I’m getting a buzz seeing how little I update social media now. Around February 2016 I began updating Tumblr far less; I’ve gone from dozens of posts per month to four in December 2017 and seven in January 2018. (Here’s my Tumblr archive.) Facebook, as many of you know, is a thing of the past for me (as far as my personal wall is concerned), though that was helped along by Facebook itself. However, I’m still a pretty heavy Instagram user, and I continue to Tweetâthough with Twitter’s analytics telling you how much you’re up or down over the previous month, it might be a challenge to see if I can get that down by 100 per cent next. (It won’t happen any time soon, but if Twitter continues on its current path over its policies, it might come sooner rather than later.)
I’m wondering if the next badge of honour is how much you can de-socialize yourself, and for those of us with web presences (such as this blog), bringing traffic to your own spaces. Why? It’s all about credibility and authenticity. And I’m not sure if the fleeting nature of social media provides them, at least not for me.
Now in an age where so many are trying to be an “influencer”, then wouldn’t we expect the tide to turn against the shallow, fleeting posters in favour of something deeper and more considered? After all, marketing seeks authenticityâit has for a long time. What is authentic about a social media influencer who changes clothes multiple times a day out of obligation to sponsors? Even if they reach millions, did it really connect with audiences on a deeper level or did it simply seem forced?
I can understand how, initially, social media were real connectors, allowing people to connect one on one and have a conversation. It seemed logical that marketing would head that way, going from one-to-many, to something more personalized, then (as Stefan Engeseth has posited for a long time) to one where brand and audience were on the same side, trying to find shared values (let’s call it ‘oneness’). At a time social media looked like it would help things along. But has it really? Influencers are less interested in being on the same side than being on the other side, in an adaptation of the one-to-many model. It’s just that that model itself has become democratized, so a single person has the means of reaching millions without a traditional intermediary (e.g. the media). There’s nothing really wrong with that, as long as we see it for what it is: a communications’ channel. Nothing new there.
Some are doing it right in pursuing oneness with their audiences by posting just on a single topic, updating honestly about their everyday livesâmy good friend Summer Rayne Oakes comes to mind with her Homestead Brooklyn account, and has stayed on-message with what she stands for and her message for over a decade. Within the world of Instagram, this is a “deeper” level, sharing values in an effort to connect and be on the same side as her audience. However, she isn’t solely using Instagram; other media back her up. Hers is a fantastic example of how to market and influence in the context I’m describing, so there is still a point to these social media services. But for every Summer Rayne there are many, many who are gathering attention for no values that I can fathomâit has all been about the numbers of followers and looking attractive.
I haven’t a problem with their choiceâit is their space, after allâbut we shouldn’t pretend that these are media that have allowed more authentic conversations to take place. Marketers should know this. These messages aren’t customized or personalized. Algorithms will rank them so audiences get a positive hit that their own preferences are being validated, just like any internet medium that places us in bubbles. The authenticity is relative: because no party has come between the communicator and the audience, then it’s unfiltered, and in that respect it’s first-hand versus second-hand. But how many times was that message rehearsed? How many photos were taken before that one was selected? It’s “unreality”.
There are so many such social media presences now, and crowded media are not places where people can have a decent connection with audiences. Some with millions of usersâI’m thinking of young modelsâmight not even be reaching the target audience that companies expected of them. Is what they wear really going to be relevant to someone of the opposite sex browsing for eye candy? That isn’t a genuine conversation.
Don’t look to my Instagram for any clues, eitherâI use it for leisure and not for marketing. I don’t have the ambition of being a social media influencer: I’m happy with what I do have to get my viewpoints across.
And I don’t know what’s next. I see social media decentralizing and people taking charge of their privacy more, even if most people are happy to have the authorities snoop on their conversations. Mastodon has been pretty good so far, because it hasn’t attracted everyone. The few who are there are having respectful conversations, even if posts aren’t reaching the numbers they might on Twitter, and mutual respect can lead to authenticity. If, as a marketer, that’s not what you seek, that’s fine: there are plenty of accounts operating on audience numbers but not genuine conversationsâas long as you know what you’re getting into. But I believe marketing, and in particular branding, should form real relationships and dialogue. Not every life is the fantasy shown in social mediaâwe know that that’s not possible. One politician has coined the term ‘fake news’; and social media have “fake lives”, in amongst all the bots.
