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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘Colin Morley’
19.12.2016
Tonight, I had the sad and solemn duty to announce publicly the passing of my friend Thomas Gad.
I’m still waiting for someone to come out and tell me that I have been severely pranked.
Thomas was the founder of what we now call Medinge Group. After working for 17 years at Grey Advertising as an international creative director, Thomas set up Brandflight, a leading branding consultancy HQed in Stockholm. He authored 4-D Branding, Managing Brand Me (with his wife, Annette Rosencreutz), and, most recently, Customer Experience Branding.
In 2000, Thomas seized on an idea: why not gather a bunch of leading brand practitioners at Annette’s family’s villa at Medinge, three hours west of Stockholm, for a bit of R&R, where they could all discuss ideas around the profession?
Nicholas Ind was one of the people at that first meeting. In a statement tonight, Nick wrote, ‘I first met Thomas when I was working in Stockholm in 2000—he invited me to join him at Medinge in the Swedish countryside to talk about branding. So began a professional and personal relationship that was truly fulfilling. Thomas, and his wife Annette, hosted the annual meetings we had at his house every summer after that with unrivalled generosity. My strongest recollection of those days is not the debates we had or flying with Thomas in his sea plane (even though those are also memorable), but Thomas and Annette sitting at the dinner table in the evenings singing songs, telling jokes and bringing everyone together. Thomas was exceptional in the way he made everyone feel welcome and valued in the group—he will be deeply missed.’
I came on the scene in 2002, invited by Chris Macrae. The event had become international the year before. Thomas and Annette made me feel incredibly at home at Medinge, and we had an incredibly productive meeting. He had taught me to sing ‘Helan gÃ¥r’, for no Swedish gathering is complete without a drinking song.
At the same meeting, I met Ian Ryder, who wrote, ‘As a founding member, and now Honorary Life Member, of Medinge Group I couldn’t possibly let such a sad announcement pass without observation. Thomas was a really bright, intellectually and socially, human being who I first met at the inaugural pre-Medinge group meeting in Amsterdam sixteen years ago. Little did we know then that our band of open-minded, globally experienced brand experts would develop into a superb think-tank based out of Thomas’s home in Medinge, Sweden.
‘For many years he and his lovely wife, Annette, hosted with a big heart, the annual gathering at which he played fabulous host to those of us who made it there. A larger-than-life, clever and successful professional, Thomas will be sorely missed by all those lucky enough to have known him.’
By the end of the summer 2002 meeting we had some principles around branding, the idea for a book (which became Beyond Branding), and a desire to formalize ourselves into an organization. The meeting at Medinge would soon become the Medinge Group (the definite article was part of our original name), and we had come to represent brands with a conscience: the idea that brands could do good, and that business could be humane and humanistic. This came about in an environment of real change: Enron, which had been given awards for supposedly doing good, had been exposed as fraudulent; there was a generation of media-savvy young people who could see through the BS and were voting and buying based on causes they supported; and inequality was on the rise, something that the late Economist editor, Norman Macrae (Chris’s Dad) even then called humankind’s most pressing concern. If everything is a product of its time, then that was true of us; and the issues that we care about the most are still with us, and changes to the way we do business are needed more now than ever.
This is Thomas’s legacy: Medinge Group is an incorporated company with far more members worldwide, holding two meetings per annum: the annual summer retreat in Sweden, and a public event every spring, with the next in Sevilla. The public events, and the Brands with a Conscience awards held in the 2000s, came about during Stanley Moss’s time as CEO. Stanley wrote this morning, ‘Thomas brought his vision and resources to the foundation of Medinge, and served as a critical voice in the international movement for humanistic brands.’ We continue today to spread that vision.
We have now been robbed far too early of two of our talents: Colin Morley, in the 7-7 bombings in London in 2005; and, now, Thomas, taken by cancer at age 65. My thoughts go to Annette and to the entire family.
Tags: 2000, 2002, 2016, Annette Rosencreutz, authorship, Beyond Branding, Brandflight, branding, Brands with a Conscience, Chris Macrae, Colin Morley, corporate social responsibility, CSR, friendship, Ian Ryder, Medinge Group, Nicholas Ind, Stanley Moss, Stockholm, Sweden, Thomas Gad
Posted in branding, business, marketing, social responsibility, Sweden | 4 Comments »
07.07.2015
Remembering the victims of 7-7 today. Ten years on. RIP to my friend Colin Morley.
I’m glad we toasted you this year at the Medinge London dinner, and we filled in the newer members on who you were, and why for many years we named an award after you.
Medinge has changed greatly over the last 10 years but it’s the memory of people like Colin who help remind us of our purpose.
