooches.

Immaculately groomed Shih Tzus, Poodles, Puggles and Labradoodles predominate, but even the odd Bulldog may be spotted on occasion.

And eighty or ninety percent will be walked by Chinese as opposed to expats,

There’s a  proverb that says the Southern Chinese will eat anything on four legs, except a table.

With good reason, because there was a time when they needed to in order to survive.

Before a hundred years of economic growth exploded over a single generation, dogs were a handy source of food.

And of course in many parts of China they still are.

So for upwardly mobile Shanghainese living in the French Concession owning a dog confers status.

Because nothing says you’ve made it like not needing to eat one.

Cool it seems is elusive in any language.

The Hidden Cost of Stock Photography

I just got back from 3 weeks in Shanghai where I had a few beers with my old mate Danny. He’s ECD of global brands for a big multi-national agency.

It’s the opposite end of the industry to my freelance gigs.

In spite of this, our business philosophies and the work we appreciate, share more similarities than differences.

We hadn’t met for 4 years so the conversation was freeform and wide-ranging.

Until it turned to how the rise of stock photography has made things tough for photographers.

Which led to some other interesting thoughts on the subject and here’s the gist of them.

Before the Internet, stock photography was a drawn-out process.

You’d give your specs to someone at a stock-house and they would manually search and cross-index tens of thousands of images.

Days, or sometimes even weeks later if the image was somewhat obscure, an envelope would arrive with a print and a negative.

God help you if you lost the negative.

You were looking at a hefty surcharge of many times the image rights.

Now of course there’s no waiting.

You download your image with a couple of clicks.

It’s fast and inexpensive - but there’s a hidden cost.

You have to find the image first.

Shutterstock is the stock site I use most.

The first time I used it, it had around 6 million images.

Today it has over 19 million.

Simple math suggests it takes three times longer to find what you’re looking for now, than it did then.

So now the process is drawn-out in a different way.

Now the consumer does the work.

So the real cost of the convenience is hidden in a huge transference of labour.

Because anyone who’s spent any time searching for stock photography will tell you it’s extremely time consuming.

Especially if you’re trying to use stock photography originally, which means using it in a way where it doesn’t look like stock.

Because then, you can’t simply look at categories you need to think across them.

And often it’s hard to believe how long it takes to find a shot.

Let alone bill clients the actual hours involved, whether you’re a freelancer or a multi-national.

Of course stock houses are aware of this and continually trying to improve the user’s search experience.

But they need to get a move on.

The point when it becomes more cost effective to shoot an image is hard to call.

A lot depends on what you’re shooting.

But every image that’s added to the database brings the tipping point closer.

And if it does tip, I imagine there will be a lot more happy art directors.

Not to mention photographers.

Now is the Spring of our Bloomin’ Discontent

Can you feel it? It’s everywhere.

From the rebels in Syria, to Occupy Wall Street, to student protests in Quebec, to a toxic US election campaign, to vocal Russian dissidents, to a UK local election thumping for the coalition government, to an embittered and unemployed Spain, to a despairing Greece, to a Eurozone coming apart at the seams.

And I’m leaving a lot out.

Discontent is everywhere and it’s different this time.

It’s not a bunch of radicals or a revolutionary cell.

This time it’s the 99%.

They may not all be manning the barricades or lobbing Molotov cocktails.

But perhaps for the first time, it feels like the majority of global citizens know the game is rigged.

They know Left or Right, Democrats or Republicans, it’s just different shades of grey.

They know governments are run by lobbyists for corporations.

They know that $30 per hour semi-skilled jobs are never coming back.

Sure, they still vote - to do otherwise would be to give up absolutely but deep-down they know it won’t change anything.

They will get fooled again.

They know all governments tell lies and waste money, and in the West, the best we can hope for is that it’s not deliberate.

And we’re lucky.

If you’re not so lucky, you get a bunch of thugs blatantly lining their offshore accounts while your kids starve.

And there’s nothing you can do.

So here’s the point.

Here’s the question.

How do you sell stuff in an Age of Universal Cynicism?

