SOME YOU WIN, SOME YOU LOSE

We seem to have lost the art of and the will to compromise. And along with that, the ability to be patient and wait until the right solution comes to us. Sometimes the right place for a problem is the pending tray. Yes, inaction is sometimes the best strategy. Calvin Coolidge, the 30th President of America was not notable for his snappy one liners but he said this:

“If you see ten troubles coming along the road towards you can be sure nine will run into the ditch before they reach you”

But in this whack-a-mole modern world we are all on our feet whacking furiously away at all ten troublesome moles regardless of the peripheral damage and waste of energy. We are all constantly guilty of premature retaliation....because we can. No sooner has the e-mail pinged in than we are issuing an affronted and affronting riposte. And the faster the better.

My brother was once punished at school for hitting another boy. On being asked why he’d done it he said: “I had a funny feeling he might be going to hit me.” His was an early example of anti-social media syndrome. Yet we can’t just blame social media for all of us becoming so impetuous. Twitter has not made Donald Trump, Donald Trump has made Twitter what it always was, an offensive weapon where the unthinkable and un-thought-through can be fired off like bullets from a machine gun.

As Ken Dodd might have said “Twitter ye not”.

Much more concerning is the apparent impossibility of opposing parties’ ability to compromise anymore. We have all become children, hitting first and thinking afterwards. Without empathy, without the desire to reach a rapprochement and without an instinct that peace is better than war there is little hope for democracy. My biggest concern is for its uncertain future. Unless a sense of give-and-take returns we’ll have a continuing round of ill-tempered stand-offs. What happened to good humour? Dick Tuck was a mischievous Democrat who said ruefully after standing unsuccessfully for Congress:
“The people have spoken...the bastards.”

You lose some. It isn’t like dying. The bastards have a point of view too.

So what is a compromise? Here’s OED definition. “an agreement or settlement of a dispute by both parties making concessions.”

Nope. I can’t see the ‘brexiteers’ and ‘remainers’ getting to that point let alone anyone reaching a settlement with the EU. Forget democracy. This is all about bigots in deadlock. We are all to blame. We have created a soft entitlement society where young people desire for  ”safe spaces” insulates them from contrary opinion. Consider - would the Cambridge Union allow Trump to debate?

Yet whilst these sanitisers of opinion have been busy the simplistic and one-track thinkers have sown the seeds for future dictatorships. Without the good humour and tolerance to listen to the other side’s point of view we are doomed to standoffs, headlocks and unreconciled squabbles.

Life’s not about winning. It’s about getting on with each other.

OH MY AMERICA - HOW I MISS YOU

I’m not sure I’ve ever bought into the argument about our relationship with America being “special”. They’ve always taken an “America First” attitude towards us and others. America the world’s economic powerhouse has never just been a “nice guy”... they are tough like Jack Welch.

     
But more than anywhere else they’ve defined global civilisation and set the standard in democracy, in thinking and in film. Films like ‘High Noon’, ‘Twelve Just Men’, ‘The Magnificent Seven’, ‘Patton’, ‘Working Girl’, ‘Pretty Woman’, ‘The Big Country’ and ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’ and many others - all had qualities that inspired us. They were imbued with will to win but within the rules, to do so with wit and style and to promote, most of all, a civilised point of view.

The West Wing series left many asking why Martin Sheen couldn’t be a credible presidential candidate. We sat engrossed watching good guys trying to do their best despite the human frailties we all have. Whatever else, the America I grew to love had a burning sense of justice and what was right and wrong. There was an American way.

   
With the Kennedys a real sense of idealism emerged that taught the world what was possible, especially with the wonderfully idealistic thoughts of Robert – what a great President he might have been. Here’s just one quote: “Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not”

This has an elegance missing in Twitter.

More than anything else it’s been this American linguistic grandeur I miss most. Gone the prose of Harper Lee so fine that the meaning flies effortlessly from the page, gone the unerring straight-to-the-point razor sharpness of Norman Mailer and the lyrical sensuality of Tom Wolfe. But it’s John Steinbeck I’m reading now. What a giant he is. What a genius of writing.

But then there’s Twitter and our snide new world of the back street. “Sad” as Donald Trump says.

It’s not sad, it’s tragic. You can impeach your President. You can support him, oppose him, applaud him or decry him. He’s your president America but how dare you let him destroy centuries of civilised thinking and writing.

