The Encounter Business

WE’RE LIKING

BLOGTASTIC

Stories

The multinational

A hotel foyer in Germany. Greetings, cheek kissing..haven’t seen you since, oh, the last brand development workshop. These are the European custodians of a big brand - about twenty people. We’re here to get this brand back on track, people say. Business is okay, but not feeding the beast at the centre. We need a compelling vision, they say. Look at these other brands in the business - they’ve got them. After two days we get there, tripping over each others’ words and agendas, but there are smiles and high fives.

What’s really going on here?
A while ago, during an strategic agonising about the international ‘meaning’ of the Levi’s brand, someone threw a pair of jeans on the table (alas, he, didn’t take his own off, which would have made a far better story) and said ‘There. That’s what I mean.’

These international gatherings are rather like 18th century balls, where subtle displays of courtship and dance are the formal proceedings, while underneath seethe fear, anxiety and dynastic ambition.

There is no ‘right’ answer, except one which is workable, stretchy and true to the source . In this case, the important insights were found by re-expressing the brand’s original purpose - what would it/they want to be doing now?

Rather like the 18th century ball, a good outcome is like a good marriage.
It satisfies the dynastic ambitions of the various parties.

The farmers

The phone rings. ‘We’ve got a apple mountain.’ We love briefs like this. They are so honest. We’ve got a load of stuff and we need to devise some smart ways to sell it, because it’s going off.

There’s no point in being sniffy about this. Yes, there was a certain lack of forward planning; indeed, any planning. Gosh, where did that crop come from? But the outcome was liberating, both for the client and ourselves. We weren’t held breathless by all the usual coporate corsetry. We just had to find three interesting ways to flog apples at a profit. (We found about forty.)

What’s going on here?
I happened to tell the story to a high flying retail banker over a beer. Just like our business, he says, drily. We’ve got a money mountain and it’s going off. As brand consultants we counsel customer based insight and careful planning. Well, if you’ve got the time and resources, that’s fine. And it’s how you should be running things. But we observe that a lot of marketing people aren’t doing that sort of marketing: they’re figuring out what to do with an avalanche of stuff.

The world is impossibly over supplied. Orange juice, software, cash, cars, chips, bytes. Please just take some off our hands. Before it goes off.

Drinks anyone?

Upstairs at the Golden Fleece, in York. Eight good men and true. We talk of life, drinking and Deuchars IPA. Time flows, conversation is easy. There is none of the sense of jerking from one subject to another as you sometimes get in qualitative work. Easy. The banter of men between 40 and 50, wryly coming to terms with the hand that life has dealt them.

What’s really going on here?

Professionally, I live for moments like this. Csikszentmihaly* calls it flow. When the meaning of a subject, brand or market unfolds within the process: lives through the conversation, rather than being jostled out subsequently. The best marketers or customer experience people I know also have this ability. They live through the market, rather than perched above it, trying to put it into Excel. (Although they can spreadsheet jockey with the best of them.)

Deuchars IPA has a simple role in life: to embody quality and ease. A grown up beer, taken in company. There’s a much underused word,commensality, which captures it exactly.
* pronounced chick-sent-me-highee, apparently

Dyson

Dyson I’m sitting outside James Dyson’s office, waiting to be ushered in. The relaxed intensity and chumminess of my visit begins to subside.
This is open plan, but I’m in an ante-chamber. My host gets slightly nervous, managing herself as we approach the appointment time. I’m nervous now. It flicks through my mind that there is a category of organisational story called “Face to Face With God”. I shift in my seat. Dyson’s PA sits at a desk outside the corner suite, a sentinel. The public relations team is the closest workinggroup to his office, and I imagine the burden of being the people most in view of the founder. Probably keeps you on your toes.

(From The Domestic Engineer: How Dyson changed the meaning of cleaning)

What’s going on here?
Frankly, a lot to to with my ambivalent relationship to powerful people. But since most of the people I met in researching the Dyson book had a similar one, then I guess it’s of broader relevance. Ambivalent, I learned from my wife, doesn’t mean neutral. Ambi-valent means swinging from love to hate or fear and back again. The psychoanalysts tell us that that’s the relationship we have with our children, and they with us. We re-enact our own particular version of this when we deal with those who are powerful or somehow celebrated. The little shiver when you realise that’s Emma Thompson in the deli, or Raymond Blanc having a coffee next to you.*

A celebrity CEO is both marvellous and burdensome. Many people in Dyson (or Apple, Virgin) struggle with questions which could roughly be summarised as “What’s James/Steve-or-Jonathan/Richard (Daddy) thinking?” and “What’s James/Steve-or-Jonathan/Richard (Daddy) thinking about me/my project?”. And the answer is you’ll probably never know.

* Marylebone High Street, November.15th 2006. Ask Mike, he was there too.