Jest szansa, że będzie można obejrzeć i posłuchać Jeremiego na żywo już 20 listopada podczas II edycji Form Praktyków Marketingu Miejsc (w Łodzi, przy okazji pierwszych targów usług marketingowych dla administracji publicznej organizowanych przez Brief for Poland).
A tymczasem poniżej transkrypcja wykładu Jeremiego z Chile.
While people are coming in, I’ll put this introductory slide up. I love this. These are the end pages from a book by Douglas Coupland. Douglas Coupland is the guy who invented the term “Generation X.” So he always has his finger on the pulse of things and you know what this is about. This is about... this is when you finish a document and you call it “final version” and you’d send it out and then someone calls you up and says, “There’s a mistake on page 6. You need to fix that,” and you do it again. And then you have the second final and then the absolutely final and all of that. And I just laughed when I saw when I opened the book, I saw this in the end pages because every article I write for The Wall Street Journal, every report I do for a client, this is how I feel, too. I know that as soon as I give this talk I’m going to want to give it a different way right at the end, so this is always the case.
Now what about me? The question was where...the question at the top of the presentation is, “Where are you from?” I say, “Soy de los Angeles pero vivo en Londres.” I like to say I’m an American who lives abroad and regards the world as his home. Anyway, these issues of identity fascinate me. I agree with Simon completely that this is some of the most interesting stuff that one can possibly turn one’s attention or efforts to. And until two months ago, I was working for a company called Saffron, which is a brand consultancy based in London, Mumbai, Madrid and New York, which specialized in what we used to say was working with companies, countries, and other entities on issues related to identity and reputation. And there was a lot of corporate identity work, a lot of corporate clients and often the issue of provenance came into it. If there was a Turkish phone company, then the issue of their Turkishness was very much paramount in their thinking about the brand.
For the last two of the five years I was at Saffron, I was head of place branding and in that post, I did have clients, a number of actual place clients and now I’m on my own. I do work for various people but in this presentation I refer to work that I did while I was at Saffron, or work that Saffron did while I was there.
Let’s talk first, what does it mean for a place to be branded? I think to be branded is to mean something. To be known, to be thought about in a certain way, to be deemed relevant, to be appreciated, understood, valued, liked, loved, personally identified with. Therefore, I think you could say that the strongest place brand, at least in theory, is the one that belongs to the place that the most people identify with most strongly and positively. I mean, there is no way to quantify this kind of thing. But if you were, I think the ultimate place brand is probably New York. Because the worst I ever heard anybody say about New York is that “it’s my dream to visit it some day.” Some people would say “I wouldn’t want to live there,” but I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t interested in at least visiting New York. And I’ve never met anyone who hadn’t heard of New York or known something about it.
Brand, I should put my cards on the table and say that when we’re talking about brand, because people mean a lot of things and so it’s worth defining on terms.
Brand for me is: substance plus feeling, or reality plus image, or truth plus imagination, fact plus impression. It’s some combination and good branding work and good marketing keeps both of these things in mind. So now to this question of, “Where are you from?” From a commercial standpoint, companies and brands have been trying to answer this for a long time. This is an age old question. This is a Victorian-era can of condensed milk portrayed as an English brand. Nowadays, often the law requires you to say where you are from. But even when the law doesn’t require it, people seem to prefer products that are from somewhere. They like you more if you are from some place because then they think they know something about you. This bottle of wine doesn’t exist and I think there’s a very good reason why it doesn’t exist. I don’t think it would sell very well, because it’s not from anywhere. And some things are supposed to come from certain places and if they don’t it’s just weird. So you buy Scotch whisky and you’ll enjoy it and you think about highlands and islands while you drink it. But if I try to sell you Roberto Rastrelli Italiano whisky, you wouldn’t pay any extra for it. Probably you’d want it at a discount and if you did drink it, you’d imagine, you’d believe that you were tasting olives in it somehow. It wouldn’t be any good at all. Italian olive oil, on the other hand, is no problem, but scotch olive oil just wouldn’t be credible.
So people like a good story and place can fit into that. The story doesn’t have to be perfectly true. Neutrogena Hand Cream Concentrated Norwegian Formula is naturally produced by a Belgian company that’s owned by an American conglomerate. But still, when you put it on your hands, you can imagine a fisherman pulling up his nets and pulling out a tube of Neutrogena and, uh, softening his hard palms.