Tags: 2015, anniversary, Colin Morley, England, London, Medinge Group, UK
Posted in general | No Comments »
05.03.2013
My good friend and colleague Stanley Moss has written a new book, What Is a Brand?, which provokes some thought on the question in the title.
Those who know Stanley and have followed his work know that each year, he issues a Brand Letter, which closes with various definitions of branding.
If there’s one thing brand experts agree on, it’s the fact that no two brand experts will ever agree on the definition of a brand. What Is a Brand? turns this into its primary advantage, getting definitions from some of the top people in the profession, and somehow I managed to slip in there.
Ian Ryder, Nicholas Ind, the late Colin Morley, Thomas Gad, Ava Hakim, Simon Paterson, Pierre d’Huy, Malcolm Allan, Patrick Harris, Tony Quinlan, Manas Fuloria, Steven Considine, Sascha Lötscher, George Rush, João Freire, Virginia James, Filippo Dellosso, the great Fritz Gottschalk, and others all contribute definitions, on which readers can ruminate.
As Stanley notes in his introduction:
The aim of this book is to render brand thinking more accessible, to share with you the ideas of theorists and practitioners who bear witness to the evolution of policy and governance, especially in light of society’s drift towards overconsumption and environmental damage.
It is now available as an e-book and as a paperback via Amazon.com, priced at US$5 and US$10 respectively.
 Keep calm and wear a tiara: I’m now also general counsel for Miss Universe New Zealand, on top of everything else. The news announcement went out yesterday—the Lucire article is here, while we have a new website at nextmissnz.com. The highlight is reducing the entry fee from NZ$3,500 to NZ$10 (plus a workshop, if selected, at NZ$199). We’ve had some great feedback over the website, which I am thrilled about, since I designed it and made sure all the requirements of the licence agreement were complied with.
The year’s going to be a very exciting one with the competition, which will be far more transparent than it ever has been, with the possibility of its return to network television after a two-decade absence. We’re bringing integrity back into the process. From my point of view, the idea is one of business transformation, to take something that has languished and turn it into something that’s exciting, relevant, and 21st-century.
 With this development, I’m relieved I never published a word on the scandal last year and never went to the media over it (even if others did—often to their detriment). It makes it a lot easier to move forward with the future if you don’t keep dwelling on the past—and with the great programme we have, why should we look back?
I’m looking forward to bringing you more with national director Evana Patterson and executive producer Nigel Godfrey. We’ve created something dynamic that the New Zealand public, and the Miss Universe family, can all get behind. Keep an eye on nextmissnz.com where we’ll post more announcements—and if you think the T-shirts (right) are as cheeky as I do, then they are available for sale online, too.
Tags: 2013, Amazon, Ava Hakim, beauty pageant, book, branding, business, business transformation, Colin Morley, design, entrepreneurship, Evana Patterson, Fritz Gottschalk, Ian Ryder, Jack Yan, Lucire, Malcolm Allan, Manas Fuloria, Medinge Group, Miss New Zealand, Miss Universe New Zealand, Nicholas Ind, Nigel Godfrey, Patrick Harris, Pierre d'Huy, rebranding, Sascha Lötscher, Simon Paterson, Stanley Moss, Thomas Gad, Tony Quinlan, website
Posted in branding, business, marketing, media, New Zealand, publishing, USA | 1 Comment »
23.02.2011
 Above Good Living, November 11, 2009, with Angela Stone and Megan Banks. Or, the day I met Donna Manning, who produced the show.I drove in a total daze today. The last time I felt like this was September 12, 2001,* the day of the World Trade Center attacks.
And then I learned a colleague I had met was among the dead in the CTV building.
I felt ashamed. Ashamed that Donna Manning was not someone who was top of my list of people to text when the earthquake happened.
After the first lot of friends all responded to say they were OK, I was playing the probability game: that if seven out of seven were fine, then it would likely stand that the percentage would hold if I contacted eight.
Not so.
But, I tried to tell myself, I only met Donna once, on November 11, 2009. It’s not like we were best friends.
Yet in those few hours I thought she was a tremendously nice lady, professional, and respectful.
I grabbed her card, which I still have, with the hope that we would continue to keep in touch.
We didn’t.
So it’s a bit hard to explain why I feel a friend has been taken from me—even though it was someone I only met briefly.
Maybe someone can be a friend even on the briefest of meetings. I say to my friends living on the other side of the world that our friendships remain strong, even if we only see each other once every decade. We catch up as though no time has passed.
And Donna Manning, in her accommodating, welcoming manner, realizing she had a guest and colleague from out of town, might be one of those people who you feel that level of connection with, quickly.