Because that’s the age we’re in.

1. Be honest

Your mum probably told you, “Honesty’s the best policy.” She was right.

Lying about a product invariably gets found out. Ask Nutella and I imagine the $3 million in damages is nothing compared to the hit Ferrero’s sales have taken over this class action lawsuit.

The bigger question is why lie to sell your “healthy” product when you could just produce a genuinely healthy product in the first place?

Having worked on quite a lot of FMCG, basically it comes down to price points and volume. Make a healthier product, price points go up, volume goes down, profit margins get thinner. I’m not saying it’s easy.

But the real bottom line is we’re choking on deceit. More than ever we want brands we can trust. Especially when we feed them to our kids.

2. Be credible

Being honest won’t get you very far unless you’re credible too, and that’s not just semantics.

It’s become too easy to bash RIM, but that’s not my problem when they make silly claims in Blackberry Bold ads. If you’ve seen the ad where Meridith Valiando claims to answer 1000 emails a day you know exactly what I mean.

I doubt anyone answers a thousand emails a day on any phone but even if this claim is true, it’s simply not credible. At a minute an email that’s 16 hours 40 minutes per day. Credibility is a huge brand asset, it’s easy to lose and hard to regain.

3. Put a smile on my face or a thought in my head

As Howard Gossage said, “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad.” So make your ads amusing or provoking or something... Because nobody cares about your message and they’ll care even less if you beat them over the head with it.

These are good advertising practices at any time, but they’re especially welcome in an Age of Universal Cynicism.

The Digital Impressionists

For an artist in Paris during the latter part of the nineteenth century, everything hinged on Le Salon. If your work got accepted it would enhance your reputation and could even make you famous.

It almost certainly meant selling some pieces and making a living.

With so much at stake, inevitably competition was furious and the selection process stringent.

Until 1863, with the art establishment struggling to beat back the emerging Impressionist movement, the selection process went beyond stringent and entered the realm of sheer brutality.

Over 3,000 paintings were stamped on the back with the infamous red R for refusé and rejected.

There wasn’t an outcry or a backlash so much as total uproar.

Parisians were so outraged that the Emperor Napoleon III had to intervene.

He diplomatically granted the rejected artists the chance to exhibit at a Salon des Refusé.

Among the rejected, hung works by Manet, Whistler, Cezanne and Pissarro.

The scandalous hit was Manet’s Dejeuner sur l'herbe.

Although thinly veiled in classical allusion it was widely assumed to depict a couple of whores in the notorious Bois de Boulogne.

It was probably the moment when Impressionism began to eclipse Realism.

The growth of photography had rendered Realism obsolete.

It was old technology.

No one could paint as realistically as a camera.

Impressionism didn’t need to.

It was different.

It was new.

And where would art be without the next thing whether it’s soup cans or Super Mario?

Currently, Super Mario Brothers and Pac-Man are on show at the Smithsonian.

They’re part of The Art of Video Games, an exhibit showcasing 40 years of gamer art, from Pong to Flower.

Predictably the show has intensified the “Are video games really art?” debate.

A hundred years ago it would have been “Is cinema really art?”

And fifty years before that, the same question was asked about Impressionism.

It strikes me as moot.

If the establishment in the form of the Smithsonian says video games are art, isn’t that enough?

More intriguingly, if the Smithsonian is today’s equivalent of Le Salon

Where is today’s Salon des Refusés.

It might just be Kickstarter.

Since its inception in 2008 Kickstarter has morphed from a source of funding for personal projects to a full-on game incubator.

The success of Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2 started a cash tsunami rolling with over $10 million funded to games projects since March 1 alone.

Kickstarter has become so successful as a game incubator, it has spawned copycat sites exclusively for crowd funding games.

While the imitators are playing catch up Kickstarter has morphed into a not insignificant source of venture capital fueling exceptional non-gamer creativity too.

The media were all over Pebble the smartwatch start-up that’s raised over $6,488,243 to date.

By some estimates Kickstarter will raise over $300 million this year.