If these media become known for shallow connections “by the numbers”, then even those doing it right, forming those genuine conversations, may be compelled to move on, or at least value the social media services less because of what their brands stand for. Email is a great medium still, and you can still have great conversations on it, but email marketing isn’t as “sexy” as it was in the mid-1990s, because there’s more spam than legit messages. It takes skill to use it well and to build up a proper, consented email list. Social media are getting to a point where some big-number accounts are associated with shallowness, and the companies themselves (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) have policies and conduct that have the potential to taint our own brands.
In 2018, as at any other time, doing something well takes hard work. There is no magic medium.
[Prof Anne-Marie Brady of the University of Canterbury] said the Chinese-language media in New Zealand was subject to extreme censorship, and accused both Mr. Yang and Raymond Huo, an ethnic Chinese lawmaker from the center-left Labour Party, of being subject to influence by the Chinese Embassy and community organizations it used as front groups to push the countryâs agenda.
Mr. Huo strongly denied any âinsinuations against his character,â saying his connections with Chinese groups and appearances at their events were just part of being an effective lawmaker.
And:
Despite the criticism, Mr. Yang has continued to appear alongside Wang Lutong, Chinaâs ambassador to New Zealand, at public events, including for Chinaâs National Day celebrations this week, when he posed for photos with the ambassador and a Chinese military attachĂŠ.
I wound up at three events where the Chinese ambassador, HE Wang Lutong, was also invited. This makes me a spy, I mean, agent.
I even shook hands with him. This means my loyalty to New Zealand should be questioned.
I ran for mayor twice, which must be a sure sign that Beijing is making a power-play at the local level.
You all should have seen it coming.
My Omega watch, the ease with which I can test-drive Aston Martins, and the fact I know how to tie a bow tie to match my dinner suit.
The faux Edinburgh accent that I can bring out at any time with the words, âThere can be only one,â and âWe shail into hishtory!â
Helming a fashion magazine and printing on Matt paper, thatâs another clue. We had a stylist whose name was Illya K. I donât always work Solo. Sometimes I call on Ms Gale or Ms Purdy.
Jian Yang and I have the same initials, which should really ring alarm bells.
Clearly this all makes me a spy. I mean, agent.
Never mind I grew up in a household where my paternal grandfather served under General Chiang Kai-shek and he and my Dad were Kuomintang members. Dad was ready to ĺ塼 and fight back the communists if called up.
Never mind that I was extremely critical when New Zealanders were roughed up by our cops when a Chinese bigwig came out from Beijing in the 1990s.
Never mind that I have been schooled here, contributed to New Zealand society, and flown our flag high in the industries Iâve worked in.
All Chinese New Zealanders, it seems, are still subject to suspicion and fears of the yellow peril in 2017, no matter how much you put in to the country you love.
We might think, âThatâs not as bad as the White Australia policy,â and it isnât. We donât risk deportation. But we do read these stories where thereâs plenty of nudge-nudge wink-wink going on and you wonder if thereâs the same underlying motive.
All you need to do is have a particular skin colour and support your community, risking that the host has invited Communist Party bigwigs.
Those of us who are here now donât really bear grudges against what happened in the 1940s. We have our views, but that doesnât stop us from getting on with life. And that means we will be seen with people whose political opinions differ from ours.
Sound familiar? Thatâs no different to anyone else here. Itâs not exactly difficult to be in the same room as a German New Zealander or a Japanese New Zealander in 2017. A leftie won’t find it hard to be in the same room as a rightie.
So Iâll keep turning up to community events, thank you, without that casting any shadow over my character or my loyalty.
A person in this country is innocent till proved guilty. We should hold all New Zealanders to the same standard, regardless of ethnicity. This is part of what being a Kiwi is about, and this is ideal is one of the many reasons I love this country. If the outcry in the wake of Garnerâs Fairfax Press opinion is any indication, most of us adhere to this, and exhibit it.
Therefore, I don’t have a problem with Prof Brady or anyone interviewed for the pieceâit’s the way their quotes were used to make me question where race relations in our neck of the woods is heading.