It’s not a desire to “belong” to a tragedy. I ruled that out quickly. I counted myself as lucky that those I knew well were all OK. I lost a friend and colleague in the London attacks on July 7, 2005, and I didn’t feel a longing to be “part” of it. I didn’t blog about it much, and kept my feelings to myself and our mutual friends. I was sorry I lost a friend, and I felt the pain his widow had when she was searching for news of him. Maybe a terrorist bombing seemed so unreal, while earthquakes are something that are known to us Down Under.
This case, I think, is part of the humanity in all of us: while we were lucky enough not to have experienced the Christchurch earthquake first-hand, we feel a sense of unity with those who did.
This is not anything to do with nationality, as the international rescue crews have ably demonstrated by rushing to our aid. Whether they are our Australian brothers and sisters, or whether they have ventured here from Japan, the Republic of China, or Singapore, or even further afield, they see people to help and tasks to do.
Just as we in New Zealand felt for those in Haïti, or in Australia as floods, bushfires or cyclones reached them in recent times.
Now, we want Cantabrians to know that we might not know what they are going through but we understand loss and grief. We empathize with them for their loss.
When I saw a photograph of Donna’s kids and ex-husband in an Associated Press photograph, my fears were confirmed. I wanted to reach out to tell them just how I felt for them.
I wrote a few words about how I felt at the time, though that’s not much to someone who has lost a mother.
We don’t have a desire to belong to the tragedy because we already belong to the tragedy. It has affected other members of the human race, and that’s qualifies us for immediate membership of this tragedy. They suffer, and we all suffer.
On my Facebook and Twitter accounts, there’s no difference in the sincerity of the writer when they wish the people of Christchurch and the Canterbury region well whether they are locals or Swedish, German, Dutch, American, English, or any other nationality.
On my Tumblr, that universality was felt in one quotation I cited—based on how many people it resonated with.
There’s no difference in the helplessness we feel, whether we are a ferry crossing and a few hours’ drive away, or whether we are 10,000 miles away.
If we could come and bring back your loved ones, we would.
If we could bring back all our colleagues at CTV and The Press, we would.
If we could bring back those Japanese students who perished in that language school, and to have them go home to their Mums and Dads happy for their Kiwi experience, we would.
All because we know our feelings of grief that we felt in our own tragedies and we do not wish them on you.
Yet tonight, the Manning and Gardiner families experience those very feelings of loss.
I grieve for a colleague, and, I would like to say, a friend. Someone who touched me positively in my life.
I am so sorry for you all.
And I am so sorry to all those who are awaiting news, or are dealing with the horrible news that someone has been taken tragically before their time.
I don’t want you to feel this down, but I know you do. And I wish, I truly wish, you didn’t have to go through this.
* In New Zealand, it was already September 12, 2001 when the attacks commenced.
Tags: 2009, 2011, acts of God, Angela Stone, Aotearoa, Australia, blogosphere, Christchurch, Colin Morley, CTV, Facebook, fashion, humanity, life, media, New Zealand, social media, social networking, terrorism, tragedy, TV, Twitter
Posted in culture, internet, media, New Zealand, TV | 4 Comments »
08.01.2010
 The Medinge Group has announced the 2010 Brands with a Conscience winners, and we’ll be presenting the awards at the end of the month in Paris. The release is below.
Can you believe we’ve done this for seven years now?
I was particularly stoked about the awards going to Selco and Muna Abu Sulayman (right), so much so that I ensured news of her Colin Morley Award appeared at Lucire soon after it went up on the Medinge site.
International think-tank announces seventh annual Brands with a Conscience awards
The Medinge Group (www.medinge.org), an international think-tank on branding and business, today releases its seventh annual Brands with a Conscience list. In the Group’s opinion, these diverse organizations show that it is possible for brands to succeed as they contribute to the betterment of society by sustainable, socially responsible and humanistic behaviour.
In announcing the winners, Stanley Moss, CEO of the Medinge Group said, ‘This year’s awards indicate that principles of compassionate branding are being applied globally, by businesses large and small, across categories from finance to retail to energy, in established and emerging economies, in new markets. Today, brands with conscience can work to build bridges of understanding between nations and societies.’
Ian Ryder, a founding director of the Medinge Group commented, ‘Winning a BWAC award is more than public recognition—it is a clear statement of your organization’s values, one of the most powerful competitive differentiators in existence!’
