One of nine newly designed "Dove" A319 planes. Photograph: Geoff Lee/British Airways

Yesterday British Airways and artist Tracey Emin unveiled the first of a set of unique Olympics-inspired plane designs to mark London 2012.

The outside artwork of the nine ‘Dove’ aircraft has been designed by Pascal Anson, from Brighton, who has been mentored by Emin.

The design of the plane, which will be in service for a year, involves using the cockpit for a beak, fuselage and wings for the main body, and the tailfin as a tail. The aircraft will be painted white with gold strokes of paint to represent the feathers.

Painting parts of a British Airways aircraft is nothing new. BA has a history of altering the design of the tailfin and famously upset Margaret Thatcher in 1997 when it redesigned the tailfins without the Union Jack.

It is the first time in their history they have painted the entire aircraft however.

One of the few airlines in the world to consistently paint the entire aircraft is Kulula, the low cost South African airline and subsidiary brand of British Airways.

I wondered firstly, how much of this idea was inspired by their sister brand Kulula originally using their planes in such a way? And secondly to what extent the idea was validated by the success they had had with the idea in the past?

It could all just be coincidence of course, but I’m always interested in this idea of parent brands allowing their subsidiaries to go out and be the Challenger, take risks and experiment, and ultimately validate ideas for their more cautious parent.

One brand who do deliberately use a subsidiary brand to extrapolate learning is O2. You can watch Gav Thompson talking about O2’s relationship with sister brand giffgaff here.

Music: Lazy Soul by Mux Mool. Buy on iTunes here:
itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/mux-mool/id161063179

With thanks to The Kernel Brewery, Neals Yard Dairy and The Woolpack.

However, I learned recently, that Chick-fil-a has issued a ‘cease and desist’ letter to a Vermont Farmer who wants the world to eat more Kale and sells t-shirts with the slogan ‘Eat More Kale’. C-F-A claims that “Eat More…” — whether it’s chicken, kale or anything else — is part of its registered trademark. So they are demanding that the farmer stop using the phrase and shut down his website, www.eatmorekale.com.

Seems like Chick-fil-a lost sight of an important principle should you choose to pick a fight — you need to pick on someone or something BIGGER than you. Otherwise, you’ll just come across as a big, old corporate bully who’s acting more like a conservative market leader rather than the ‘Irreverent Maverick’ Challenger they portray themselves as in their consumer communications.

I think Chick-fil-a needs to rethink this move, before it backfires on them in this new world of social media and advocacy. Just look at the comments out there already, and it’s pretty clear they are picking the wrong fight. Perhaps they should heed the wise words of Wilt Chamberlain, who famously said ‘Nobody roots for Goliath,’ and go back to focusing on their fight with Beef where they look like the underdog David to McDonald’s Goliath.

To learn and read more about this story, AMEX small business wrote a good article describing the scuffle http://www.openforum.com/articles/why-is-a-fast-food-giant-going-after-a-one-man-business?extlink=sm-openforum-tw

Each bottle of Kernel is bottled and labelled by hand. Photograph: A Beer on the Downs

Kernel Brewery was started in 2009 by Evin O’Riordain, a man who had no experience of beer making and learnt all he needed to know about the craft and brewing process by searching on the Internet. “I started making beer at home about two-and-a-half years ago,” he told the Independent. “I taught myself to brew: it’s simple. There’s lots of information on the internet. Some of the information is good, some not so good.”

Prior to founding Kernel he worked for Neal’s Yard Dairy at London’s Borough Market and it’s clear that his knowledge of the methods used to produce and sell cheese heavily influenced his plans to produce and sell beer.

“It was when I went to the US that I realised beer can be different. If you look at the way good cheese is sold now, you know the cow’s name that made the milk, what the weather is like – that’s very important to us. It was only after I went to the States that I realised we could do that with beer.”

Today they produce 5,000 bottles of beer a week and are finding it difficult to keep up with demand whilst still brewing from their small premises under a railway arch in Bermondsey. They are now sold in some of the most fashionable bars and retail outlets across London, including Selfridges, the Michelin-starred Chez Bruce and Shoreditch’s Mason and Taylor and despite their growing reach and scale each and every bottle is still labelled and capped by hand at the brewery.

With no marketing budget or conventional resources, it’s purely word of mouth and online reviews that have propelled the brand to their recent level of popularity and demand.

Looking at the countless blog posts, reviews and write-ups on Kernel beers the first thing I notice is that it’s the quality of the beers themselves and the unusual taste of many of their products that has got people talking.  It was important for Evin that he created beers that stood out and were unlike others ready available.

“There’s a pub I used to go into, but I can’t remember the name of anything I ever drank in there because they all taste pretty much the same. And they’re created to be interchangeable, so that when one runs out you stick another one on. There’s nothing really to grab your attention.”

The branding and packaging is simple, uncluttered and almost utilitarian, enabling it to stand out from the competition in a market where the communication has grown increasingly loud, noisy and personality based. This no frills identity may also form part of a wider cultural backlash against the friendly, chatty, tone popularized by innocent, but subsequently used by banks and fast-food chains in more recent years. They don’t have a polarising POV or want you to ‘pop in for a chat’ they are just driven by a single and practical determination to make great tasting beer.