Bailey’s Original Irish Cream, naturally invented by product development and branding people in 1973 in Soho, London. But it--never mind, because these stories have resonance, you know, they work. They fit with what we think we know about a place and that helps. There’s a concept that’s relevant here called “truthiness” which is a term coined by an American satirist called Stephen Colbert and the definition of truthiness is a felt sense of something being true independent of logic, evidence, intellectual examination or actual facts. So it’s basically you’re saying to yourself, “I feel it’s true and that’s what matters.” And, like it or not, a lot of effective brand stories seem to have this quality of truthiness and I’ll hasten to add that it’s very hard to achieve truthiness without some degree of truthfulness, but they are not the same thing and it’s truthiness that at the end of the day matters the most.
So how do commercial companies deal with where they are from? Let’s look at a few examples.
Germany. A few years ago, a branding agency in London called Wolff Olins carried out a series of studies with the Financial Times, on what “Made in Germany” means to people. What does that label mean? I think they did it with telephone interviews with senior executives around the world. And what they came up with they asked things like, “Which industries do you associate with Germany?” Most people, a vast majority in fact, associate Germany with automotive and engineering products and meanwhile give very low association to areas with high emotion or passion and that’s why you see, very obviously, a company like Volkswagen--they actually ran an ad campaign in the U.S. some years ago, where they used a German word. Every American of a certain age can tell you what “farfegnugen” is or knows what it is. They can tell you what it means and it has something to do with pleasure of driving. And this is not the only German automotive company that I’ve seen that uses actual German language in their ads. Another car company recently ran some ads in Britain which played on all kinds of stereotypes about Germans and Germany and had “Ride of the Valkyries” playing in the background, you know, this Wagnerian music and you get to the end of the ad and in fact, it’s an ad for Citroen, a French car that they are describing as “unmistakably German.” It’s quite controversial these ads, but they did get attention. And then after that a screenshot, a little while later this little asterisk comes up that says “Made in France”. It’s bizarre, but it shows the overwhelming power of provenance sometimes. And it’s why a company like Miele, which is a super-premium, incredibly expensive white-goods appliance manufacturer doesn’t even bother trying to have a brand personality of their own. They just pin it all on German-ness. That’s all they tell you about them. “We are Miele, you’ve heard about us, we are super-premium and we’re German. Pay lots of money for us.” And it seems to work. But a company like Deutsche Bank doesn’t--it’s neither hurt much nor helped much by being German. And so they call themselves Deutsche Bank and they don’t take it further than that. Same thing with SAP, a software company. Their German-ness doesn’t do anything for them.
At the other extreme you’ve got, if you are a fashion company from Germany, being German is probably unhelpful to you. So, what do you do? You know, fashion is an industry that’s marketed on emotion and there is a complete misfit here between national perception or misperception, or whatever it is and the reality of the brand—same with Jil Sander. OK.
Spain: The images people had of Spain for a long time, I think, it’s changed a lot now. We are dominated by romanticized nonsense, shall we say, and particularly by this grotesque caricature of a particular region of Spain called Andalucía. People thought all of Spain is like that and this includes—you know, the images of Spain were of toreros, and Sanfermines, Pamplona. More recently you’ve got Almodóvar films –and all of this amounts to, in a very roundabout kind of way, some idea of passion, some central, loose, guiding principle of passion which Spanish brands, or brands that want to portray themselves as Spanish can pick up on. And hence San Miguel beer, which is owned, I think, actually by a Filipino concern, but it’s certainly offered as Spanish product, sells beer where Spain is basically one of the ingredients in the beer—this is effectively what they are doing. They are saying this beer with water, malt, barley, hops, and a little spoonful of Spain in there; and that’s what you find in the bottle. And say our cars use this tagline auto-emoción so they play on their origins as well. And I couldn’t find an actual label showing this but I understand some years ago, Spanish wine was marketed under this slogan. And it all ties in to ideas that people have about Spain.