I’m astonished by the silence of the silent majority. As human catastrophes of indescribable anguish follow one from another, from a tirade of hurricanes to a grotesque massacre in Las Vegas, the words with which they are greeted by the most powerful man in the world are crude, brutal or banal. It was not always so.

Words matter. Words inspire. They change minds, they excite, they engage and they help people have dreams, impossible dreams.

America used to create pictures with words so unutterably vivid as to make one believe these dreams, like flying to the moon or walking in New York to the rhythm of the future.

Come back America. Restore that sense of reason, passion, optimism but, most of all, civilisation.

BASTARDS DON'T ALWAYS WIN

Pete Shuttleworth, the founder of a new and very successful Film Production Country, Hoi Polloi, leaned over the table of Café Coho near Brighton Station and asked me if “bastards always won”.

Outside the sun was shining and people trudged along the pavement. In Brighton there’s a curious “sod you,” lumbering walking style which I put down to a shortage of hunger. In London everyone sprints.

Being a bastard works best if you’re a rich genius like Jobs, Bezos or Zuckerberg. It worked for Stalin and Attila too. Bezos comes up with great put-downs like:

“Are you lazy or just incompetent?”

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tried not to be a bastard. He sent an internal memo out last Tuesday announcing that 336 employees were leaving the company. He wanted to avoid corporate speak, messed up by talking about “roadmaps” and “streamlining” but, to be fair, it was a reasonable try. The corporate bastard took over in the hands of HR (aka the Grim Reapers) closing down Twitter and e-mail accounts of the unfortunate 336 with the cryptic words  “you have been removed”. 

Anyone who hasn’t seen the opening of “Margin Call” should. In a major downsizing exercise, HR assassins in the film swoop into the New York offices of a New York Investment Bank slaughtering as they go,.

But the fictional CEO (Jeremy Irons) and Dorsey aren’t bastards, they are just doing what CEOs do when under critical profit pressure, they cut cost.

The really nasty people are the prevaricators and those who stop talent being as good as it should be. These are the death-eaters of management who suck the energy and creativity from people who work with them. I worked for one of these. There are a lot of them around. And one of their characteristics is they interview well and they’re brilliant presenters. But deep down they are evil. They feed greedily on the talent of others and they are devoid of any generosity of spirit.

Back to those lumberers outside the café in Brighton - well at least they were all smiling - and Pete who got it spot on in saying the key to the business who knew best - advertising - was to be “smart and hard.” 

You also have to strive to work with the best people. As Bezos (again) said:

“Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful”

At Netflix they say what makes a great business is not perks but “stunning colleagues” who are smart, hard and driven to do great work. When you work alongside really great people, as they also discovered at Pixar, great stuff happens.

But this is a competitive world and to win you have to remember this - the words of George C. Scott in the film “Patton":

”Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his county. He won it by making the other poor bastard die for his country.”

PUTTING MY AFFAIRS IN ORDER

No don’t worry I’m not about to hand in my dinner pail just yet so far as I know. It’s just that bizarre thing of going on holiday, which I should clearly do more often and feeling impelled to leave everything tidy (or as tidy as a house in upheaval through redecoration can be left.)

I feel quite smug. I’ve proof read my latest four books. Packed - well actually my wife has packed but I told her what to put in. I’ve downloaded a mass of books on to our Kindles, completed a couple of projects. Given books to charity and ticked off everything on “my to-do list”.

What is on my mind now?

I’m concerned about the way social media is going. No the internet is not the answer - I agree with Andrew Keen on this one. Twitter is in trouble - CEO Dick Costolo gone - investors angry. They were promised the moon and haven’t yet got much more than a piece of cheese. Apple is out to demolish Spotify. And this week I saw something weird - a poster which should have been a tweet.

Good punchy stuff but guys, guys…I’m driving and get the idea that Stella Export has just been launched. Damn. I nearly hit that cyclist trying to read the small print….and you mate and you.

Too many words - there are just too many words. At FCO the axiom was fewer words good - example Wimbledon Shoe from Nike “McEnroe swears by them”.

It’s too complex an idea - we are better than Stella - no didn’t get that first or second time - in fact “Why Stella is stellar” is a great ad for….sorry …Stella.