Kernel is also proving popular with non-traditional beer or ale drinkers. Much like in the US at the moment, the craft of beer making in the UK has become much more popular and people increasingly want to drink beer at home, in restaurants accompanying food, in trendy bars and in many environments other than the traditional pub.  Their audience tends to be younger and more creative than the stereotypical beer drinker and the very fact that they are independent, hand crafted and unable to advertise is often what makes brands such as Kernel appealing to this section of society.

Above and beyond the nice packaging, hand crafted and independent ethos its ultimately the quality of the beer itself and the strength of their product that has got people talking and creating such buzz around the brand. Ultimately, it’s the beer talking.

Sources and further information:

The Guardian – The case for bottled beer

The Independent – Special brew: One of Britain’s most wanted beers is produced by novices under a London railway arch

Protein – Rise of the beer makers

The Kernel Brewery Website

This is a story about some Norwegian pirates.

To be more accurate it is a story about a group of sea faring DIY enthusiasts who liked camping but preferred house building.

So the story goes that a few years back a group of people from mainland Oslo set out on a weekend boat trip around the Fjords stopping to explore each of the islands as they went. Now some of these islands had remained uninhabited (as some still are today) and this group of people took a liking to one of these islands in particular. So as they sat watching the sun set that Sunday afternoon they decided that they would ask the Norwegian authorities if they could build a few weekend houses on this island so that they could visit at the end of a hard week at work.

So on Monday morning once back at their desks these people go through the appropriate channels and write to the appropriate people to find out if their house-building dream is possible. They discover that it is not. They absolutely definitely certainly cannot build any permanent residential structures on this island or any other uninhabited island for a million and one reasons.

But they can camp.

They are allowed to create a campsite on the island as long as they bring only a limited number of tents with them from the mainland each weekend and take them away with them when they leave. The only evidence of the campsite that can remain between visits are the windbreaks that they are allowed to construct in order to protect their tents from the fierce winds – that is as long as these windbreaks are made entirely of the natural materials that are found on the island.

So the very next weekend this pirate gang set sail with their boat and their tents. Being summer the winds aren’t too bad and so they create themselves a small collection of windbreaks made from twine and sticks and straw-stuff reaching 5 foot tall which they leave on the island and erect each time they visit. And for a few weeks this works out ok but every now and then a strong gust of wind huffs and puffs and blows them down.

So they decide to build their defenses with stronger stuff and create a new set of windbreaks from logs that they collect in the forests. And this works out ok too for a little while until a particularly furious wind blows these windbreaks down as well.

And so on their next visit these Pirates go about collecting rocks that happen to be lying about on the beaches and construct windbreaks made from stone and sand. And of course no matter how hard the wind blows these brick and cement walls stand fast against the elements.

Now the only problem that our Pirates face is that the wind tends to blow in many different directions and these now 40 foot stone windbreaks, although definitely not permanent, are pretty hard to maneuver. So they decide to build a number of windbreaks at right angles to each other be sure to protect each individual tent from the North, South, East and Westerly winds. Four adjoining stone windbreaks should do it they think – a bit like the four walls of a conventional house but with a tent in the middle.

Apparently after some time the tents were removed from inside the four stone walls of each of these little houses and nice carved wooden beds presumably replaced the sleeping bags on the floor but no one knows exactly when. It was probably about the same time that the roofs were put on.

Today the owners still stand by the fact that their lovely homes with their permanent looking window boxes are merely a set of very effective windbreaks that can be removed at any time the Government wishes. I guess the Norwegian authorities just don’t have the heart, or maybe they don’t want to mess with these DIY Pirates who have a strange and quiet way of getting what they want? Or maybe it’s something to do with the publicity and revenue generated by this now infamous tourist attraction?

Using the Power of No

One of the Challengers we interviewed for The Pirate Inside said that he used the word no merely as a request for more information. In this case these Pirates used the word no as their inspiration to find a new way of achieving their goal and the information they were given as the means to their end.

If you’re trying to build a metaphorical house within your organisation and the powers that be say no. Don’t just build it anyway. That will piss them off. But don’t give up.
- You might have to break down the jump for them a bit if it’s a big demand that you’re making. So take the time to build in a number of stages to reach your goal.
- If your goal is simply too scary for words help them out by redefining your ambition according to their rules and their language. What is your equivalent to the windbreak?

And of course if you’ve always wanted a seaside retreat but are finding beachfront property prices prohibitive you could try out the windbreak vs. house-on-the-beach approach with your preferred seaside council.

And it is Insight that most Brand Owners feel they are most short of. We can buy creativity, we can outsource innovation, we can hire social media strategists. But Insight remains something that we feel we need to be generating ourselves, at the very centre of everything our company does – and yet for all the money we spend on research, what we find ourselves served up with most of the time are very expensive truths, rather than brand-changing insights. Too much Washington, and precious little Hollywood.