But until heâs proved guilty, Iâm going to reserve making any judgement of Dr Yang. The New York Times and any foreign media reporting on or operating here should know better, too.
How interesting to see a silly Tweet of mine make the Murdoch Press and lead an opinion columnâIâm told it even hit the news.com.au home page.
Itâs a very old joke that Iâve told since 2002, when I walked along Bay Road in Kilbirnie and saw a locksmith sign in Futura. Back then, Dick Smith Electronics had its logotype set in ITC Avant Garde Gothic. I really thought it was a Dick Smith sign at a first, fleeting glance, seeing CKSMITH. The joke was born.
Most in my social media streams got it except a couple of Australians who had likely come across it via Murdochs a day late, one calling me ignorant (not sure how you can get that from one Tweet), and another âaholeâ (is this a misspelling of aloha?). As the funniest guy in their media is John Clarke, who was born in New Zealand, maybe humour doesnât reach a couple of households there if it has to be imported. And the number of times Johnâs taken the piss about us, to my thorough enjoyment, means that some of us can take a joke. Perhaps we just have a sense of humour. We have to: it was the only way we could deal with our PM appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman. It is, to quote the man, âa bit of banter. No drama.â
The false indignation âon behalf of othersâ is always a comical one, because itâs usually founded on a misplaced and unjustified sense of superiority. During a political campaign, theyâre the ones I find the most humorous and least authoritative. Thick skin came with that territory.
Neither deserves a response beyond what I said on Twitter, but the second one (with a fresh new account to troll from, always a good sign of someone who wonât stand by their words) highlights a point that I have made on this blog before. âRuby Pondâ notes, âThe guy is pure Oz and started when you were in nappies and tried! Stick to your foreign companies, they really help Oz.â Iâm not sure what I was tried about, not having been to court while I was in nappies, but maybe sheâs depending on the fact that not everyone remembers back to their infancy.
Well done. She got this from an American-owned newspaper website (remember, Rupertâs no longer an Australian, nor is the HQ in Australia and hasnât been for a long, long time), and, for the record, Iâm not as old as the business that Dick founded. Thereâs also a suggestion that I must be Australian, because, after all, everyone on the planet must be. No other countries exist. I didnât want to get into trans-Tasman rivalry in such a situation, nor was it appropriate to give a list of Australian corporate misdeeds in New Zealand. The term off-topic springs to mind.
I told her, âStick to your foreign media, they really help Oz.â
Hers is that simplistic thinking that gets people supporting foreign-owned businesses when they believe they are supporting local ones.
Dickâs been one of my personal heroes since his solo helicopter flight and Iâve been a customer of the chain he founded since I was old enough to buy my own tech gear. Entrepreneurs like him are the ones Iâve always encouraged, through mentoring and through my policies. However, the sad story of the company, no longer owned by Dick, is one of corporate greedâwhich the founder himself has been critical of. We havenât learned the lessons of so many economic crises: Gordon Geckoâs mantra of âgreed is goodâ continues to drive the corporate world.
The reason so many multinationals buy local brands is to fool the public into thinking theyâre supporting their own. Weâre guilty of it ourselves, and I recall using the examples of Just Juice and most of our local newspapers on this blog. People closed accounts at the National Bank when it became ANZ here, because of a suspicion of, dislike of, or rivalry with Australia, perceiving National to be a local bank. The problem there: ANZ had owned the National Bank for years before the rebranding of its own subsidiary, and prior to that it was part of Lloyds TSB in the UK. A lot of Australians think Ford and Holden are domestic players (though, oddly, not Toyota, which probably builds as many, if not more, cars there), just as many Britons still think they are buying British when they shop at Ford and Vauxhall.
The situation with news.com.au differs slightly in that that business was started in Australia by Rupert Murdochâs Dad, and it has grown from thereâbut the fact remains that its HQ is overseas and thatâs where it pays its tax. Help to Australians: not a lot. The Murdoch Pressâs globalization agenda wonât be one that the âbuy Australianâ crowd would support for the most part.
But this is how brands work, because they encourage us to make mental shortcuts for the products and services we consume. Iâve devoted a good deal of my professional life to it. Some should encourage scrutiny because of the power they have (Wally Olins noted, many years ago, how some brands need to adopt notions that were once reserved for states), and it was hoped that, post-No Logo, we would be more inquisitive about the backgrounds to the organizations we support.
