 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | | | | | | |
Mind the Brand One Sunday last October The Observer put out a supplement titled CoolBrands, sponsored by a mysterious body called Superbrands (UK) Ltd that claims to be part of ìan international organisation tasked with identifying best practice in brand managementî. Its principal task on this occasion was the publication of a list of the UK’s Top 20 brands, measured according to their relative qualifications as 1) Stylish, 2) Innovative, 3) Original, 4) Authentic, 5) Desirable, 6) Unique. The Official Top 20 thus arrived at included Tate Modern, listed at no 15 between Rolex and Prada. In the editorial that followed Nicholas Roope, founding partner of something called Poke London that does creative things with corporate images, congratulated beauty brand Aveda on its environmentally cool partnerships with the indigenous communities of the Mardu people of Western Australia, the Yawanawa people of the Western Amazon and the Babassu nut gatherers of North-Eastern Brazil, before acclaiming Tate Modern as ìanother brand that is breaking new ground all the wayî. Nowhere in the three paragraphs that followed did the author feel it necessary to mention what Tate Modern did. It was only by consulting a list on a previous page that the reader discovered it listed as a ‘Visitor Attraction’, a classification lent circumstantial support by a photograph of the Holler helter-skelter. Now that brand recognition is imbibed at the breast with an infant’s first pair of Nike Jordan Down Low Baby Booties, any entity without a brand is a nonentity. Nothing escapes, not even al-Qaida, currently the object of a Whitehall counter-terrorism campaign aiming to ìtaint the al-Qaida brandî through ìmedia engagementsî. It’s war out there. No matter how clandestine, indefinable or airy-fairy an entity may be, it cannot claim immunity from branding. Size is immaterial, too. In branding terms there’s absolutely no difference between a Rolex watch and a conurbation: without brand recognition a city of 1m inhabitants with a 2,000-year history is reduced to a meaningless dot on the map. So branding becomes a priority for city councils on a par with essential services, and more expensive. Pity Bradford, recently judged to have the worst brand and assets in the EU according to a European league table drawn up by the resident expert on ‘place branding’ at another creative consultancy called Saffron. And that was before the Bradford & Bingley debacle. The sad conclusion of Saffron’s study as a whole was that Britain’s regional cities are bottom of the branding league when it comes to competing for tourism, trade and investment. Only London and Edinburgh can hold up their heads in mixed company – Glasgow and Liverpool, despite their pretensions to be capitals of culture, shape up poorly beside Sofia and Krakow, while the hopelessly unbrandminded Leeds and Sheffield lag shamefully behind in the brand development stakes. Saffron’s pundits will presumably have joined their voices to the howls of protest at the destruction in August of Sheffield’s trademark Tinsley towers, whose brand recognition went global with their appearance in The Full Monty and whose passing was loudly lamented by Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and MP for Sheffield Brightside David Blunkett - whom one might have expected to look on the bright side, given Bill and Ben’s planned replacement by a £60m biomass station promising energy for 40,000 homes. But energy pales beside brand recognition, even to the blind. How exactly is ‘place branding’ measured? The criteria used in this study, apparently, were media recognition, conversational value (as measured on the middle-class chattometer) and recognisability from a photograph. Nul points on this last score for Birmingham, then, whose own city council recently failed to notice that a photo of its skyline on a recycling leaflet represented the other Brum in Alabama. Worse, only one recipient of 720,000 copies complained. If the BT Tower can’t brand the Brummie skyline, what can? Next thing you know, nervous council chiefs will be in discussions with creatives about commissioning some officially branded landmark to stop such unfortunate mistakes occurring in future. It’s this sort of nonsense that is driving the mad stampede for regional landmarks whose only future legacy will be pointless pustules like The Public pimpling the skyline of places like West Bromwich. The question we should all be asking, at this time of belt-tightening, is: ‘Is your landmark really necessary?’. Funny how in the rush for regional recognition we seem to have forgotten that many of our cities were perfectly well branded in the 19th century by civic, rather than brand-minded, local benefactors, many of whom built and endowed art galleries that would, in any other country, still rank as national, if not international, visitor attractions. In Britain, though, the chattometer goes dead when any regional gallery opened before last Tuesday is mentioned. No matter how ‘original’, ‘innovative’, ‘authentic’ or ‘unique’ the exhibitions enterprising curators at regional galleries put on, they do not make the grade as ‘stylish’ or ‘desirable’. You’d have thought notching up four out of six ingredients of cool might swing it, but it takes more than that to shift the capital’s cultural couch potatoes off their backsides and onto a cheap saver return to Bradford – yes, Bradford – where the Cartwright Hall is currently hosting a unique exhibition of the thoroughly original and underrepresented Roderic Barrett, offering a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the work of an artist who will not be doing the rounds - like his contemporary Francis Bacon – ad infinitum. It’s not all the public’s fault. How can they possibly get to hear of shows like this, when local authority two-horse marketing departments must compete for media attention with the sleek press machines of the new museums that Poke & co deem stylish and desirable? If local councils diverted some of the resources wasted on misselling their recycling services into promoting cultural initiatives of this sort to the national press, a small step might be taken towards breaking the sclerotic London-centricity of our national culture, not to mention the growing stranglehold of brands. It was interesting that when a press party of us, whistled up to Liverpool first class by the Tate to review the Klimt exhibition, wandered off to the Walker Gallery’s Art in the Age of Steam, many declared it the high point of the day – though most had not known it was on. And it was free. The ignorance and lack of curiosity of the British public about its regional museums is staggering. (Even the Jackdaw thought that Gateshead’s Shipley Art Gallery - which recently staged another unique and fascinating exhibition, 18th Century Blues: Exploring the Melancholy Mind - was in Shipley). We’ll happily watch Andrew Marr arsing about in a chopper expatiating on Britain from the air, but rather than set foot on cultural terra firma north of Hampstead we’ll fly the family to Disneyland Florida. Instead of throwing our own and European money at rebranding cities with new cultural landmarks, why not invest in media campaigns alerting the nation to the value of the assets we already have – assets paid for and delivered in the 19th century when the ‘P’ in ‘PFI’ really meant private? The public money squandered on re-branding, meanwhile, goes straight into the pockets of Saffron, Poke & co with no visible benefit to the rest of us. A pig in lipstick is still a pig, even in a poke. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
Columns | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
| | | | |