My point is a social media idea has been whacked onto a poster is the mistaken belief they work the same way. They just don’t.

And having mentioned Nike I recall talking about marketing to the Brighton Chamber of Commerce and being reviled for praising Nike. Down here in Caroline Lucas country where even Naomi “No Logo” Klein is regarded as too soft on brands like Coke and Nike, big US brands are capitalist and vile.

Small is beautiful.

Well  I thought they were crazy but you know the stories about Nike coming out of from the FIFA debacle , the story in the Daily Mail - yes I know-  “How Nike lured Mo Farah to work with coach Alberto Salazar in Oregon” and more recently the comments of Julie Strasser - wife of the late Rob Strasser, one of Nike founders -  about the value shift in the company  from attitude creator to money machine, well,  all of those begin to question my previous judgement about a favourite brand.

And FIFA?

I hear Hillaire Belloc’s words in my ears:-
“And always keep ahold of nurse 
For fear of finding something worse.”

Rather like the Arab Spring I suspect the toppling of corrupt tyranny often leads to something much worse.

HASHTAGCONSULTANTSLASHTWITTERSLASHBRAND

I’ve been thinking about three things this week. The legitimacy (or otherwise) of consultants, Twitter and why branding works.

Let’s start with the proposition that we are a parsnip. As such life would be dull. Being an Essential or an Aldi parsnip would be a horrid fate. But imagine you were a Pershore Purple  and better still an Organic Pershore Purple Parsnip (notice the capital letter in “parsnip”) and all would be so much better.

Because language matters,especially when it comes to branding.

But it’s my inability to cope with just 40 characters and the new language of today which is crazy sparse and not easy for someone of my age to ship with. Twitter and I know each other, of course, but we exchange just curt nods

Until this week when the absurd Omnicom/Publicis ad agency merger collapsed in a crash of what I hear is over £60 million of advisor fees.  Here are just three of the tweets I saw:

“Damn. Omnipube was best name ever.” 

“Omnicom rolls over, blinks, stares perplexedly into the sleeping face of Publicis, thinks: My head! Where am I? I remember Champagne...”

“This whole failed Publicis Omnicom merger was like two magnets with the same polarity trying to attract each other.”

And here are those very magnets.

So now I get it. Brevity is the soul of wit and this blog already much too long.

Finally consultants or “people who are unemployed” as my mother used to describe them. I saw this quote from the splendid Erica Jong and felt myself nodding:

 “Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.”

I believe in advice, I believe in asking others for help but the Job Centre for the unemployed is not necessarily the best place to go to find it. So back to branding.

I decided to create my own mega-merger of three consulting companies I set up in my head called McFinsey, Paine and Company and the Hoxton Consulting Group thus, at a stroke, in my lurid imagination creating the biggest consulting group who are proficient in - wait for it - strategy, leadership and change management. That should do it.

As the week rolled on I had two conversations - one about HR. 

“Aren’t we delegating management to this dubious department? You have a tricky people issue…call in HR (not)” and the second was about marketing. Someone said they had a large marketing department and I heard a voice saying:

“Why? Why would you do that - tie up all that fixed and probably mediocre cost when you could go out and shop for talent?”

It was my voice. Me, who’d spent a third of my life in marketing in a big companies. Yet marketing is an expensive investment when the brand (that very Pershore Purple of a thing) should be owned by the CEO and the board. 

Call in consultants with talent but just make sure they have a capital letter and brand name attached. And remember this - consultancy is a “thing” now.

www.colourfulthinkers.com

ONE 'EUREKA' AFTER ANOTHER

We seem to spend our lives alternately being nostalgic about our past or being in love with “life-transforming” inventions like Twitter which, if you were to pay attention to some people, makes the invention of Gutenberg in the 15th century of just marginal account.

I was reflecting on how retro so many things had become with the resurgence of artefacts and things from previous times which we now think are very contemporary. Things like:-

• Bicycles, windmills, satchels, teashops, cup-cakes, baking,  porridge, cocktails, hard back books (making a big resurgence), knitting, community singing, cash, colourful ties (Tie Rack’s ties were not, by the way)

All of these are things that, in some way or other, slow things down rather than speed them up and have the smack of authenticity (and the porridge I’m talking about is the real Scott’s Old Fashioned Porage Oats not  Ready Brek.)