And the reason surely is that we have far too monochromatic a view of what an insight is and where to find it – we tend to use ‘insight’ as a shorthand for ‘consumer insight’: something the consumer says or does that will open up a new possibility for us and our brand. Yet if one looks at brands that have really broken through in their categories, we see that there is a much broader range of sources of insight that we should be drawing on: Insights into why consumers have much stronger relationships with other categories than they do with ours, and what it would mean to bring some of those drivers into our category; Insights into what made the brand successful when it was most successful and what that would mean today; Insights into why our company culture is unique, and what element of that our consumer might find compelling . The kinds of questions, in other words, that we briefly consider in the first couple of weeks in our new job, and then get pushed aside as the heat to deliver this quarter’s results kicks in. Obvious, isn’t it? Yet hardly any of us do it.

So if we want to expand the horizons for our brand, the first thing we need to do is expand our sense of what an insight is. Look for entirely new sources of insight, and give ourselves the time and space to explore them properly.

It’s the only way to get to Hollywood.

This article first appeared in Campaign Asia Pacific in October 2010

Check out Chris’s 3 Bits of Advice for a Challenger over here.

Of course, we never did anything with it. We were just joking, weren’t we? A serious company couldn’t actually launch such a thing. It was only a way of blowing off steam in the middle of some complex strategy. I still love the idea though. And as surely everybody knows by now — though won’t design it into their processes in any systemic way — just joking around can be a really productive time.

Well Chris Lindland, the founder of Betabrand described the birth of his business this way: “it started as a joke”. And though it’s still a small, privately held business (so no sales numbers are disclosed), it has grown double digits every year since it’s birth 5 years ago and Chris has just raised money to fuel the growth of his joke. Betabrand is getting funnier everyday.

The original joke was “hey, what about horizontal cords?” – cords that run around not up and down. That was the birth of Cordarounds (that ultimately became Betabrand) and it was a way for Chris to shoot the shit with his fashionista friends. It became his schtick with them, a joke he repeated a few times before saying, heck I’m just going to go make some, rather than just talking about it. All he needed was $120 to buy material and get a seamstress to sew them up. His friends liked them and this gave him the confidence to make some more, then throw up a website and start selling them. Out of pocket costs for starting the business were really quite low and what could be the harm. As Chris said “I was at that point career-wise where I just wanted to do something funny”.

Lesson 1 from Betabrand: make a prototype as quick and simply as you can and go try to sell it.

Sometimes big business really overcomplicates things with its complex and largely flawed testing methodologies. How much easier and more real to throw up a website and see if anyone responds. Betabrand today, which launches a new product every week is constantly in beta, throwing up prototypes, going with what works.

What really helped Cordarounds catch on was the happy accident that followed the joke. As Chris explains it, the fashion world five years ago — pre Daily Candy etc. — worked around definite seasons of Spring, Fall, Holiday. Most of the big players made three major announcements at the same time each year. He launched, naively, out of season, when there was not much else for the Fashion journalists to write about. One of them got wind of Cordarounds “through a friend of a friend,” thought it was funny, and wrote about it. Cordarounds was written up in the New York Times because it was funny and because it broke the season convention of the industry.

Lesson 2 from Betabrand: Break a convention of timing in your industry to stand out.

One of Chris’s best sellers is a crazy, foil-like pant called the Disco ball pants. As he points out, you couldn’t open a store in San Francisco selling Disco ball pants and stay in business, because although he has found a large audience they are highly geographically dispersed. These pants have shown up everywhere from golf charity events to Burning Man. What unites such a broad group appears to be a ‘show off mindset’ – people who want to get attention. There’s a lot of them out there, just not all in one zip code. Disco ball pants are an internet-only kind of an idea.

Chris says, he’s not really selling pants, he’s selling conversation. “Attention-getting clothes make the party funnier,” he says. “My job is to give people the material for conversation — 50 jokes about horizontal cord pants. It’s 99% fiction and 1% fashion. We don’t do the quality and craftsmanship stuff because people won’t talk about that.”

Is there a better piece of advice for anyone in any business today in our super-saturated markets? If you’re not being talked about you may as well not exist.

Lesson 3: if you think of your business as “99% fiction and 1% _______,” how would it change the way you approach your marketing?

As Chris says, most of the time he approaches design with the questions, “What has editorial value? Will this create conversation? Is this forwardable?” His newsletters have a 45% open rate. Do yours?

Thinking like this lead to the Black Sheep sweater made from the wool of real black sheep, naturally. And to the commuter pants with the reflective pocket linings (genius – check ‘em out).

And there’s more to the success of Betabrand than a bunch of gag clothes. The products are genuinely well made, for instance, so there’s no buyers remorse once you’ve stopped laughing. There’s the fictitious bike gang called the Comanches. And Chris is a very web-savvy marketer, providing you with your own custom URL if you send them a photo of you wearing the gear, for instance — what better way for you to show off to your friends, than appearing as lead model for Betabrand.

But still, the core idea here is the very human insight that people want to share stories. So stop thinking about selling and start thinking about stories.

Final piece of advice: “nobody will read it if you’re just trying to get them to buy”. Think about that for a second. Then go joke around a little and make some money anyway.