The international collective of brand practitioners meets annually in August at a secluded location outside Stockholm, Sweden, and collaborate on the list, judging nominees on principles of humanity and ethics, rather than financial worth. The Brands with a Conscience list is shaped around criteria including evidence of the human implications of the brand and considering whether the brand takes risks in line with its beliefs. Evaluations are made based on reputation, self-representation, history, direct experience, contacts with individuals within the organizations, media and analysts and an assessment of the expressed values of sustainability.
Three years ago the group added a unique category commendation, the Colin Morley Award, recognizing exceptional achievement by an individual or NGO. Mr Morley, a member of the Medinge Group, died in the London Underground bombings on July 7, 2005. The award commemorates his visionary work in humanistic branding.
For 2010, the group has singled out the following organizations as Brands with a Conscience:
Alibaba Group/China
Co-op Bank/UK
Marks & Spencer/UK
Merci/France
Pictet et Cie./Switzerland
SAP/Germany
Selco Solar Pvt. Ltd./India
The Colin Morley Award is given to:
Muna Abu Sulayman/Saudi Arabia
Detailed descriptions and web links follow:
Alibaba Group
www.alibaba.com
A young Asian brand built on the idea that it must exist as an experience to elevate their own or other people’s level of happiness. Jack Ma founded Alibaba in his cramped apartment with 17 colleagues. A decade later, Alibaba Group is the largest ecommerce company in China, with 15,000 employees and more than 100 million users. It also has a B2B unit with a community of more than 42 million registered users from more than 240 countries and regions. This year Alibaba will unveil partnership plans for Grameen China, a project to significantly increase access to micro-credit for poverty alleviation in Sichuan and Inner Mongolia. (Medinge named Grameen Telecom a Brand with a Conscience in 2005, and its parent Grameen Bank was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2008.) Employing the Grameen Bank microcredit model, the group hopes to impact more than 72,000 lives in its first five years.
Ava Hakim, IBM exec and member of the Medinge Group, remarked that Alibaba is a business ‘built on trust, one which respects intellectual property rights and will remove sites which infringe upon the rights of others.’ She also was impressed by the six core values named, which they have successfully applied to their business.
Co-op Bank
www.co-operativebank.co.uk/servlet/Satellite/1193206375355,CFSweb/Page/Bank
The Co-op, founded in 1872, from its origins has focused on serving local communities. Today the Co-op is the only UK clearing bank to publish an ethical statement. Medinge director Patrick Harris lauded the brand, noting that ‘since 1992 Co-op has been building its ethical stance by asking its membership to vote on issues such as animal welfare, human rights and ecological impact.’ It claims to have turned away over £900 million in loans to businesses not in keeping with the Co-op Ethical Policy. The commitment to improve their food business’ ethical and environmental performance is in line with expectations arrived at in consultation with 100,000 members. Co-Op was double-nominated this year, for both its banking and food businesses.
Marks & Spencer
plana.marksandspencer.com
In her nomination, Medinge director Erika Uffindell emphasized the focused approach to climate change, waste and sustainability that Marks & Spencer have adopted. With their Plan A campaign, the company established 100 commitments to achieve in five years, clear targets for their business, actionable by people across the group. Uffindell finds the brand very accessible and involving: they have engaged 17,231 customers in making pledges to support climate change and a commitment to sustainability.
Merci
www.merci-merci.com
Merci is a 1500 m² shop for fashion and home furniture based in Paris, France. All sales profits are destined for women and children in Madagascar. The store sells new or artist-reworked donated goods and has had a huge impact. Some goods are sent directly to Madagascar. Merci’s website is especially minimal and modest, yet effectively states the store’s mission. In his nomination, Medinge’s Philippe Mihailovich expressed the hope that Merci’s actions influence others to follow.
Pictet et Cie.
www.pictet.com
This Swiss-based private bank started in 1805. Medinge director Nicholas Ind cited two significant aspects of the brand.
First, its focus on sustainable development and the redirection of funds in this direction by encouraging the maximum investment in sustainable areas for a given risk: the bank’s management of a water fund, launched in 2000, which has become the world’s largest of its kind, with over €4 billion in assets; and a Clean Energy fund. The second aspect is the Prix Pictet—the world’s first international prize dedicated to photography and sustainability—mandated to encourage the use and power of photography to communicate vital messages to a global audience. This year’s theme is Earth.
SAP
www.sap.com/about/SAP-sustainability
Today, many B2Bs are silently doing a fantastic job to adapt to our global challenges. Medinge’s chairman Thomas Gad nominated Germany’s SAP, a software company whom he admires because ‘they actually help other companies to create usable metrics in their CSR and sustainability.’ Over the past 10 years, SAP has been recognized by the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for upholding ethical, environmental, social, and governance values in products and services.