OK, that’s barely seed capital by Silicon Valley standards, but significant funding to the rest of us.

It marks an evolution from personal to small business funding to venture capital.

Can’t get that meeting with Sequoia or Union Square - maybe you don’t need to when you can go direct and get funded anyway.

That works, until someone thinks up an even better model.

And they will.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

As they say in Paris.

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Not Every Business Needs a Brand

Mario the Tiler doesn’t have a logo. I’m not sure he even has a business card.

And I know he doesn’t have a website.

He doesn’t need one.

Everyone in the hood knows if you want decent tiling at a fair price you call Mario.

His phone never stops.

Call him and he'll come round in his beat-up van and give you an estimate.

It’s a straight-forward value proposition.

The work is good not great.

But good tiling is good enough for most people.

The price is modest not cheap.

So you get a deal and you don’t hate looking at it.

And Mario works fast so it works for him.

If you’re an architect or a perfectionist, you might want to use someone else.

Mario won’t mind.

He’ll be busy tiling, he’s good at it.

He’s even better at getting customers and keeping them.

In contrast to Mario and his van, Honest Ed's takes up a whole block.

Ed's as everyone calls it is a Toronto landmark.

In business for over 60 years, it was a big box store before there were big box stores.

At around 160,000 square feet it still is.

It sells everything and anything it can buy, and then sell, cheap.

Ed’s is a refreshingly random shopping experience.

Want a DVD for 88¢ how about Abbott & Costello or vintage TV series Dragnet?

No, how about an 88¢ baseball hat?

Sometimes when I'm stuck on a brief, I’ll stroll round Ed's incredible retail smorgasbord and free associate.

Pooch shampoo, sardines, kitsch religious artwork, clothespins, BBQs, cleaning supplies, hey I need cleaning stuff!

Ed’s doesn’t do branding, so much as anti-branding via cheesy hand painted signs that tell it like it is.

Everyone likes Ed’s.

They keep you coming back.

In contrast to Ed’s prime real estate,  Casa Rosa is a garish pink motel tucked behind the bus station, in the Mexican resort town of Tulum.

It lacks curb appeal, and if you just arrived, you would probably walk past it.

I certainly would have, if a hotel owner in Valladolid hadn’t recommended it.

That was my good fortune, because Casa Rosa is an excellent budget hotel.

Less than forty bucks gets you a spotless room with a king size bed, air-conditioning and TV.

It may lack a bit of charm, but the same amenities on the beach would cost you at least three times as much.

The word is out and not surprisingly Rosa’s gets busier every time I stay there.

I love brands, but not every business needs a brand.

Every brand, on the other hand, needs a business.

Which means getting customers and keeping them.

Not quite as sexy as selling your 2-year-old start-up for a billion dollars.

But the first step in doing an "Instagram" is getting and keeping customers.

Real Street Marketing

The weather has been unseasonably warm here, culminating in a record 25.5°C on March 22. It’s like Christmas in July for one of Toronto’s much maligned and marginalized groups; the panhandlers are back out in force.

These other boys of summer may be underrepresented, but they are highly vocal.

On my 10 minute stroll to, and from work, through the Annex, one of the city’s prosperous but still gritty hoods, I get a snapshot of marketing at its rawest.

Panhandlers don’t have MBAs or Clios; they have a split second to engage you.

Selling yourself is never easy and as with any trade there’s a knack to it, maybe they can even teach us marketing sophisticates a thing or two.

A Sherlock Holmes story, The Man with the Twisted Lip tells of a protagonist leading the double life of a London beggar while making enough income to also be a respectable country gentleman.

He accomplishes this by virtue of, “A facility of repartee, which improved by practice and made me quite a recognised character in the City.”

The Holmes story chronicles a practitioner at the pinnacle of his trade.

Unlike the first guy I usually pass.

A 20 something, who gruffly demands “Spare change?” and whether you give him any or not, follows up with “Nice day” making both phrases sound like a proposition.

He certainly lacks the silver-tongued delivery of the man with the oversize white cane.

