Brewdog Nottingham – Not terribly keen on Carling or Diageo

You may have seen this little story bubbling under over the last week or so but it says an awful lot to me about brands and their respective behaviours.

In brief, Brewdog were at the British Institute of Innkeeping awards and fully expected to win the title of Bar Operator of the Year. They were on the top table and their name was on the trophy. It was that nailed on.

But when the announcement came, it wasn’t Brewdog, but someone else. They were surprised to say the least and when they saw Brewdog’s name on the trophy, rightly refused to accept it.

The independent judges couldn’t believe it had happened, but what did happen.

Well, it appears that Diageo, wanted any winner but Brewdog, so told the local BII team that if they won, they would withdraw any sponsorship in any BII event for the future. Strong arm tactics to say the least, so they panicked and gave the award elsewhere.

But social media has real power these days and the story came out anyway, but so did all the backlash against Diageo.

So what does it say about these brands?

Diageo, is old school. Flawless, never makes mistakes and wants to control every single element of their brand and who it hangs out with. They rather forgot that you don’t decide how your brand is perceived, your customers do. It shows to me the fear they are facing with craft beers, low run, carefully produced products that are worth paying a premium for.

For Brewdog, it can be nothing but good news. Look what happened when Radio One banned the Sex Pistols. It launched them! So the Punk beer brand is banned by the establishment.

I was in Brewdog Nottingham on Saturday afternoon. It was busy, the beer was good. A victory for Punk.

Thanks to Brewdog shareholder Lisa Harlow for telling me about this story.

Tesco - a brand to trust? Hmm, Not in my opinion.

Tesco as a business isn’t doing badly. It’s profits are still huge, even if they are slightly down on previous quarters in the UK.

But for me, this is masking a much bigger brand problem and that is because nothing they offer is special any more. They don’t make customers feel valued, they don’t surprise or delight us, they just keep chipping away at prices by chipping away at suppliers who have no choice but to chip away at the quality.

We have always believed that the way a brand should behave is to decide a price and then see how good you can make the product for that target price. To me, Tesco look like they are aiming to produce all of their goods as cheaply as possible and not seeing how good they can make them for the money.

This is a short term profit boost that leads to long term decline.

Look at the section with motoring and cycling products. If you are even slightly into either pastime, you will see that what they are selling is utter crap and not cheap either. This is one tiny category in a huge store, but it’s reflection reaches far and wide in perception. If everything in the store is as badly produced and as nasty as this, why would I trust the brand overall?

Unless they up their game, start focusing on quality again and start treating their customers as intelligent individuals who do have a choice, this will be the first of very many profit warnings to come.

Hello I’m an apple. A lovely Bramley Apple.

The nicest apple in the whole wide Veld.

I’m so tired. I just feel horrible and battered and bruised and awful. I haven’t always been like this, so let me tell you a little about my life.

I was born about three months ago in south Africa in a beautiful warm sunny place in a shady orchard with a lovely river running at the bottom of the garden. I was sure my life was going to be idyllic. I remember when I was just a blossom having big plans to be the tastiest apple the world had ever seen.

When I started to sprout, I was sprayed with this nasty chemical stuff. They told me it was to protect me and help me grow, but it just made me smell funny and feel all dirty. After this I went on a bit of a growth spurt and pretty soon was one of the big boys.

And just as I was starting to feel like a leggy teenager all spotty and gangly and a bit too big for my body, this massive machine came and pulled us off the tree and well fell into a huge washing machine. We tumbled about for ages and ages and I thought we were being washed, but when we rolled out, I had this horrid waxy stuff all over my skin. Eeeugh!

I fell onto another big conveyer belt and shot along bashing into my brothers, cousins and loads of apples I’d never even met before. It was very scary. I just wanted to go home to my simple life.

Suddenly we shot into a spinning machine and were all wrapped in a strange blue paper, a bit like toilet roll but harder on my young fresh skin and I was thrown into a box in a little solitary compartment that didn’t quite fit my shape properly that made me really uncomfortable and my bottom ache.

But then it got worse. They started to chill the box down until we were all shivering with cold.

I don’t remember much about the next few months other than it was dark and cold and we rolled about with the movement of the sea and the bumping of some different lorries and trucks. For the whole of this time we were freezing, dark and very lonely. I couldn’t believe my life could get any worse…

…but it did.

We were thrust into the light feeling travel sick and awful and thrown onto a shelf ready for the lovely humans to come and eat us.

But back to the present day, you’ve seen what I’ve been through and how hard a life I’ve had. My vitamins have gone, I’m waxy, tired and horrible. I’ll never live up to my potential taste. Eat me if you dare, but I bet you wouldn’t swap my life for yours.

The nicest apple in the world

Hello I’m a Bramley apple. I heard about my cousin from South Africa, the poor thing, he has been tortured for his whole life and I look at how I’ve been brought up and feel so sorry for him and the poor people who have to eat him.

I grew up in Southwell, just North of Nottingham. The farmer who looked after me was a lovely man. He let me grow up slowly and nurtured me with natural and healthy food so I grew big and strong and tasty – in my own good time.