Selco Solar Pvt. Ltd.
www.selco-india.com/index.html
Medinge CEO Stanley Moss described Selco as an interesting small business, 14 years old, who supply solar power solutions, mostly in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. They rely on microfinance loans, employ 140 people, and have done around 100,000 installations of small to large size. They are partially funded by Grameen. Moss was impressed by their cradle-to-grave attitude about product, longevity in the marketplace after a tough start-up, good work on the individual level, private ownership, and the understanding of need for innovation.
The 2010 Colin Morley Award to Muna Abu Sulayman
helwa.maktoob.com/%D9%86%D8%B3%D8%A7%D8%A1_%D8%AA%D8%AD%D8%AA_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%B6%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%A1-%D9%85%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%843966-%D9%85%D9%86%D9%89_%D8%A3%D8%A8%D9%88_%D8%B3%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86.htm
Simon Nicholls, a member of Medinge, nominated Muna Abu Sulayman, who receives 2010’s Colin Morley Award, for excellence by an individual or NGO, acknowledging their contribution to the betterment of society through sustainable, socially responsible and humanistic behaviour. In giving this award, the Medinge Group recognizes Muna’s outstanding work in educational development, poverty alleviation and strategic philanthropy; as Executive Director of the Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation, developing and implementing operations for humanitarian assistance across the globe; her role as the first woman in Saudi Arabia to be appointed by the United Nations Development Programme as a Goodwill Ambassador; and for exceptional reporting as co-host on popular MBC-TV social programme Kalam Nawaem, in particular her advocacy of rights for women. As a public and media personality, she speaks about issues relating to Arab society, media, building bridges of understanding between east and west. Since 1997, Ms Abu Sulayman has served as lecturer on American literature at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia. She frequently appears as a panelist at the Davos World Economic Forum, Jewish Economic Forum, C-100 of the World Economic Forum, Brookings Institute Conferences and other venues.
Patrick Harris, a Medinge director, added, ‘In the list of 2010 Brands with a Conscience winners, we can see a clear focus on commerce and finance. This is no accident. Instead, this is a sign of the world’s markets responding to the need for responsible and inter-generational business activities.’
Regarding his nomination of Co-op Bank, Harris said, ‘The UK’s Co-operative Bank is a prime example of a highly principled business within a traditional competitive landscape. The Co-op are being recognized by Medinge for their values-led business focus and for the impact that they bring to a beleaguered sector.’
Jack Yan, a director of Medinge said, ‘Again, the Medinge Group’s international influence has resulted in a global list of winners, all of which practise our ideals of humanistic branding. I’m thrilled we’ve recognized our first Chinese and Saudi Arabian winners this year.
‘In particular, Selco Solar of India shows a commitment to green energy that is very poignant in the 2010s. Just because fuel prices have dropped from their 2008 highs does not mean that the energy crisis is over, a fact the Medinge Group recognizes.’
Medinge Group member Ava Maria Hakim commented, ‘The message to the world—and Alibaba’s 100 million users—is that China’s Alibaba Group has set a global brand and business benchmark that goes beyond corporate social responsibility to building an integrity-based business driven by long-term vision. Alibaba Group is a Brand with a Conscience of the future.
Erika Uffindell, a director of Medinge, commented, ‘Marks & Spencer is a great example of an organization living by its beliefs. M&S has been recognized by Medinge for creating the innovative Plan A—an initiative that involves customers and partners in their ambition to help combat climate change and reduce waste. Plan A focuses on five key areas: climate change, waste, sustainable raw materials, health and being a flair partner. Marks & Spencer’s ability to involve their stakeholders in such a simple and accessible way has been reflected in their significant achievements to date.’
Nicholas Ind, a founding director of Medinge stated, ‘This year, the Medinge Group’s Brands with a Conscience awards shows impressive diversity and reflects the commitment that brand owners are demonstrating around the globe to building organizations that meet the needs of all parts of society. The 2010 winners come from the UK, China, India, Switzerland, Germany, France and Saudi Arabia.’
Special thanks to Medinge’s 2010 BWAC nominating committee
Paulina Borsook
Thomas Gad
Ava Hakim
Patrick Harris
Pierre d’Huy
Nicholas Ind
Philippe Mihailovich
Sergei Mitrofanov
Stanley Moss, chairman
Simon Nicholls
Anette Rosencreutz
Erika Uffindell
Jack Yan
Tags: 2010, branding, Colin Morley, CSR, Jack Yan, Medinge Group, social responsibility, Stanley Moss, sustainability
Posted in branding, business, culture, France, leadership, marketing, social responsibility | No Comments »
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