Brazil: Another case. The image of Brazil is funny because at least beyond South America, the image of the whole country is dominated by the image of one city in that country, Río. As Marie Castro, a Brazilian writer put it: “Anything for good or ill that’s going on in Brazil’s 3.3 million square miles is thought of outside Brazil as happening here. A forest catches fire in Amazonia and its thought someone in Río had something to do with it. This is funny because it’s very... it’s one of the few situations where the city image absolutely dominates the national image. And the city has some common associations: favelas, Carnival, Carmen Miranda, if you are a little before my time. And you know, the beach and the relaxed life style that goes with it. I’ve been told that Río is a city composed of people who live like they are nowhere near a city. This is the idea of Río out of Brazil; which is great because if you are Havaianas, then all you have to say is, “Look, we are the flip-flop from the flip-flop capital of the world, buy us.” And it works, your marketing’s done for you. You just identify where you are from and go home.
And then other people will try to use your brand equity. They’ll try to steal a bit of it. So Estée Lauder comes out with a new fragrance--I took this photograph in the Duty Free Shop in London a week ago. They’ve come out with a fragrance and call it “Brazil Dream,” and it says, “Go where it’s warm, exciting and full of life.” They just bottle a little bit of Brazil’s brand equity and try to get that to do their marketing for them.
Estée Lauder, incidentally, is an American cosmetics company named after the daughter of a ... well, Estée Lauder’s original name, her given name, is like Esther Metzner or something, her father was Czechoslovakian and her mother was half Hungarian Jewish and half French Catholic and she changed her name because she had an innate sense of the power of place, I guess. Although it’s easy for her to answer the question “Where are you from?” She was from Queens, New York.
This image of Brazil though, doesn’t help you very much if you are Embraer and you are trying to sell serious aircraft to serious people, and I would argue that Embraer has built their brand, which is a strong one, despite being Brazilian rather than because of being Brazilian. It’s no surprise that mostly they don’t use their Brazilian-ness in their identity. They call their model the “Phenom.” I did find one example from the history books, in which they did call a plane the “Brazilia.” But you’ll note that they didn’t call the model the “Copacabana” or the “Caipirinha” or the “Bossa Nova.” They call it something relatively serious. Although I think I’d like to fly a plane called “the Saudade,” I think that would be interesting.
Anyway the apparent lesson here is that if your national stereotypes are helpful then you milk them and if what you’re doing or selling doesn’t have much to do with the prevailing perceptions of your national origin, then you downplay or hide where you are from. And I can’t really fault people who do that, I guess, it’s hard to criticize. It’s certainly easy to understand why they do it, but I think there are two constructive alternatives that I want to propose to you:
The first is to turn a widely-held perception or stereotype, presumably somewhat negative, into a real positive, and the other possibility is to employ creative labeling to recast where you are from. One that I quite like is an Indian brand that came to Saffron some months ago, called Apollo Tyres. They are the second largest manufacturers of tires in India and they are getting ready to enter the European market, they want to sell tires in Germany, and they wanted to sell very discounted tires. And we said, “Hang on a sec. OK. You’ve got to price it at a discount to Michelin and Goodyear but sell at a normal price for a branded tire and make your Indian-ness into an asset by saying, “Look, we design tires for these kinds of conditions, we design tires for the worst roads and the worst drivers in the known universe and if we can do that, can we certainly make tires that are good enough for your European roads. So we gave them this brand idea which was written up like this: “Where the silk road meets the autobahn.” And they liked that. We gave them a visual identity to go with that, sort of based on four wheels but building in little bit of Indian color, the bright colors that are very popular in India, that are a very basic expression of Indian identity and they went on like that. We’ll see how successful it is, but I think it should work.
