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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘Wally Olins’
14.10.2017

Above: Brand Kate Moss was probably seen by more people when the model collaborated with Topshop.
In 1999, the late Wally Olins sent me his book, Trading Identities: Why Countries and Companies are Taking on Each Otherâs Roles, a fine read published by the Foreign Policy Centre that argued that countries were trying to look more corporate, adopting the practices of corporate branding. Conversely, as corporations gained more power and their need to practise social responsibility increased, they were adopting the ideas from nation branding. There was an increasing amount of this swapping taking place, and the 21st century has seen the trend continue: more countries have finely tuned nation brands and guidelines on how to use them, while many corporations are trying to look like good corporate citizensâDilmah and Patagonia come to mind with their work in building communities and advocacy.
Weâve been discussing at our firm another area where a similar switch has been taking place: that of corporate brands and personal brands. Personal branding is a relatively new development, with (in my opinion) Managing Brand Me the best work on the subject, authored by the late Thomas Gad with his wife Annette Rosencreutz, dating from 2002. (Thomas, of course, founded Medinge Group.) Managing Brand Me features an excellent break-down of the four dimensions involved (functional, social, mental, spiritual) in any good personal brand that still hold true today. They were well ahead of their time given that they had written their book long before selfies became the norm, and before people were being hired by companies as ambassadors based on their Instagram or Twitter followings.
Those spokespeople are practising their brands almost haphazardly, where some are getting to the point that they cannot be sustained. Others are balancing authenticity with commercial demands: we know that Kendall Jenner probably doesnât drink Pepsi, and no one wants to be seen to sell out their values. Nevertheless, there is a group of people mindful about their personal brand, and itâs only a matter of time before more begin taking on the trappings of corporate brands: inter alia, guidelines on how theirs is to be used; what products can be endorsed by that brand; how it can be differentiated against othersâ. Kate Moss may well be one example with a recognizable logotype that appears on products that have her seal of approval. (If I can be slightly macabre, the estates of Elvis Presley, Steve McQueen and Audrey Hepburn all think carefully on how each celebrity can be used to endorse products today; while lacking symbols or logotypes, their faces themselves are more than a substitute. With technology democratizing, it is no surprise that living and less iconic people might adopt similar ideas.)
What of companies? Many now find themselves on an equal footing, or even a disadvantage, to personal accounts. The biggest companies have to fight for attention on social networks just like some of the top personal accounts in the world, and they cannot succeed without speaking to the audience in a personal fashion. A corporate account that reposts publicity photographs would gain little traction except from fans who are already sold on the brand through non-social media; and there is some wisdom in assuming that millennials do not possess the same level of brand loyalty as earlier generations. Theyâre on the hunt for the best product or service for the price and adopt a more meritorious approach, and among the things that will draw them in will be the values and societal roles of the company. Therefore, there has to be a âpersonalityâ behind the account, aware of each of Thomas and Annetteâs Brand Me dimensions.
It has not escaped me that both Lucireâs fashion editor Sopheak Seng and I do better than the magazine when it comes to social media interactionâgetting likes and commentsâbecause weâre prepared to put our personalities on the line. The automated way Lucire shares articles on Twitter, for instance, hasnât helped build its brand there, something which weâre remedying by having team members around the world post to Instagram for starters, giving people a glimpse of our individual experiences. The images might not all look polished as a result, but it is a step toward fulfilling the four dimensions. It is a quest to find a personal voice.
In the wider media game, this is now more vital as news has become commodified, a trend that was first expressed in the 1990s, too. Perhaps those authors saw that most media outlets would be getting their news from a more concentrated base of sources, and demand on journalists to be first and fastestâsomething not helped by a society where speed is valued over accuracyâmeant that whomever controlled the sources could determine what the world talked about. Global companies want everyone to see when theyâre involved in an event that a good chunk of the planet is likely to see; in LâOréal Parisâs case itâs the Festival de Cannes. If every fashion publication has its eyes on Cannes, then what differentiates that coverage? What stamp does the media outletâs brand place on that coverage? Is there a voice, a commentary, something that relates to the outletâs role in society? Should it communicate with its best supporters on social networks?
Lucire does reasonably well each year at Cannes with its coverage, probably because it does communicate with fans on social networks and alerts them to exclusive content. The rest of the time, it doesnât do as well because as a smaller publication, itâs relying on those same sources. In 1998 we would have been the only English-language online publication specializing in fashion that talked about each H&M launch; in 2017 many fashion publications are doing it and our share of the pie is that much smaller. Individuals themselves are sharing on their social networks, too. This is not a bad thing: others should have the means to express themselves and indulge their passion of writing and communicating. Exclusivity means traffic, which is why we do better when we cover something few others do.