I can’t wait for the day when he’ll pick me to be the one for your tea. Believe me I’m ready. Its what I’m trained to do. You see I’m fresh, naturally strong and the kids will just LOVE me.

David and Victoria Beckham in leather for the 1999 Versace party

This weekend was a milestone for brands everywhere. One of the strongest – Brand Beckham – admitted they had made a mistake when they wore their matching leather suits to a Versace party in 1999. According to Vogue David  said “I look back on some stuff and think I can’t believe I actually wore that,” he said. “I have no regrets, though – I knew at the time it was good!”

This may not sound too significant at first glance, but I think it is. I really think it is.

In those days, long ago in the life of brands, when glossy and shiny was the norm over today’s more matt black world, brands needed to be flawless. In 2001, this song by The Ones confirmed it.

So what can we learn?

Well, according to Trendwatching.com, brands now need to show their flaws for their fans to continue to love them. Flawless is no more and brands, flaws and all are where it’s at.

So for me, this move by the Beckham’s only serves to show what a brilliant brand strategy they have been running for years and that it’s an early sign that brands with flaws win.

I’m not sure if I have seen such a seismic shift in brand thinking for years and I think it is so significant a change that it will affect every single brand in the developed world over the coming years.

It’s a big subject, so i’ll be adding more to it soon.

(Thankyou to HolyMoly for the use of the Beckham picture)

But it would appear that they have now made things even worse by going back to the old logo, without the apostrophe.

Now i’m not going to get as pathetic as the Daily Mail with their typically over the top three headlines about it;

Move sparked outrage among customers – Really. That is utter crap. Who cares that much? Perhaps if some of the people who are so outraged by the lack of an apostrophe went into Waterstone’s and bought a book or two from them, they wouldn’t be in this much trouble.
Punctuation experts say it’s ‘grammatically incorrect’ – Yes, it’s a logo, a name of a business, not a piece of work being peer reviewed by academics. Advertising generally has always played a little fast and loose with punctuation. the ‘comma and’ or starting sentences with an ‘And’ debate came from the creative industry.
Twitter users warn the change is another step towards the ‘extinction’ of the apostrophe – Who cares? There are bigger things to worry about.

But the fundamental point is that Waterstone’s still haven’t changed their business and this sadly will do absolutely nothing to halt their slide. I am a very big book fan and consume books by the metre but I buy very little from Waterstone’s. Waterstones or even waterstones.com.

Unless they can engage us again, all the rebrands and debrands in the world will do nothing to stop this lovely old tug boat from sinking.

Firstly the music. Laid back and cool music by the Skatalites and two guys working there with luxuriant facial hair and a total focus on doing a great job.

The Tonsorial Artist - Holt, Norfolk

I had my meagre barnet tidied up by the slightly scary looking Doug, who was great, incredibly knowledgable and he gave me a great cut.

Doug from The Tonsorial Artist - Holt, Norfolk

All this and it was only £11.50 – admittedly more than I pay at my local barbers, but it felt like a real treat.

I love places like this and I would love to get my hands on their brand to do some work with – It would franchise out beautifully and would have people queuing out the door if it was done as well as they have delivered their outlet.. People who are doing great work and clearly differentiating themselves in what must be a quite crowded market.

If you’re ever in Holt, stay at Byfords Posh B&B and get a hair cut by the Tonsorial Artists.

For me, it looked very much like the kick start that many retailers were hoping for. I can genuinely say, that I have not seen HMV as busy as it was on Wednesday this week for some years. It was like Christmas eve in there with people grabbing almost anything with locust like avarice. They did have lots of multi buy offers, (two for £10 etc) but it was buzzing.

Disappointingly for them, the brand new technology section, seemed to be the only area you could bring your cat for a fast look around. It was their CD’s, DVD and overpriced computer games that were doing well. I was a bit peeved to find they had gone back to their policy of a higher price in the store to online, for the one thing I had gone in for.

Traffic in Nottingham was almost at gridlock from around 10.00 until well after 18.00, again a Christmas norm, but unusual, even on a Saturday.

So whilst many were complaining and many were clearly striking, there will have been a very marked positive retail effect, that few probably expected and many, many will welcome.

Maybe its the glimmer of hope the economy needs.

And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how the bailout package works

Thanks to my mate Patrick Chapman for sharing that wisdom with me.

Boots Opticians - Simple eye test app

My eyesight isn’t bad, but it certainly isn’t perfect and it was a Boots Optician that told me that quite recently.

But he also told me something else that was rather important.

He told me that I had critically high blood pressure and referred me to the doctor immediately. Six months later, it’s now back under control and it looks like i’ll be on meds for the rest of my days. Probably a pretty good job they found it then.

But would this app have been able to do the same?

No, but it is set to be on the safe side and does advise you that you need to get their advice if in any doubt at all.

It’s beautifully easy to use and probably one of the most intuitive apps i’ve seen yet (apart from our own obviously – which you can see here)

Does it undermine the expertise of an optician? Probably not.

Does it do the job of an optician? Definitely not.

Is it a fun game to test the oldies amongst you?

Well yes and it does it really rather well.

I’m off to buy some now and then look for some logs to dance around on.