Now, the United States is by far, the best-known nation in the world. Simon and I wrote a book about the history of the image of America and it’s coming out again on the 4th of July in a revised version, but anyway... The United States is famously the land of the brave, home of the free, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty. Give us your tired, your hungry, your poor, all of that. Democracy, freedom, opportunity. Well, it was like that for a long time but recently things changed and we got some new sides to the image and U.S. brands had to react to that and one of my favorite reactions to this is what Apple did. Does anyone have an iPhone or an iPod with them? Who’s got one? Can you take it out, look at the back and tell us where it says it’s made? Do you have it with you? Someone’s got an iPhone or iPod. No, no, read the whole line. What it says, not made in USA, it says, “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” This is perfect, it portrays the origins and exactly the proportions that we, as consumers, are absolutely delighted to accept. It’s a faultless line of copy in terms of labeling. We’ll take it. Designed by Apple, that’s great, in California. We like California. We know that a technology company in California is probably among the best in the world. And we are OK with things being assembled in China now. We accept that that’s not a diminution in quality, especially if it’s supervised by a great company in California like Apple. This is brilliant, the way they walked around being made in America. It assumes, probably correctly, that people know about California, and know about Apple. What if they don’t, as in the case of Chile? Then I think you need to teach them. So here’s my idea. Why not label export products clearly but also creatively. Why can’t “hecho en…” be a national advertising space for a not-so-well-known country? I think it can be. I’ll come back to that.
But first I want to show you a third constructive alternative which is much more ambitious, which is to change the context that the product lines or company brands are operating in by re-branding the country or a sector of the country. For this I’ll go back to Spain. Spain, in addition to those threadbare, you know, the real stereotypes, also has recently become known for a lot of other things, especially in the U.K. You know, its soccer, it’s Real Madrid, Costa del Sol and great new architecture by Gehry in Bilbao or Calatrava who is himself Spanish, or global financial institutions like Banco Santander or major retail chains. Zara’s got more than a thousand stores in more than sixty countries now. It’s a major flagship for Spain, although I don’t know how many people know they’re Spanish and maybe it’s a missed opportunity. Or Richard Rogers’s airport terminal in Madrid or Fernando Alonso, Rafael Nadal, these sports championships that Spain had a habit of winning for a little while, and real world-class Spanish designers that are gaining a real international notoriety. These all are new or relatively recent reputational aspects to Spain. And unfortunately, one of them is not technology, even though technology from Spain is one of the pillars of the economic success of the resurgent Spain. And you might not know it, in fact you almost certainly don’t, but Spanish technology is all around you. These are some American examples but the U.S. Navy, the only non-American supplier to the US Navy is a Spanish company called Indra. Hotels, like ones in las Vegas are routinely built with Spanish cranes. Both Coca-Cola and their rival, Pepsi, use bottling equipment that’s designed by a Spanish company. And the U.S. Coast Guard aircraft are Spanish. The Metropolitan Transport Authority of New York City hired a Spanish company to extend one of the subway lines. And when it comes to windmills it’s not just Don Quixote anymore: A Spanish company called Iberdrola is one of the most important private energy groups in the world, operating in more than forty countries. And even in software, some Spanish company has this software that analyzes pop songs after they are recorded but before they are released and it suggests, based on its database, like tweaking the song to make it more likely that it will become a hit. The point is that there’s real substance here. There’s real substance to the claim that Spain is a powerhouse for certain types of technology and yet in the words of one of our former clients, and I love this line, “no sólo hay que serlo, hay que parecerlo.” Which, as best I can grasp the translation, means: it’s not enough to be, you have also to seem, which is such a profound thought. So, in that interest, in that goal of seeming, the Spanish export office appointed Saffron in 2005 to create a brand identity for Spanish technology; not a brand for Spain, just for the technology. And we came up with this idea which, in my view, is a bit generic but anyway, sustainable ingenuity and we devised a mark which would be used as an endorsement. It would go next to other people’s logos, like trade organizations and private companies, and we had to convince them to use it. No arm twisting was allowed—this mark had to be something that people would want to use alongside their own identities, and we had to portray the benefits and the potential to the people who might use it. So we showed them things like the wall mark, or this UL, the Underwriter’s Laboratory seal, or the European version of that, or the Royal Appointment Crest that products take and our holy grail was that this brand mark become for Spanish technology exports what the Joan Miró sun logo had become for Spanish tourism, which is another export, actually. In other words, a true seal: Eventually we hoped that it would have this kind of recognition and ability to transmit meaning. We told them, too, “Look, the communications that you use, even if communication isn’t the essence of an image change strategy, have to reflect the high quality of the products on offer, so take these lousy product catalogues that you’ve got that look like auto parts, you know, sprinkler heads and combined harvesters and the way....” You know, they were just ugly, we said, “Get rid of this. Get some style, photograph them nicely, present that, think about your presentation, bring some more attention to that and while you are at it, tell authentic stories because there are enough ones and back the claims that you are making with true facts, and cases and real people.” And they did that, and so when they ran ads --and these are real ads—they told little stories, all of which portrayed real people doing something real as part of that. And then we made this video. We worked with another company to make the video, and the point of the video was to connect what people thought they knew about Spain –in other words, current perceptions-- with what we wanted them to know about Spanish technology, and to do it in a way that was harmonious so it wouldn’t jar. So they would go, “Of course,
Spain should be good at this kind of technology. This makes perfect sense.” It’s so natural and maybe it doesn’t show as much about the people as Simon would have it. It’s more about the machines and things. But I think it has a human side and it’s stylish and slick. There should be sound.