Even though it’s our money and time, the sad thing is that this level of inquiry remains the province of the few, those people who are willing to scrutinize their own behaviour and practise what they preach. Social media have helped spread news of corporate misbehaviours (Volkswagen will attest to that) and more people are aware; but to counter that we get more information than we ever used to, and unless something resonates, will we just forget it?
Therefore, it can only be something where people who have done the proper investigation get to have a say. And like all human endeavours, it can be scammed, so safeguards have to be built in.
One of the reasons the Medinge Group awarded its Brands with a Conscience accolades for close to a decade was to champion the organizations that were getting it right, inviting transparency and scrutiny, championing good corporate citizenship, and engaging in socially responsible programmes. Among them were companies devoted to doing things right by the communities they were present in, whether it was Dilmah Tea, Tata Steel or Hennes & Mauritz.
By our championing them, selected by a think-tank of leading brand professionals, we would be able to highlight shining examples of branding, as well as give them the sort of boost they deserved. If positive companies could increase their custom, and if positive non-profits could increase their influence, then we can do some good in the world.
As people rightly want shortcuts in their busy daily lives, then the work at Medinge, if seen as an endorsement, would help them make a decision about whether to deal with that organization or not.
Itâs nice to be in that bubble, which makes me ever-grateful to get reminders that we still have a lot of work to do. If youâre genuinely desirous of helping your own, then we need to help create more ways of reminding people which organizations do just that. The Brands with a Conscience programme was definitely a very good way of doing it. What shall we do, in the post-peak-Facebook world of the second part of this decade, to get word out? Is it through video, thanks to greater bandwidth, that allows us to experience and understand more? Is this the coming of age of some form of virtual reality? Or, as we did when we first started exploring bulletin boards and email, time again for us to reach out to people in communities very foreign and different to ours through video chatsâsomething like Google Hangouts but actually with people? (Yes, I know, Google fans, I was taking the piss.) Is Skype the service on which this can be built?
I would have said that technology is the great democratizer, and maybe more of us should be giving out awards to truly deserving organizations, voted on by more of the public. But we come across the issue of quality versus quantity again: the Reputation Institute surveyed 60,000 people in 15 countries and still wound up with NestlĂŠ among the most reputable firms in the world. NestlĂŠ may do very good things in some quarters, but it hasnât been able to avoid a lawsuit by environmental and public interests groups in California over its water-bottling operation there, or accusations by activists who believe the company wants to privatize water at the expense of public health. Volkswagen was there in the 2014 survey. We decide on image, and that image is the very thing that gets us making bad choices.
The next innovators are already on to it, and we donât even know that we seek it. But, in order to self-actualize, maybe organizing usâindividuals, not corporationsâinto global communities is the next stage. We have seen Kiva work so positively, so how about making it more interactive? Naturally we will tend to choose to help those in our own countries firstâcrowdfunding campaigns show us thatâbut allowing us to understand another human beingâs situation could be the challenge in a time when governments pursue their austerity agenda. Somehow, we can restore, at least to some degree, the optimism we had when we in the first world accessed the World Wide Web for the first time.
Top Earlier today, attempting to get into Style.com meant a virus warningâthe only trace of this curiosity is in the web history. AboveStyle.com is back, with a note that it will be transforming into an e-tail site.
If thereâs one constant in fashion, itâs change. The other one, which we notice thanks to a number of our team being well schooled on fashion history, is that trends always return, albeit in modified form. Both have come into play with Style.com, which announced earlier this week that it would become an ecommerce site.
When Lucire started, we linked to style.com, but it wasnât in our fashion magazinesâ directory. It was, instead, in our shopping guide.
In 2000, that all changed, and it began appearing under our fashion magazine links, where it was until today. An attempt to log in to the home page was met by a virus warning, preventing us from going further. We figured that this was part of the transformation of the website as it readied itself for the next era, discouraging people from peering. However, having had these warnings splashed across our own pages two years ago courtesy of Googleâs faulty bot, when our site was in fact clean, there was a part of us taking it with a grain of salt. In either case, given the impending change, it was probably the right time to remove the link.