And I was pondering further on the story we keep on hearing about how 21st century technology is transforming our lives in quite unprecedented ways.  But our social media, video games devices, robots, iPods and new plastics (made from pig urine) don’t seem quite as life transforming perhaps as the inventive tsunami of the early 20th century which ran up to the outbreak of the First World War.

Here are just a few of those inventions during those thirteen years:-

• Manned flight, Bakelite,  radio receivers, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, crayons, cornflakes, windscreen wipers, colour photography, safety razors, cellophane, instant coffee, crossword puzzles, bras, zip fasteners, the isolation of Radium, the model T Ford and the theory of relativity.

We speak in awe of Dyson’s bladeless fans today but they don’t quite match the bra do they?  Indeed I think it might be fair to say that the work inventors did in the early 1900s helped define and change modern civilisation in a way that Xbox and Skype simply don’t come close to.

More importantly, perhaps, it wasn’t until I checked up on what had been actually going on in that period that I realised how extraordinarily fertile it had been.

And then on BBC Radio 4’s on Saturday I heard a further piece that was eye opening. At the beginning of the 20th century the global centre for piano production was in Camden Town where there were over 100 factories. (These disappeared after the First World War because most of the skilled piano craftsmen had been killed in France.)

And how did this inventiveness happen?

In part it was through the sheer exuberance of economic success in the USA, Germany, Russia and Britain and the increase in wealth.  In Europe real wages had risen by nearly 50% between 1870 and 1912. But there was something else. Just as a half century earlier had seen a vivid explosion in artistic achievement in all its forms so this narrow decade and a half saw something really special happening – an epidemic of commercial inventiveness.

But how many “eurekas” died in the mud of the battlefields?

WHAT A WASTE OF TIME

Strange isn’t it that two of the biggest and most self-regarding corporations in the world are “Mc” named. McDonalds of Olympic shame and McKinsey the people who according to Malcolm Gladwell helped build Enron, creators of the big whopper – or was it the other way round. Whatever….

Allister Heath, from the paper City AM, reveals  Mckinsey’s study which tells us something we know but we’ve doing nothing about. It shows that  61% of average office workers time’s spent as follows:-
28% staring at their computer screen at e-mails and stuff
19% gathering information
14% collaborating and communicating internally
Then there’s Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, Linkedin and other sites.

We have gone insane with paying attention to opinion and giving our opinions to a vast  chortling audience.

“Isn’t Jess Ennis great”. Yes. We know. Why share it?

Allister says:
“Anyone who’s able to tackle the mad communication overload will be on to a winner”.

It isn’t that hard Allister. It just involves facing up to the truth.

Most of digital is bunk.

And I’m making a pledge.
Today.  Right here.  Right now.

I’m reducing my e-mail traffic to 12% of my working time. I’m ceasing activity on all my Linkedin Groups, stopping Facebook and stopping Twitter. I’m even wondering if this should be my last blog.
I’m changing my office layout, relegating my PC to a corner and going back to thinking on paper on a big lots-of-room-to-work table.

The key word is “thinking”.

I’m going to start trying to do that properly.

And I’m going to walk more, talk more, listen more, read more, look at the world more.
I’m going to work less hard and work much better.
I’m going to value people’s voices and faces much more and spend less time crafting e-mails.

Mostly I’m going to spend less time on networking (or as I call it not-working) because the world is full of people meeting who can do nothing to help each other

I’m tired of hearing how critical IT is. In my recent experience it’s a time waster and something we use to do stuff we could often do quicker and cheaper more simply manually.

Most of all I’m going to simplify. Clear out stuff. Stop wasting time on the internet.
And start using my creativity and my common sense.

Being me. Not a robot.