[Video]
You can argue its merits, but I think that it does a, it’s an example of at least a halfway decent attempt to do something very worthwhile, which is to connect perceptions, existing perceptions, to some new perceptions that you’re trying to engender. And the royal family of Spain, I know, took it to China with them for two days after the--I think they held off the trip a day or two so that they could take this thing with them on a mission to China. And the important thing is that the brand, this brand of Spanish technology, was about not only showing off Spanish technology, but actually using this platform of Spanish technology to show off modern Spain and modern Spanish-ness. So there is real interplay of the place and the products, which leads me to promoting a place—kind of an abrupt change, but I think most of you out there are advertising people working for Chilean companies but some of you are working for the Chilean government promoting Chile in different ways, so I thought I would touch on that.
I want to show two country promotion slogans.
One I think is the worst going right now and one I think is the best, which they don’t use anymore. It’s really a way of saying, I guess, my favorite and my least favorite. My least favorite is the one Panama is using right now, which says “Panama, it will never leave you.”
And whenever I see this on a bus in London I always giggle and I imagine how the committee that chose this had it narrowed down to two: “It will never leave you,” or “You will never leave it,” and they were arguing about it… and this one won by one vote. I don’t know, that’s how I imagine its happening. But I think it’s awful.
And then Norway, many years ago, ran a campaign where they used this slogan. You know, Norway, known for the Fjords and has a very similar environment to Chile, as you know, because of the Norwegian connection to the salmon business here, among other things. Norway run a campaign where they said, “Any decent doctor would prescribe Norway.” And it’s dated in its style and so on, but it’s has charm and it has real confidence and speaks in a subtle but unmistakable and very alluring way to something genuine about Norway that they were seeking to promote, and that’s why I like it.
Now, what about Chile?, Well I’ve only been in this country for six days, this is my first visit. Four of these days were in Easter Island, and as I flew from Easter Island to Santiago the other day, I caught this in the lobby, in the check-in area, “All ways surprising.” And I think it’s in vogue to put down this slogan right now. But anyway, I think it’s somewhere in the middle, it’s not the worst slogan even written, that’s for sure, but what I want to point out here, because you guys are a lot in this business of promoting things to countries that do not speak Spanish, is when you look closely at this thing, it’s advertising Eastern Island, which probably exists somewhere but it’s not in Chile. The point is, be very, very careful. There’s really no excuse for this—if you’re going to run an ad in a foreign country, get a native speaker to have a look at it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen this kind of thing, and it’s really amateurish. Its power to undo a lot of the other things that you are doing should not be underestimated.
And anyway, do you really have to use a slogan? This is a question I’ve been pondering a lot lately. And I think the answer might be, in many cases, is no.