This evening, Style.com is back and virus-free, with an overlay graphic announcing that the website will be changing. Plenty of our media colleagues have analysed the closure over the past week: the Murdoch Press has gossiped about how the layoffs were announced, WWD suggests editor-in-chief Dirk Standen didnât know it was coming, based on rumours, while Fashionista puts it all into context by analysing just where ecommerce is within the fashion sector, and that content should be the answer over clothing sales.
What is interesting is no one that weâve spotted has mentioned how the style.com domain name (weâve carefully noted it in lowercase there) has effectively come full circle. Perhaps we really are in the age of Wikipedia-based research, as this fact is not mentioned there at all.
When Lucire launched in 1997, style.com was the website for Express Style, later more prominently, and simply, branded Express, a US fashion retailer. Itâs not hard to imagine that had Express remained at the URL, it would have become an e-tailer; it has, after all, made the move into ecommerce at its present home, express.com. Like a fashion trend that comes back two decades later, style.com has gone back to its roots: by the autumn itâll be e-tailing.
The omission from the above paragraph is the sale of the style.com domain name by Express to CondĂŠ Nast in the late 1990s. We never completely understood the need to start a new brand to be the US home of Vogue and W; for many years, typing vogue.com into the browser in the US would take one automatically to Style.com. Then, somewhere along the line, CondĂŠ Nast decided that vogue.com should be the online home of Vogue after all.
But having made the decision to forge ahead with Style.com, CondĂŠ Nast did it with a lot of resources, and took its site to number one among print fashion magazine web presences in a remarkably short space of time. It devoted plenty of resources to it, and itâs thanks to Style.com that certain things that were once frowned uponâe.g. showing off catwalk collections after the showâbecame acceptable. Designers used to enjoy the fact that we and Elle US delayed online coverage, the belief being that the delay ensured that pirates could not copy their designs and beat them to the high street.
To get itself known, CondĂŠ Nast bought advertising at fashion websites that were better known, including this one (yes, in 2000 that really was the case), at a time when online advertising cost considerably more than it does today.
The muscle from the best known name in fashion publishing changed the way the media interacted with readers. Designers figured that if they wanted coverage, they would have to accept that their work would be shown nearly instantly. We became used to that idea, so much so that we now have to show the catwalk videos live in the 2010s.
In some ways, the change makes sense: weâre talking about an Alexa rank in the 4,000s, which translates to plenty of traffic. The name is known, and most shoppers will make some association with Vogue. The official word is that Franck Zayan, formerly head of ecommerce for Galeries Lafayette, will helm the revised website, and heâs reporting that brands are coming on board rapidly.
One shouldnât mourn the loss of Style.com as a fashion news portal, since the content weâre all used to is bound to appear at Vogue. And in all the years we had it in our magazinesâ directory, it was listed under our Vogue entry anyway. We await the new site to see what CondĂŠ Nast will do with it, and it may yet return to the spot where it once was in the 20th century, in the shopping guide.
Massimo Vignelli, who passed away on May 27, was a hero of mine. When receiving the news shortly before it hit the media in a big way, from our mutual friend Stanley Moss, this titleâs travel editor and CEO of the Medinge Group, I posted immediately on Facebook: âIt is a sad duty to note the passing of Massimo Vignelli, one of my heroes in graphic design. When I was starting out in the business, Massimo was one of the greats: a proponent of modernism and simple, sharp typography. His influence is apparent in a lot of the work done by our brand consultancy and in our magazines, even in my 2013 mayoral campaign graphics. A lot of his work from half a century ago has stood the test of time. There was only one degree of separation between us, and I regret that we never connected during his lifetime. The passing of a legend.â
This Facebook status only scratches the surface of my admiration for Vignelli. There have been more comprehensive obits already (Fast Company Design rightly called him ‘one of the greatest 20th century designers’), detailing his work notably for the New York subway map, andâcuriously to meâglossing over the effect he had on corporate design, especially in the US.
