Posts Tagged ‘brands’

I’m taking part in a couple of debates in the next few days. First up is Risky Business: Risk and Reputation, an early morning debate on the nature of risk, this Thursday, February 11th, at the Cass Business School. Given the year just gone and the way the financial crisis has played out, it should be an interesting and possibly heated debate Read the rest of this entry »

Over the years, my company has worked with a great many heritage brands – from Horlicks to Gordon’s Gin, Hovis, Selfridges, R White’s Lemonade and of course Wispa. I understand, as a consequence, that these sorts of brands – usually on the back of iconic advertising campaigns and careful PR that pushes all the least sickly nostalgia buttons – connect with the public deeply, right in the heart.
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A breakfast meeting with David Blaine last week was a very pleasing and revelatory experience; it’s good to sit and talk with someone who really, really gets true showmanship, spectacle, creativity, word of mouth and viral publicity and who has encountered many of the same things I’ve encountered, even the Russian circus act with a coat of living minks.

Blaine is a great, great grandson of Barnum and has built his persona on the Barnum and Houdini models, always connecting with his audience and constantly astonishing them. Most importantly, he is always sure that they are talking about him. He knows that without promotion something terrible happens. Nothing!

A perfect case in point is the trick he showed me. I didn’t dare ask – it felt too gauche – but Blaine offered. He got me to shuffle a pack of cards and lay out two lines of ten cards, making sure that each one was different. Then he asked me to take ten of them and hold them behind my back. Next, he suggested I look at the remaining cards and mentally pick one. “Not the Ace, it’s too obvious,” he said.

I chose the four of diamonds and told him that I’d chosen. Next, he made a gesture and told me to place the cards I held behind my back on the table. The ten cards I had hidden behind me were now eleven in number and sure enough, the eleventh card was the four of diamonds. I was gob-smacked. I have absolutely no idea how he did it – it seems an impossible trick.

But this is the reaction Blaine is constantly seeking, since he instinctively knows I would go away and talk to several people about the trick and how astonishing it was and, in this way, his reputation would be perpetuated. Now, of course, I am also blogging about it. The chances are that his reputation will spread in ever increasing circles if everyone who is astonished by him does as I have done.

Just as interesting was the revelation that Blaine actively thrived on the people who came and taunted him with food and insults whilst he was attempting to live on only 4.5 litres of water a day in a Plexiglas box above the Thames. “I needed people to react in the way that the did to get through the stunt,” he told me.

Their antipathy during his 44 days of starvation gave him something to prove to the haters and became a media focus for the endurance stunt, guaranteeing it more coverage and even comments from then-President Bush. No wonder he was heard to murmur “I love you all” when he finally completed the stunt.

He is the greatest modern showman / illusionist and will remain popular as long he can maintain the incredibly high creativity, the quality of his unique stunts and continue to amaze and astonish. Celebrities, brands and publicists have a lot to learn from David Blaine.

I was interested to read the latest Bare Feet Studios blog by Roxanne Darling on the need for transparency and new, big, clear thinking in advertising; it chimes in rather neatly with my views on the way PR should work in the coming years.

“This post is part of my desire to both shine light on discrepancies in advertising and to attract people who want to use advertising as a genuine tool to build better customer relationships, products, and long-lasting brands,” she writes.

She is clear-eyed on what has brought about this need for transparency; the internet. She is part of the burgeoning conversation on the web about transparency and empowered users of brands. 

“A powerful global conversation has begun,” she says. “Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

“So we have this rich, conversational internet happening, and the bloom of social media and social networks almost everywhere I turn. There are incredible opportunities for brand-building and even transactional results. Dell has sold over $1 million worth of refurbished computers on Twitter. More than ever people want to tell their friends about the things they love.”

The more this type of conversation can be encouraged the better, I say. It will be interesting to see what comes of it in the coming months, when recession will make it all the more necessary for people to feel they can trust the brands they are being sold and the people who are selling them.

The Independent reported yesterday on the decline in ratings of Richard and Judy since their move to cable and asked me to comment. Here’s an extract of the article, entitled Turning off Richard and Judy.

“They have spent the best part of two decades as Britain’s most unlikely TV power couple. Now it seems the fortunes – and ratings – of the husband-and-wife team are dropping fast, despite once having A-list guests queue to appear with them and a lucrative book club that could make or break an author.

“Since the couple’s move last month from Channel 4 to the cable channel Watch, viewing figures for Richard and Judy’s New Position have slumped disastrously, even by cable channel standards. The prime-time show attracted just 20,000 viewers for one recent broadcast, plummeting from 149,000 for the much-heralded first show at the beginning of October. The average is just 47,000 compared with 2.5 million in their Channel 4 heyday.

“Mark Borkowski, a publicist and PR expert, said: ‘Personality brands occasionally have to be rested and try to create some nostalgia for that person to come back. Some of the best television formats have been those brave enough to cut personalities off in their prime, rather than suffer the ’slings and arrows’ when they’ve stretched for too long.’”

To read the full article, click here.

Johanna Schneller and I were speaking on the Canadian CBC network’s Q arts, culture and entertainment show yesterday, about the ways to maintain a celebrity brand, alongside Suzanne Somers (who is mentioned in The Fame Formula thanks to her association with Jay Bernstein) on how to maintain life as a star brand and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

 The podcast is now available to listen to – if you’d like to hear it, click here.