August 2004

A few highlights from my weblog in recent weeks...

Beyond Lovemarks

A new book, Lovemarks, purports to be a manifesto for a world beyond brands. Written by CEO of Saatchi's, Kevin Roberts, it has received a lot of coverage lately.

I think it's self-indulgent bunk. Far from being a radical rethink of branding, it amounts to little more than same-old same-old Saatchi thinking. One good thing about Lovemarks is that it provoked me into a series of posts challenging its ideas and setting out an alternative way of thinking about brands - so that they are sustainable and useful. Here are some of them...

Modesty "For every great brand you or I could nominate, there are probably thousands of also-rans. In my experience, these failures are quietly covered up, rationalised or scapegoated by their perpetrators. And, of course, go largely unnoticed by the rest of us. Thus the story of branding is a tale usually told by an egotist, and thus we get the conventional narrative of heroic leadership, blinding customer insight blah blah blah."

It's not yours to own "We use the word brand as if it refers to something concrete. In reality, it's shorthand, an averaging out of all the different stories in each of our heads about what an organisation means. Now you can influence these stories by what you do and say, but you can't control them."

Emergence "..it helps to think of brands as emergent. Not things that unfold according to the master plan, but that emerge as a result of all the encounters between people who belong, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or loathing, to the community around a brand."

Other Beyond Lovemarks posts: Lovemarks panned, Lovemarks panned again, Spontaneity, Things/Ideas or People/Relationships, Restoring the power of language

Thought is not the most productive form of work

Rebecca Ryan at Worthwhile shared this view

So I'm here to tell you: Thought is NOT the most productive form of work. PLAY is. PLAY engages all of our senses. It moves muscles other than our cerebrums. PLAY rejuvenates, makes room for risk, and reminds us what it is to feel truly alive.

This month I painted rocks with a five and a seven year old. I threw my partner over my shoulder and into the pool. I participate in a twenty minute pillow fight, and played tag until I was laughing too hard to stand up.

And an amazing thing happened: I returned to work this morning with more energy than I've had in months.

Made me laugh

For light relief on the US Presidential election, you could do worse that watch this online movie: This Land is My Land, a sharp satire on the contest. (It's a 3.7MB download, so not great if you only have dialup internet).

This made me laugh, too:

Thanks for reading!