Vignelli, and his wife Lella, a designer in her own right and a qualified architect, set up the Vignelli Office of Design and Architecture in Milano in 1960, which had clients including Pirelli and Olivetti. In 1965, they moved to New York and Vignelli co-founded Unimark International (with Ralph Eckerstrom, James Fogelman, Wally Gutches, Larry Klein, and Bob Noorda), where he was design director. It was the worldâs largest design and marketing firm till its closure in 1977.
The 1960s were a great time for Vignelli and his corporate identities. He worked on American Airlines, Ford, Knoll, and J. C. Penney, and the work was strictly modernist, often employing Helvetica as the typeface family. Vignelli was known to have stuck with six families for most his workâBodoni was another, a type family based around geometry that, on the surface, tied in to his modernist, logical approach. However, there were underlying reasons, including his belief that Helvetica had an ideal ratio between upper- and lowercase letters, with short ascenders and descenders, lending itself to what he considered classic proportions. The 1989 WTC Our Bodoni, created under Vignelliâs direction by Tom Carnase and commissioned by Bert di Pamphilis, adheres to the same proportions.
Although my own typeface design background means that I could not adhere to six, there is something to be said for employing a logical approach to design. American corporate design went through a âcleaning upâ in the 1960s, with a brighter, bolder sensibility. Detractors might accuse it of being stark, the Helveticization of American design making things too standard. Yet through the 1970s the influence remained, and to my young eyes that decade, this was how professional design should look, contrary to the low-budget work plaguing newspapers and books that I saw as I arrived in the occident.
When the Vignellis left Unimark to set up Vignelli Associates in 1971 (and later Vignelli Designs in 1978), their stamp remained. The MTA launched Vignelliâs subway map the following year, and like the London Underground map by Harry Beck in 1931, it ignored what was above ground in favour of a logical diagram with the stops. Beck was a technical draftsman and the approach must have found favour with Vignelli, just as it did with those creating maps for the Paris MĂŠtropolitain and the Berlin U-bahn.
New Yorkers didnât take to the Vignelli map as well as Londoners and Parisians, and it was replaced in 1979 with one that was more geographically accurate to what was above ground.
In 1973, Vignelli worked on the identity for Bloomingdaleâs, and his work endures: the Big Brown Bag is his work, and it continues to be used by the chain today. Cinzano, Lancia and others continue with Vignelliâs designs.
Ironically, despite a rejection of fashion in favour of timelessness, some of the work is identified with the 1960s and 1970s, notably thanks to the original cut of Helvetica, which has only recently been revived (a more modern cut is commonplace), and which is slightly less popular today. Others, benefiting from more modern layout programs and photography, look current to 2010s eyes, such as Vignelli Associatesâ work for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
The approach taken by Lucire in its print editions has a sense of modernism that has a direct Vignelli influence, including the use of related typeface families since we went to retail print editions in 2004. Our logotype itself, dating from 1997, has the sort of simplicity that I believe Vignelli would have approved of.
Vignelli was, fortunately, fĂŞted during his lifetime. He received the Compasso dâOro from ADI twice (1964 and 1998), the AIGA Gold Medal (1983), the Presidential Design Award (1985), the Honorary Royal Designer for Industry Award from the Royal Society of Arts (1996), the National Lifetime Achievement Award from the CooperâHewitt National Museum of Design (2003), among many. He holds honorary doctorates from seven institutions, including the Rochester Institute of Technology (2002). Rochester has a Vignelli Center for Design Studies, whose website adheres to his design principles and where educational programmes espouse his modernist approach. It also houses the Vignellisâ professional archive.
He is survived by his wife, Lella, who continues to work as CEO of Vignelli Associates and president of Vignelli Designs; their son, Luca, their daughter, Valentina Vignelli Zimmer, and three grandchildren.
The news that should have us all worried is: the derivatives market contains $700trn of these debts yet to implode. Global GDP stands at $69¡4trn a year. This means that (primarily) Wall Street and the City of London have run up phantom paper debts of more than ten times of the annual earnings of the entire planet.
It brings me back to one of the first things we ever wrote in the Medingemanifesto: ‘Finance is broken.’ Attempting to value companies using shares or financial statements can be a mugs’ gameâand that was in 2002, before the market became so improbable.
If only we knew how much worse things would get. And we thought, in the immediate post-9-11 period, that we would be learning the lesson about a Dow that was well overvalued. History has shown that we didn’t. And the most recent recession hasn’t corrected things: we’re still sitting on a time bomb.
