The Chinese papers were full of Google finally deciding to pull out. A difficult decision, and one with considerable long term consequences – what are the costs to Google of not being in such a vast and rapidly growing economy? So imagine my delight when last week, just off one of the main streets in Beijing, I came across this. A passenger bus, with Google advertising livery on the side, broken down at the side of the road, with the engine cover open to the world.

Initially I thought it was simply an accidental but perfect metaphor: Yes, the Chinese Google Bus has indeed broken down. No, it isn’t going to carry the Chinese people to new places any more. And, yes, the trouble is indeed that someone has been forcing Google to open up the engine and mess around with the innards – well, you can see that could just go on and on unpacking this thing. My Chinese tour guide had been keen to impress on me that in China everything had secondary and tertiary meanings, and here was a wonderful example from the 21st Century, rather than the Ming Tombs. ‘The Chinese Google bus has broken down: Discuss. ‘

And then I idly wondered something else.

What if this was not just an accident – what if it was a brilliant piece of communication instead? A profound statement by Google themselves on the relationship between their company and China?
What, in fact, if this created a whole new kind of media opportunity, one that was about representation rather than communication, and where that representation was about the health of the relationship between the brand and its constituencies?

Ridiculous, at one level.

Except that other people are already creating such representations for us. Angry shareholders, for example, are very good at doing it. Here are Lloyd’s TSB shareholders complaining about the decline in the company’s size over 2009.

They paraded the Lloyd’s TSB symbol, the black horse, outside the 2009 shareholder meeting, alongside a black Shetland pony – to represent the size the company had shrunk to following some (in their view) questionable decisions within a turbulent economy.

I am not seriously suggesting that we create ‘an angry shareholder’s view of our company’ for ourselves, and constantly flagellate ourselves with it. But there is another sense in which we could all benefit from a Google Bus or a black Shetland pony in our Reception. Every challenger company needs to be constantly aware of its central challenge, the Big Fish that we all have to eat, or it will eat us first. Not necessarily the Big Fish in terms of the competition (though it could be), but perhaps the key consumer issue or internal issue that we have to overcome to succeed. What if we were to create a single physical representation of that, and put it in Reception? Make ourselves walk past it every day? Perhaps that would help our collective focus, in everybody, everyday.

But I am not ruling out the Google bus as being a piece of brilliant media placement, mind you. It’s too good not to be. Someone should enter it for an award and see what happens.