IT'S TIME TO BE DIFFERENT

I heard Linda Jackson Citroen’s CEO on Radio 4 last week. She was asked to reflect on this car maker’s resurgence in sales - up 16% year on year. She said she thought the brand had lost its soul, that it had tried to be like the others rather than trying to be different. But that had changed. She was (she said) leading Citroen back to the glorious eccentricities of the 2CV and the DS - Maigret’s car and the limousine used by French Presidents.

Citroen was style. Citroen was sexy. Citroen was - as David Cameron put it - the future once. It had the potential to be relevant, feminine and head turning and now it’s all of those - at last.

Over 20 years ago I held a senior position in London in a French advertising agency called Euro RSCG who had the Citroen account. From a distance I watched the business constantly on the verge of being lost and then in an unbelievable kiss-and make-up over a spectacular meal between the agency’s French CEO and the CEO of Citroen a new strategy would be hatched over Chateau Latour and more mediocre advertising for mediocre cars resulted.

Citroen had not only lost it soul it had lost its senses. But it seems Linda has helped change this. And well done here because we live in a same-old world when it comes to most design.

We’ll  decline complacently as we become more alike. To succeed we need to renovate, reinvent and be distinctive.

What’s a French Carmaker that’s a bit awkward, independently spirited and characterful got to do with Brand Britain?

Caitlin Moran who usually makes me laugh more than she makes me think made me start thinking quite hard on Saturday when she wrote in the Times:

“Ostensibly we’re leaving Europe but what we’re really leaving is the High Table. We’ve made all our history. We’ve done all our innovating. We want to be smaller. Let someone else do the heavy lifting ….. I think we’re done.”

That’s why the old and the young voted so differently. The older voters are knackered by the constant demands on trying to be GREAT Britain when just being Britain would be great enough.  We may, like it or not, have voted to be a bit smaller.  But more importantly although we don’t have a plan yet we have voted to be different, less institutional, less global corporate, more awkward and less co-operative.

Finding our soul, agreeing on our reinvention and doing a Citroen on ourselves is going to take longer than the negotiation of the Brexit terms with the EU and it’s a lot more important. If we get this right (or more properly if we come to a broad consensus on what we are trying to become) things could work out well.

David Cameron used to talk about the Big Society. This is the smaller society. More John Lewis than Tesco but actually different to either.

Are we up for it?

VENICE: A PARADIGM OF DEGRADATION?

Jan Morris entertainingly described the history of Venice as a transition from power to luxury from luxury to flippancy and from flippancy to impotence. But the Venice of today, where I recently spent a week, is on the ascendancy again.

There are real craft shops doing great stuff, the Biennale is in in full swing and once you’ve overcome three shocks one has a deep sense of admiration that billions of dollars have been well spent on restoration
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The shocks are economic -the pound/euro parity – so a couple of beers cost £15; iconoclastic - the cruise ships (Voyager of the Seas which has over 3,000 guests and is 14 stories high slid past on the Giudecca Canal and nearly gave me a heart attack because there are no skyscrapers in Venice except these) and finally commercial, the posters and African market traders of knock-off designer labels in St. Mark’s Square. The 96 sheet ad for Citroen was particularly nasty, the Louis Vuitton knock-off bags a close second.

Pseuds’ Corner would have a field day with the arty fliers. Here are just some of them:
“One of a thousand ways to defeat entropy”;
“The cloud of unknowing”;
“Permanently becoming and the architecture of seeing” (this one authored by Julian Schnabel, the US film maker and artist) and from the Canadian exhibit at the Biennale itself – (Canada clearly got out of bed the wrong side that day)
“Triumphant secretion sculpted in foul mist
Dehydrated spectral birth at war with false metals”

Even the local Casino got in on the act with this: “an infinity of emotion” – yes that’s what you get with your chips on the tables of Venice.

The city is glorious – learning, effortlessly reaching back a thousand years and forward to a world of art and experiment, of hand craftsmanship and of car-free and Vespa-less perfume. Venice feels quite modern and self-confident in some ways, a world apart from the wrinkled old lady I first saw over twenty years ago.

Look at Venice today and see how once great can be reborn as the capital of conferences, global art, fashion and opera. There’s the odd jolt and tacky moment but it felt young, experimental and fun; a place in which to learn rather than a place in which to decay or die.

And maybe it’s a place to use as a new paradigm – one of restoration and hope.