We wrote in the manifesto, ‘We believe money is a poor snapshot of human value. Brands, however, create value. The branding industry is about creating value for our customers. It makes more sense to measure the ingredients of branding and relationships.’
It’s an ideal, and one with its own problems, too. But I know that part of the finance industry has failed us through its greed. I’m not too certain how their deeds and those of these British forgers differ, creating “wealth” backed by nothing.
Part of me admires Nissan for going after the taxi market in a big way in New York and London.
Another part of me wonders why on earth the London Hackney Carriage solution is so ugly.
I think Nissan should have asked Mr Mitsuoka for advice on how to Anglicize one of its products.
Overall, I haven’t a big problem about a van being a black cab (neither does Mercedes-Benz). We live in the 21st century, and a one-and-a-half-box design makes practical sense. The recent Metrocab, from Frazer-Nash (whose owners are domiciled abroad), doesn’t look perfect, either, but the effect is a bit more cohesive. However, it reminds me a bit of the Chevrolet Spin.
I’m not sure how conservative a buyer the cabbie is. The LTI TX4 still looks the best, and it is even being adopted in Australia, but it’s not as economical. The idea of the solid axle and Panhard rod at the back doesn’t scream modernity, either.
New Yorkers haven’t really minded the advent of Toyota Siennas and Ford Escapes taking the place of the traditional three-box sedanânor have the tourists. Therefore, I doubt much romanticism will come in to the decision. As with their counterpart elsewhere, the London cabbie will be very rational and look at the best running costs. That may suggest the demise of the TX4, at least in London. (It seems to have a life of its own in China, although that may depend on how visible it remains in London.)
The world is so globalized that no one bats an eyelid when they see a Volvo badge on a double-decker bus. It’s not that easy to find a police car with a British marque. There’s a nostalgic part of me that wants to argue that the London city brand will be adversely affected by Johnny Foreigner making its cabs, but it won’t. Even the one regarded as traditionally the “most British”, the TX4, is made by a Chinese-owned company, Geely.
History says that it won’t matter. As long as they are black, they can turn on a sixpence, and the cabbie has the Knowledge, then that’ll be sufficient for most. The experience of travelling, rather than the Carriage’s brand, is what tourists will rememberâI can’t tell you whether the first black cab I sat in was an FX4 or a TX, but I can tell you about the conversation I had with the cabbie. One would, however, remember a bad journeyâlet’s say travelling in the back of a Premier Padmini in Mumbai is not as misty-eyed as it seems.
And if one insists on a decent British solution, then it needs to be better than the competition: falling back on tradition (or at least some parody thereof) helped kill Rover when it was still around. Although I’m not sure if there are any British-owned taxi makers left. Whatever the case, the next generation of black cab will be made by a foreign-owned company, and I’m willing to bet that the 20th-century formula is toast.
Elementary is an modern-day, American TV version of Sherlock Holmes. It’s not an American remake of the Steven MoffatâMark Gatiss update, which I love, and some might say it has taken too many liberties with the original. Watson is now female.
I’ll leave you to comment, but I don’t make my thoughts of remakes a huge secret on this blog. And, I know, this is technically not a remake, but the timing is a tad suspicious.
However, there is nothing new under the sun. It’s not the first time CBS has attempted a contemporary Sherlock Holmes series, nor is it the first time it has made Watson female. In the mid-1980s, there was The Return of Sherlock Holmes, where Dr Watson’s great-granddaughter (Margaret Colin) awakens a cryogenically frozen Sherlock Holmes (Michael Pennington). It was actually filmed in the UK, with London standing in for various American locales. Of course, this meant that Canadian actor Shane Rimmer (whom Lewis Gilbert dubbed ‘the standard American actor’) had to have a part, as did Connie Booth.
If Elementary came before Sherlock, I might have given it a shot, but it reeks of metooism. And, of course, Elementary would never have existed if it were not for copyright expiry and the idea of public domainâsomething which I find ironic given how the US entertainment lobby behaves sometimes.
I know, I’m dissing a show I have never seen, and this is coming from a guy who watched all 17 episodes of the Life on Mars remake. Maybe I’m older now and don’t have the same time to waste.