 “Can you spare a nickel a quarter a dime or a dollar?” delivered in the breakneck rhythmic sing-song, if not the accent of a Kentucky horse auctioneer.

I appreciate his attention to syntax, in putting quarter before dime to improve the flow, almost enough to overlook his breaking one of salesmanship’s fundamental rules, by asking a yes - no question.

Then there’s the nondescript guy although that’s not entirely accurate, because I can describe him as the guy with the best tagline.

“Something is better than nothing.”

A line I appreciate enormously for being both optimistic and philosophically unassailable.

I usually pass the 40 cent guy on the way home.

His strategy is one of deceptive simplicity.

“Do you have 40 cents?”

I admire the cleverness of this, because first, by asking for a specific amount he legitimizes his request to some degree.

(A specific amount surely infers a specific purpose.)

Second 40 cents cunningly requires a minimum of 3 coins, greatly upping the probability of getting more, because who is going to search for exact change?

Do I give them money?

Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.

I side with the character in Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink, who asserts:

“Begging is a profession, like dentistry, like shining shoes. It’s a service. Every so often you need to get a tooth filled or your shoes shined or to give alms. So when a beggar presents himself to you, you have to ask yourself, ‘Do I need a beggar today?’ If you do, give him alms. If you don’t, don’t.”

Put another way, if I’m not in the market for what you’re selling, it doesn’t matter how good your presentation is, I won’t be buying.

But that doesn’t mean I won’t appreciate a good one.

And I can think of a few brands that don't handle their messaging with such smarts.

The Strange Allure of Losers

In a world enthralled by winners, sport reminds us there are also losers. Last weekend I watched Spurs (that’s Tottenham, not San Antonio) lose their third Premier League match in a row.

Although the team is still in third place, their lead over Arsenal (our arch-rivals) in fourth place, has evaporated to a solitary point, from 10 points, in just two weeks.

As a longstanding Spurs fan this is disappointing, but not altogether unexpected.

It’s the price of following a club with a tradition of swashbuckling football and a masochistic tendency of giving up soft goals.

A club that hasn’t won the game’s top honour since 1961, and could well go another 50 years before winning it again - but still sells out more or less every home game.

In a society that idolises winners, sport may be the only area where associating with losers is considered acceptable.

Even losing sports brands are incredibly powerful, with teams getting passed down through generations of families like blue eyes, or big ears.

In many communities it’s OK to change your spouse but not to change your team.

In sports, even losers have allure.

History, on the other hand, is said to be written by the winners.

Maybe so, but there are losers who capture our imagination across the centuries, with a grip most brands can only dream about.

Napoleon may have lost the battle of Waterloo, yet he’s certainly defeated the Duke of Wellington in the battle of pop culture.

There are innumerable films about Napoleon, including Abel Gance's 1927 epic, in most of them Wellington is relegated to a minor role.

While Wellington can lay claim to a boot and a beer or two named after him “Napoleon” is the term given to a whole category of Armagnac and Cognac.

Oscar Wilde died broken and penniless.

Since then, practically all his work been filmed, he himself is the subject of numerous films and Wildean has become an adjective.

His epigrams endure and he’s the subject of numerous biographies.

Van Gogh never sold a picture in his lifetime and cut off his ear.

But two of his paintings are among the 10 most expensive ever sold, (adjusted for inflation).

And his pop cultural influence ranges from a portrayal by Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life, to the song Vincent by Don McLean and at least 5 other films.

We’re fascinated by Van Gogh’s brilliance, his madness, and his persistence, in death we accord him the place he was denied in life.

Napoleon died in exile, but is still regarded as one of the finest military strategists ever.

Oscar Wilde’s wit overshadows his fall from grace over something as commonplace as homosexuality.

In life, as in sport, the best players don’t win every time.

But sport at least gives us transparency along with victory or defeat.

A transparency that can be missing in life, where sometimes the game feels rigged before it begins.

And there's something heroic about rolling the dice for really big stakes.

Whether the winners write history or not, the losers are often more interesting.

Even if, when it comes to sports, they break your heart every time.