THE WISDOM OF CROWDS AND OTHER MYTHS

This week I was on a train to Brighton that braked sharply at Gatwick where we sat waiting for 45 minutes with no announcement. Eventually the driver said: “I’m so sorry about the delay. The reason is someone forced open a carriage door on the wrong side of the train and then ran off. We had to fix the door. We’ve done so now and we’ll leave very shortly. Thanks for your patience.” A guy behind me said “he’s lying”. I asked why he thought that and he replied he’d been on Twitter and “someone” had tweeted that a person had opened the door on the “right side” and run off down the platform. “So there you are. The driver is a liar”. Let me get this straight. The driver (who also wanted to get home) told his story - credentials? A trained, experienced employee into whose hands we’d trusted our lives. But he was worsted by someone we don’t know and can’t see yet whose credibility is he tweets and claims to be an eye-witness. Imagine if Twitter had existed when Kennedy was shot or when Princess Diana’s car crashed. Caroline Flint MP said recently that she “lived on Twitter.” Why would you? What makes Twitter better than real people and real conversation? In a week where Dianne Abbott was incautious and nearly lost her job by tweeting with a “racial bias”….what a palaver that was….and in which Ed Miliband who on Twitter (a bit like a mini-Tesco at present because Ed can’t put a foot right) described the late Bob Holness’ show as “Blackbusters” we need to examine what this medium is doing to us all. Ed says he’s on it to show people the “real Ed”. The trouble is it makes him look a bit boring, trivial and self-obsessed. It would be far better for him to spend the time on his presentational skills instead. We live in a strange world where the use of e-mail is rapidly reducing, where I’ve seen it claimed that “no-one reads anymore” and where Waterstone’s (for whom such an assertion is bad news) changes its name to Waterstones because “in a digital world of URLs and e-mail addresses, a more versatile and practical spelling (is needed)” … viz. no apostrophe.

In fact it’s, anyway, a long hard word which could be better abbreviated to WastoBosto – ie. Waterstone’s Book Stores. I must tweet someone about that and say James Daunt (CEO) is seriously thinking of doing this. After all, everyone would believe me, the tweeter, and not him, the man in charge, and his denials.

HOW SOCIAL IS OUR MEDIA?

A really bright creative called Scott Leonard said to me last week – “let’s not talk about social media let’s talk about how unsocial old media used to be”.

To be sure letters to the Times and Any Answers were about as interactive as it used to be and I recall sitting irritably in a Greek Harbour waiting for the ferry to arrive with the Sunday Times. I’d have killed to have got the last copy. To read it, by myself, like a news addict.

Although now Mr Murdoch seems have finally proved how anti-social old media could be.
But why can’t I get more worked up by Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin?

I think it’s to do with their content.

Most of the stuff on them barely raises itself above the level of “OMG don’t you hate Sundays. Groan!”

And imagining you can sell stuff on Facebook seems naïve. It’s a place to chat not to do transactions and having big brother brands next you pretending to be cool is absurd.

But as the riots and the Arab Spring have shown, social media is an efficient way of managing the expectations and movements of crowds.

When it comes to ideas, though, something else is needed – Dave Trott provides that in his blogs with  genuine “I hadn’t thought about it – whatever it is – quite like that” insights. Ken Robinson and Matt Ridley do it on TED.

And TED and its mission to spread interesting ideas that seems to change our world.

It’s when you can pick away at and disagree with someone that something interesting happens.
What is happening, I imagine to the distaste of most politicians, is a lot more people are starting to think and the old fashioned art of conversation has started to be revived.

I like neither the word “social” nor the word “media” very much – if only we could describe the phenomenon as “community conversations” I might be less grumpy.

Because that is really interesting – the idea of groups of people spreading ideas and thinking about stuff that really matters.

The megaphone is redundant. Welcome back the village pump and the oral tradition. Welcome back storytelling.

Welcome back discussion.

SETTLING DOWN WITH A GOOD BOOK

And before we go on further can I say I am obviously unable to comment on those allegations in Twitter that I have served a superinjunction so can we move on please?

I love books. We even have a small but beautifully fitted out 2500 book library at home. I spend more money on books than anything else. Barely an evening passes without me buying a book on Amazon and barely a week passes that I don’t go into Waterstones and come out of it  grumpy. And yet I used to love the place.
And today, Saturday, I see the Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut has bought it from HMV (no surprise that…it’s been well trailed for ages) and put in James Daunt to run it (huge surprise that.) Daunts Books (there are seven branches but I only know the one in Marylebone High Street) is the delicatessen, the very Dean and Deluca of books. I always find books in there that I’ve never heard of but desperately want to read, books that I feel I really need.

Will James succeed with big W – the place that has become the shame of the High Street…the place where a friend was told a recent publication was not in stock and given the friendly advice by their staff “why don’t you try a real bookshop mate, like Foyles?”