[Cross-posted] Summer Rayne Oakes and Benita Singh’s Cartier award-winning venture, Source4Style, which helps designers source sustainable fabric through a well designed, transparent website, launches its second version today. Lucire has the low-down in the main part of the site, and this story forms part of some of our next 2012 print and other non-web editions.
We believe this will revolutionize the way the business of fashion is conducted. Think about it: consumers demand sustainability and the trend has no signs of stopping. Yet, according to Singh, suppliers are spending up to 43 per cent of their marketing budgets just on trade shows. âItâs a huge up-front time and ďŹnancial commitment with no guarantee of a return,â she says. On the other end of the scale, Cornell University research shows that designers are spending up to 85 per cent of their time visiting those same shows, going through online directories, or wading through sample folders.
Source4Style uses the internet to bridge the divide, and has obvious positive implications for smaller suppliers, who are on a level playing field with the big names. Some of these suppliers are in third-world countries, so it’s not hard to see the financial benefit that Source4Style can have for them and their communities.
It’s in line with the ideas in Simon Anholt’s Brand New Justice, where Anholt posited that good brands helped third-world communities find greater profits and margins. Source4Style doesn’t quite give these companies brands per se, but through the site, it allows them to be the equal of businesses that are operating in the first world, and levels the playing field.
It is the solidity behind this venture that sees us devote two web pages and the cover to it. We encourage readers to take a look, as this may well be the moment when fashion changes for goodâin more than one sense of the word.
It was in the fourth quarter of the year that Occupy became a brand. Just capitalize it, and everyone knows what you mean. The original geographical indicator of Wall Street disappearedâto be fair, it began disappearing when similar protests began happening across the United States and then, the worldâbut I’ve only noticed in the last few weeks that the simple utterance of the word Occupy brought with it a multitude of values. That’s what a brand does: it’s shorthand or code for a range of associations.
But what associations? If one believes some of the media, then Occupy is unfocused, with its protesters simply upset at the status quo. Others see it as an attack on the technocratic agenda and the multiple facets they possess, whether it’s the financial system being broken (something Chris Macrae brought up at my first Medinge meeting back in 2002) or corruption in politics.
The truth, at least initially, was probably somewhere in between. I never believed Occupy was one where there was some “protester class” (at least one media outlet believed that), and that its members came from a cross-section of society, even if a few of the international protests brought out a few of the usual suspects from antiestablishment groups. It was clear, early on, certainly from the social networks that brought more direct news than the mainstream corporate media, that everyday people were involved. To me, the most poignant images were probably that of retired cop Capt Ray Lewis getting cuffed by the NYPD.
However, there were so many conflicting emotions at Occupy that it would be hard to sum up just what people opposed. Maybe it was very hard to voice because there are so many parts to the system that they see is broken. I know when we did our post-Enron session at Medinge, we probably had three dozen Post-It notes on a whiteboard summarizing what we thought was wrong with the business system. They were then synthesized into eight points, not without some effort.
As the protests wore on, the synthesis has taken place. It’s not an unusual phenomenon: gatherings of people can take time to figure out, through dialogue, what their common grounds are. Better doing it this way, codifying through dialogue, than having a set of values imposed on you from above: it’s a way to preserve authenticity in the movement. A good set of values that represents an organization, in a formal, corporate setting, is usually the result of in-depth research into staff, channel members and external audiences. In the branding world, especially with social networks empowering communications, it makes more sense to harness people’s thoughts through the technology we have at our disposal.
It was interesting reading what Naomi Wolf had to say about Occupy in The Guardian. The crux of her article is not about brand whatsoeverâshe highlights potentially dangerous patterns as crackdowns take place and their implication for the USâbut read on and she finds out there are certain things that Occupy wants through simply asking its supporters online:
get the money out of politics (e.g. ‘legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process’);
âreform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act ⌠This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks’;
âdraft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.â
No doubt there will be variations of these with Occupy movements in other parts of the planet.
I don’t know Ms Wolf’s processes, or how academic this Q&A was, but perhaps that is not the question here. What we should realize is that the movement is taking a more defined shape, and the media’s contention that this is something unfocused is getting weaker by the day.