One example of this is Visit London, a project that I led for Saffron last year. Visit London is the tourist board for London basically. And we won this job of creating a new corporate identity for them. And they are, it’s fair to say, the marketing arm of Europe’s largest city. And this challenge was to find something that let London be historic and charming and also contemporary and evolving and which avoided the clichés, because they said, “No Big Ben, leave Big Ben and the changing of the guard out of it, please.” We had tussle with them, because we said, “Yes, OK, but these are assets.” We had to find the way to get all of this in there. And the other tricky bit was that the identity had to be used for business tourism and conferences and things, and also just leisure tourism. And so it couldn’t be too, you know, too much fun. It had to have a bit of sobriety to it, because of the business aspect. And this is what we were replacing, this is the identity that they had. Which is based on the street signs around London. It’s the same typographic style. And our solution was also typographic and it was based around the core idea of the Visit London guides being the champions for London. Which is really what they do. And we did it in red because red is, if not uniquely, then very strongly identified with London. And it’s this: Visit London. This version was “Established 50 AD.” And we didn’t just have “Established 50 AD.” We had a whole range of things that they could choose from, depending on the situation. So “GMT+0,” “Black cabs in 12 colors,” “300 hundred languages spoken,” “31 tailors on Savile Row.” So any kind of situation that they might be in, they could choose a different one that would suit that. So if you are promoting the Tate Modern, then you have this “Visit London, Established 50 AD.” This contract is really nice, because London, is not merely about... it’s not just old and new. It’s not like that, it’s completely utterly ancient Roman ruins, right next to an absolutely vital, most modern and significant stuff happening in the world. And that’s uniquely London, and we wanted to get that across. Another side of London is the humor. I mean London is in Britain, even though more than half of Londoners are non-British. Only city in the world where more than half the people living there are not from the country that the city is in. So there’s a humor there, so we said you could have a mug, and they actually made a bunch of these where it says, “Tea time, 4 o’clock.” So you could play a little bit, it was very flexible. And it came in different colors, and they used it. Although in fact, as you see, the ad agency that was working for them couldn’t resist a slogan, and came up with, “See the world, visit London,” which they used alongside the material that we provided. So there’s the “Established 50 AD,” “The greenest big city in the world.” There are more than 600 parks in London, I’ll have you know. “Black cabs in 12 colors,” and in all of the versions it’s very unpretentious, unadorned and it befits London’s stature. We were very concerned about this because London, it’s a premium product, it’s not a cheap holiday destination. And it needed to be handled and marketed that way.
So back quickly to Chile and my thoughts about labeling, and the opportunities that you have here. Simon said that the export stuff is the main way perhaps that Chile is likely to... it’s the main lever at your disposal, for changing the way that you are perceived. And if the basic goal is to get people to know and like Chile, more than they do already, wherever they are on that curve, then your tools when it comes to labeling are language, facts and flair. And really, I have no idea what you should say, but I think that you should say something. You should label in a way that characterizes and conveys Chilean-ness, and teaches people something about the country. 40:15 There was some discussion earlier about aspects of Chilean-ness. Well, you need to pin that down, and then label accordingly on a case-by-case basis. So in wine, Chilean-ness might mean one thing, in fruit something slightly different, and in a manufactured product, or in services it could be really quite different but it’s all Chilean. And I imagine what Simon’s done, I’m not very familiar with the work that has been done or the foundation that’s being created, but I imagine that that will help. But here are some random ideas that occurred to me. So you could say, “Made by Chileans, the British of South America.” I’ve never seen anything labeled like that, but why not? Why couldn’t you do it? I can’t see a reason. Or “Made in Chile, called the thin country by the Nobel prize winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.” That can fit on a bottle of wine. I’ve never seen a country say anything other than “Made in” on their bottles of wine, but you could do it. And Simon talked at length about the incredible benefits of being winemakers, so add to that some facts that you can plant in people’s heads—a Nobel prize, that’s not a bad thing. Or “Made in Chile, the most stable, safe, prosperous and democratic nation in South America.” It’s not an exiting thing to say, I wouldn’t put it on a bottle of wine, but you could do it. Or “Chile, Latin America’s success story.” Really, I’m not sure how you would use this, but I can conceive of a situation where, the simple, rather dull but entirely sober and somewhat bold statement, could be helpful. More helpful than a catchy slogan. Or you could say, “Product of Chile, home of 55 active volcanoes.” You could use that in tourism, or you could use that on textiles, some outdoors products, some fruit. I don’t know, I know volcanic ash –I learned this on Easter Island-- volcanic ash is good for the soil. So you could tell, if there’s room on the back panel, you can tell some story about that.
The possibilities are nearly endless and what’s appropriate will depend on context and circumstances. But it should be always link to the basic brand strategy. And to this national image strategy that Simon Anholt has worked out with you. I’ve pulled these out of the air, so take them with a grain of salt. As Woody Allen said, right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.
So, those were my notions. I hope you’ve found some of my remarks useful, and or provocative. Thank you for listening.
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