However, I recently blogged that Google News has shifted to favouring larger media players, disincentivizing the independents from breaking news. It comes back to needing a distinctive voice, a personal brand, and while we still need to rely on Google News to a degree, that voice could help build up new surfing habits. The most successful bloggers of the last decade, such as Elin Kling, have done this.
These are the thoughts milling around as Lucire heads into its 20th anniversary this month, and we reevaluate just what made us special when the publication launched in 1997. Those values need to be adapted and brought into 2017 and beyond. But there are wider lessons, too, on just where corporate branding and personal branding are heading; this post did not set out to discuss fashion media. Itâs not a bad place to start our inquiry, since fashion (and automobiles) are where a lot of brand competition takes place.
Indeed, it signals to me that in the late 2010s, companies need to do well as corporate citizens and have a personal voice on social media, ideas that build on my 2013 paper for the dĂ©but issue of Journal of Digital and Social Media Marketing (where I discussed brands in the age of social media and put forward a model of how to manage them) as well as Thomas and Annetteâs earlier research. Itâs the next stage of where branding practice could goâJY&A Consulting is primed, and weâre prepared to let those thoughts loose on Lucire and our other projects. The book of the blog, meanwhile, is the next target. What a pity Iâm not in Frankfurt right now.
Tags: 2010s, 2017, academia, Annette Rosencreutz, blogosphere, book, branding, celebrity, corporate branding, corporate social responsibility, Festival de Cannes, France, Google, Hennes & Mauritz, Instagram, Jack Yan, journalism, JY&A Consulting, Kate Moss, Lucire, LâOrĂ©al, media, Medinge Group, nation branding, personal branding, research, social media, social networking, Sopheak Seng, Sweden, Thomas Gad, Twitter, Wally Olins, Web 2·0 Posted in branding, culture, France, globalization, internet, marketing, media, publishing, Sweden | No Comments »
05.09.2017

My complaints about Google over the yearsâand the battles Iâve had with them between 2009 and 2014âare a matter of record on this blog. It appears that Google has been making enemies who are much more important than me, and in this blog post I donât mean the European Union, who found that the big G had been abusing its monopoly powers by giving its own properties priority placement in its own search results. (The EU, incidentally, had the balls to fine Google âŹ2,420 million, or 2·5 per cent of Googleâs revenues, unlike various US statesâ attorneys-general a few years ago, who hit them with a $17 million bill, or four hoursâ income for Google.)
Itâs Jon von Tetzchner, the co-founder and CEO of Vivaldi, who blogged on Monday how Google hasnât been able to âresist the misuse of power.â
Von Tetzchner was formerly at Opera, so he has had a lot of time in the tech world. Opera has been around longer than Google, and it was the first browser to incorporate Google search.
As youâve read over the years, Iâve reported on Googleâs privacy breaches, its false accusations of malware on our sites, its favouring big sites over little ones in News, and (second-hand) the hacking of Iphones to gather user data. Google tax-dodging, meanwhile, has been reported elsewhere.
It appears Google suspended Vivaldiâs Adwords campaigns without warning, and the timing is very suspicious.
Right after von Tetzchnerâs thoughts on Googleâs data-gathering were published in Wired, all of Vivaldiâs Google Adwords campaigns were suspended, and Googleâs explanations were vague, unreasonable and contradictory.
Recently there were also revelations that Google had pressured a think-tank to fire someone critical of the company, according to The New York Times. Barry Lynn, ousted from the New America Foundation for praising the EUâs fine, accused the Foundation for placing Googleâs money (it donates millions) ahead of its own integrity. Google denies the charge. Heâs since set up Citizens Against Monopoly.
Itâs taken over half a decade for certain quarters to wake up to some of the things Iâve been warning people about. Not that long ago, the press was still praising Google Plus as a Facebook-killer, something I noted from the beginning would be a bad idea. It seems the EUâs courage in fining Google has been the turning point in forcing some to open their eyes. Until then, people were all too willing to drink the Google Kool-Aid.
And we should be aware of what powerful companies like Google are doing.
Two decades ago, my colleague Wally Olins wrote Trading Identities: Why Countries and Companies Are Taking on Each Otherâs Roles. There, he noted that corporations were adopting behaviours of nations and vice versa. Companies needed to get more involved in social responsibility as they became more powerful. We are in an era where there are powerful companies that exert massive influences over our lives, yet they are so dominant that they donât really care whether they are seen as a caring player or not. Google clearly doesnât in its pettiness over allegedly targeting Vivaldi, and Facebook doesnât as it gathers data and falsely accuses its own users of having malware on their machines.
On September 1, my colleague Euan Semple wrote, âAs tools and services provided by companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon become key parts of the infrastructure of our lives they, and their respective Chief Executives, exert increasing influence on society.