The omens are not good. Book sales were down by 3% or so last year. Luke Johnson, owner of failed Borders and Books etc said book retailing was finished and his involvement had been a stupid error. Amazon say e-books now outsell paper books. Barnes and Noble are being kept alive by their e-commerce division the Nook and are currently considering a $1 billion bid by Liberty Media, the QVC shopping channel people.
And yet…and yet. Shops that sell great brands and give great service thrive. Farmers Markets burgeon. Organic and quality food blooms. New restaurants keep on opening. Literary Festivals flourish. And nothing beats a comfortable chair, good light, a glass of wine and the feel of a real book, the smell of fresh print and beautiful paper, the clunk of a hard cover and that certainty that it’s all there in your hands, typeset in Dutch 801 by MacGuru and printed by Clays in Bungay, Suffolk.

Our Kindle gathers dust from neglect. Our library just gathers dust, the dust of knowledge and turned pages, that fragrant dust of words.

I love books. I need books. Good luck James. Turn back the pages.

HOW TO JUDGE THE POWER OF ADVERTISING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

When I was in advertising the word on the street meant more to most of us than Millward Brown tracking studies did because the loudest word was the word of our knowing and, hopefully, envious peers. Now the word on the street includes everyone.  All the punters out there are our colleagues too.

Twitter and You Tube have instantly changed the game. Now everyone’s point of view counts and is counted. No event or conference is a proper conference without a constant Twitter flow. Ditto advertising campaigns...instant judgements are made.

What’s interesting is that these qualitative reactions are being weighed more carefully than the more ponderous quantitative stuff. Welcome back to the real world…and I’d feared the researchers had hijacked advertising. Here’s what the guys in the business are saying:-

"The dialogue around Super Bowl ads has changed--it literally used to happen at the water cooler, and now, the minute an amazing ad hits, the Twitter world goes crazy," says Tor Myhren, chief creative officer of Grey New York. "I personally believe the YouTube view count is the single most important factor in judging the success of a Super Bowl ad."

"It used to be that you'd watch the Super Bowl spots played on TV and in the news right after," says Jill Beraud, chief marketing officer of PepsiCo, which monitors chatter on Facebook and Twitter to measure an ad's success. "Now, the longevity of these Super Bowl spots is endless between YouTube and all the digital tools that are available."

Jason Peterson, chief creative officer at Euro RSCG's Chicago office, believes a Super Bowl hit is more than just YouTube views or Twitter tweets. The most successful ads, he says, will not just be watched again online, but be reimagined. In other words, they'll not only go viral--they'll become Internet memes.

"The next level is: How many parodies are you getting? How many people are getting off their asses, getting video cameras, and actually interacting with the work you put out there? Parodies, to me, are the biggest gauge of whether an advertisement is relevant with the market."

Interactive, engagement and really getting into it…this new world of marketing is getting more emotional and it works.

THE NEW WORLD OF BRAND VALUES

I’ve been spending time recently thinking about the brands of the future and what they’ll look like. This has been helped by a recent survey.

The Times of October 15th published the Populus/YouGov list of the most influential brands. I’ve compared 2007 and today to see what’s changed in the “top ten”.

2010	2007
Apple	Google
Google	Apple
John Lewis	Tesco
Amazon	John Lewis
Facebook	Microsoft
Microsoft	Virgin
Innocent	M&S
Co-op Group	Goldman Sachs
Co-op Bank	McKinsey
Twitter	BSkyB

In 2007 we were in the Vienna days of those good times before the economic war, so the reputational demise of Goldman Sachs and McKinsey since then isn’t so surprising. Virgin, M&S and Tesco are perhaps punished for their failure to keep up with the way people see the times and Microsoft and Tesco, I suspect, for being so big and bullying. But apart from John Lewis and the Co-op the “go-go” brands are young, all post war creations. Ten years ago half of them would have been establishment brands like Coca-Cola, Cadbury and Ford.

The big news is from the “we stand for an attitude to life and employees – employees always coming first” – John Lewis and the Co-op. Look at the Innocent website and you’ll see that they live in this same world of celebrating its employee/partners and its ethics (yes – good for them – they actually use that word).

The somewhat unworldly Co-op evoking as it has done a patronisingly sniffy “room-for-improvement” response from many marketers proves the power of staying true to principles and putting substance before style.

So welcome to real and sustainable brand values if you want to be taken seriously and maybe great product values too.