Category Archives: Uncategorized

Steve Barron: the cultural impact of one 80s music video director

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This is going to get sentimental…
A few months back I went to a music video showcase I’ve been going to for about a decade BUG (#50!) which had a very special guest. One who is an example of the cultural ripples creativity can send.
It’s a guy I guess most of you have never heard of, and yet he’s touched your life in more ways than you imagine.
Steve Barron is a director who started as a tea boy on sets and by the late 70s was directing videos for bands like The Jam.
He was quite humble in Adam Buxton‘s interview, saying that many of today’s videos would have won ‘video of the year’ from MTV back then because the form (and production values) evolved so much.
Back then, labels didn’t really believe videos made a difference to an artist’s success. Most of them were shot in 16mm.
But then, in 1981, he managed to convince the execs to let him shoot in 32mm and the result was this little triple-inception-meta Truffaut homage.
But wait, it gets SO much better. So much better that I just had to write a whole post… With some help from the BUG programme notes, the interview and wikipedia.

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Why Gin is a marketer’s dream

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(Short comment written for an article about the rise of craft gin. not sure if it was ever used, so here it is)

Q: how can craft gin brands stand out, and how is branding/packaging helping to differentiate artisanal/craft/small batch products?
Gin is a marketer’s dream. It offers more aspects of brand storytelling than your typical spirits, and the craft angle adds more.
Like  other spirits, you can use history. Many craft gins will look to that as the nexus of their brand. If they don’t wish to take on established brands on heritage, there are many alternatives.  If distilled in a surprising place, provenance could play a part. If that’s too close to heritage, they could explore the botanicals. Gins use a long lists of potential ingredients beyond juniper. Each ingredient, be it lemon peel or coriander seed, presents opportunities for differentiation and story-telling. Monkey 47, uses the sheer number of ingredients to define the brand.
If none of the botanical is interesting enough, the story of traditional small batch methods is often what makes ‘craft’. If there isn’t much in that, there are drinking rituals. Hendrick’s use of the humble cucumber is a  case in point.
Finally, you could  tell the story of the people behind the gin. With the big producers increasingly using the term ‘craft’ to describe their own premium spirits, that personal touch is one thing they can’t take away from the smaller distilleries.
Give it an intriguing name which embodies the essence of the brand. Add a premium carefully designed bottle, label and communications that sing the praises of the product in harmony, and you may just come up the next big name in spirits.

British food brands and the world

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(originally written for a piece published last year) 

I was recently asked to comment about the international success of British food brands in the The Times’ The Raconteur. As often is the case with things like that I’ve had a lot more to say than the article allows, so here’s a link to the article and here are my original thoughts, lightly edited. (oh, and BTW ‘Made in Britain’ isn’t a government project).
Q: What is it about ‘brands’ such as Gordon Ramsey, Jamie Oliver, Pret, Costa and co that makes them appealing? What part does Britishness have to play in this success – any at all?
A: While all four Brands are strong examples of British success abroad, they relate to Britishness in different ways. Pret and Costa excel through a business model that meets consumer needs quickly and efficiently. The first providing a healthier, fresher alternative to fast food, the latter riding the increased savvy of coffee drinkers. British business innovation if you will, but they aren’t particularly British in any explicit way, despite Costa’s nods to some nostalgic bakery and biscuits. When it comes to Ramsey and Oliver, however, both are ambassadors of our changing relationship with food, despite not being quintessentially British in the way a brand like Paul smith, for example, is.
First, we should keep in mind that for large parts of the world, British accent and mannerism are enough to make a brand British. As their brand stories develop, Oliver becomes the plucky young cockney while Ramsey combines a gruff disciplinarian perfectionist angle mixed with his colourful language. Beyond style, they have become ambassadors to the changing relationship of Britain with food – Oliver with his commitment to fresh and healthy ingredients; Ramsey with his meticulous attention to ingredients. Both almost a direct opposite of the stereotypical stodgy British grub. The one made with cheap ingredients with no fresh vegetable in sight that foreigners used to think of, and which to be fair, is mostly the result of post world war(s) recession years.

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Definitive products, inevitable brands

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Binder label: Food Title: Heinz Baked Beans with Tomato Sauce [back] Date issued: 1870 - 1900 (approximate) Physical description: 1 print : chromolithograph ; 13 x 8 cm. Genre: Advertising cards Subject: Boys; Canned foods Notes: Title from item. Statement of responsibility: Heinz Collection: 19th Century American Trade Cards Location: Boston Public Library, Print Department Rights: No known restrictions.

(Guest Column in The Drum, 1.3.2013: ‘Ketchup is ketchup, so why does the Heinz brand mean so much?’)

Ketchup is weird, Malcolm Gladwell observed a few years back. It is served alongside mustard, but while mustard is a highly diverse product category, ketchup, as we all know is, well… ketchup.

Yes, it is, essentially, a type of tomato sauce, but it isn’t part of that highly diverse category either. Tomato sauce lives by a completely different set of rules.

So if ketchup isn’t like mustard, and it’s not a type of tomato sauce, what is it then? Ketchup is ketchup. Ketchup is weird. Ketchup is magic.
And Heinz is its magic brand.

Yet Ketchup is not the company’s only magic brand. Heinz dominates the Baked Beans category too. There are few definitive products in our world today, and far fewer still where one brand owns two of them. Maybe Apple has managed to achieve this with the Mac and the iPhone (with two product brand names), but you may struggle to find other examples in the mainstream world (Coke and Diet Coke are variants so don’t count).

Both Heinz Baked Beans and Heinz Tomato Ketchup are operating in ‘categories of one’. Competition isn’t fighting Heinz through differentiation; it is forced down to copycatting. Heinz, with its dominant presence and rich, long heritage is just too strong.

From a design perspective, Heinz marries its definitive products with brand identities that are textbook case studies in the long-term management of iconic brands.

If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. Tend to it. It’s this custodian mentality that keeps these definitive brands alive and well. Continue reading →

UKGC – custom gaming PC building service review

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So, I don’t think I’ve ever written a review on this blog, but I think this time it is well deserved and also a nice example of the difference good customer experience makes…

UKGC's Cerebus

My pet monster

So here goes:

About 18 months ago, I decided to indulge myself and get back into gaming. I started the process by making the terrible (and apparently common among adult gamers getting back into the habit) mistake of buying a gaming laptop (and nothing less than a souped up Alienware 11mx !). About a year later, I still had the best laptop I’ve ever had, but being unable to upgrade the graphics card (or pretty much anything) meant performance with new titles began to suffer.

So, swallowing my pride, I started looking around at getting a proper gaming PC. Among many questionable gaming PC workshops on the net, ukgamingcomputers.co.uk stood out.

UKGC are all about your customer experience.
We don’t all have time to sweat and curse through the process of building a custom-made PC and they make it all a pleasant experience at a reasonable mark-up.
The site doesn’t bombard you with a million alternatives, just with premium, award winning, components. For those, you will find detailed information that will help you understand what you wish to keep and what you wish to change, even if you’ve been out of the hardware loop for a while.