âHow we see ourselves individually and collectively is shaped by their products. Our ability to do things is in our hands but their control. How we educate ourselves and understand the world is steered by them. How we stay healthy, get from one place to another, and even feed and clothe ourselves is each day more dependent on them.
âWe used to rely on our governments to ensure the provision of these critical aspects of our lives. Our governments are out of their depth and floundering.
âAre we transitioning from the nation state to some other way of maintaining and supporting our societies? How do we feel about this? Is it inevitable? Could we stop it even if we wanted?â
The last paragraph takes us beyond the scope of this blog post, but we should be as critical of these companies as we are of our (and othersâ) governments, and, the European Commission excepting, I donât think weâre taking their actions quite seriously enough.
Tags: 2017, advertising, branding, corporate citizen, Doubleclick, EU, Euan Semple, Google, law, media, monopoly, nation branding, privacy, Vivaldi, Wally Olins Posted in branding, business, culture, internet, marketing, media, social responsibility, technology, USA | 3 Comments »
06.01.2016

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 NestlĂ© among the most reputable firms in the world. NestlĂ© 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.
Tags: 2016, ANZ, Australia, banking, branding, Brands with a Conscience, business, capitalism, car industry, commerce, corporate culture, corporate social responsibility, CSR, Dick Smith, Facebook, Ford, globalization, GM, Holden, image, internet, Kiva, localization, media, Medinge Group, Murdoch Press, national image, NestlĂ©, New York, NY, Skype, social media, social networking, Toyota, UK, USA, Vauxhall, Volkswagen, Wally Olins, World Wide Web Posted in branding, business, cars, culture, globalization, humour, internet, marketing, media, social responsibility, technology, UK, USA | No Comments »
05.03.2010

The day the current mayor, Kerry Prendergast, announced her intention to stand for a fourth term, I was asked by a few media colleagues what I thought. The wittiest reply I gave to Salient, as it was an email interview, and I seem to be cheekier in writing than I am in speaking. I wonât spoil it yet, but letâs just say one learns an awful lot from television.
This morning was a very good start to the day, giving a guest lecture at my Alma Mater, Victoria University, thanks to my friend Helen Baxter, who has begun teaching there. In fact, I taught out of the same building in 2000 when the campus was shared with Massey University, and the A on the front was not mounted backwards (typography students must have taken note by now).
One thing I hit upon, and I donât think I have shared with readers, is the concept of personal branding taking on corporate behaviours. We know that corporations and countries have been swapping roles a bit in the 1990s (Wally Olins wrote a book on it, called Trading Identities), but I donât think it has been properly addressed at the personal sphere (corrections welcome).
We have corporations trying to look mean and responsive, and speak with a personal voiceâthe One principles that Stefan Engeseth has talked about, and the idea of one-to-one from Christian Grönroos. They are trying to look like individuals, so the person in charge of the Tweetstream is the âvoiceâ of the organization.
Meanwhile, people are becoming aware of branding themselves, of differentiating who they are, and finding the right things to align with in order to make themselves employable. Of course, such efforts must still remain authentic, as we can see through the spin, but it would not surprise me if the nascent ideas of personal branding in the 1990s become formalized in to whole courses on personal brand management.
I refer not just to styling, of course, but making sure embarrassing stuff is taken off Facebook (I believe my words were along the lines of, âBy all means, party and show youâre human. But photos of you doing a powerchuck: maybe notâ), of figuring out what your vision is from a very early stage, of engaging with your audiences, and, if I may be so bold, living your brand as part of living your life.
The cynic in me recognizes that last phrase sounds dodgy because it cheapens the whole experience of life into a brand event, which is not precisely what I mean. But it is important to have some idea of a personal direction in mind and doing things that are compatible with that. This is, in some respects, no different to some of the self-help claptrap out there, explained in corporate branding language as opposed to spiritual fulfilment.
However, itâs not altogether a bad way to think. Iâm willing to bet some of us have done exactly this, perhaps unconsciously or informally. We all have some purpose, some raison dâĂȘtre, and whether we like thinking about it in branding terms or some other method is up to us. Brand, at least, provides a framework and some boxes to tick, and if they help people get a personal advantage and get the job of their dreams, then why not?
Note to self: Keeley Hawes jokes work a lot better with heaps of Brits or Anglophiles in the room.
PS.: I got one post-lecture question, to which the answer is: yes, I am the guy opposing the liquor ban.âJY
Tags: 2010, academia, Aotearoa, branding, Christian Grönroos, Helen Baxter, humour, Jack Yan, mayoralty, New Zealand, personal branding, politics, Stefan Engeseth, Sweden, TV, UK, Victoria University of Wellington, Wally Olins, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in branding, business, humour, marketing, New Zealand, politics, Sweden, UK, Wellington | No Comments »
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