The world's most curious man contemplates writing, branding and travelling with an insane degree of nuance.

jeremy@jeremyhildreth.com

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Branding

The backs of things

Steve Jobs gave an interview as part of a Smithsonian oral history project that's one of the greatest things I've ever read, full stop. If you read this (along with the Playboy interview I'm about to mention), and you read between the lines, too, you'll know what Steve Jobs knew.

One of the things Steve Jobs knew was that motive matters. Your motive is what's in your heart and your mind when you're making or doing whatever it is you make or do that people pay you for.

Walter Isaacson, in his Jobs bio, quotes from another equally lengthy and superb interview with Jobs, from 1985, for Playboy. Jobs' recalls what his dad told him about one of the hallmarks of a real craftsman.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

That's a long run-up to my point: I had Steve Jobs on my mind when I visited the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, to see an exhibition on furniture maker Sam Maloof. In The Wall Street Journal article that resulted from my visit, I couldn't help but reference good ol' Steve.

On the surface my article is about Maloof, an American midcentury woodworker-modernist who became a legend in his own time. Beyond that however, it's about integrity and motives and bringing soulfulness to your work. Since it lives outside The Wall Street Journal's pay wall, you can read it for free here.

View related articles: Branding: good examples

Keeping perspective on perspectives

Havana, Cuba: where a Yankee imperialist *is* a Yankee imperialist.

Havana, Cuba: where a Yankee imperialist *is* a Yankee imperialist.

There's a great expression in American English: "Where you stand depends on where you sit."

It means: your point of view is probably highly correlated with what you think your place in the world is.

It's a simple idea, but I have found it extremely powerful to keep it in mind when working on place branding jobs, or doing any kind of corporate identity work that involves getting to know the culture of an organization or a nation. And I've been grateful -- and amused -- whenever I've stumbled across something that makes me realize my perspective is just that: a perspective, not [necessarily] the gospel truth.

Example 1:

Once I wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal about the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, England. When I visited the museum, I found one placard on the wall which put the American Revolution somewhat differently than did my childhood history texts in Southern California:

Colonial rebels: The American War of Independence

By 1765 thirteen very different English-speaking colonies stretched along America's east coast. But, from Georgia in the south to Massachusetts in the north, one thing united them. They disliked Britain imposing taxes on them.

The colonists kept spreading westwards, seizing land and starting wars with the local people. They expected British troops to defend them. But they objected when parliament tried to recover its defence costs by taxing them.

And so on. Not inaccurate -- but certainly framed from an angle alien to the one I grew up accepting as reality.

Example 2:

In Havana, Cuba, the one-time presidential palace now houses the Museum of the Revolution. Outside the museum is the tank which supposedly (but why shouldn't it be so?) Fidel Castro himself drove at the Bay of Pigs invasion. The text is all about Yankee imperialist invaders and heroic rebuffs. So, too, is the placard beside the pieces of Maj. Rudolph Anderson's U-2 plane, which the Cubans managed to shoot down in 1962 just prior to the Cuban missile crisis. To an American it's entertaining to read. Sure, it's propagandistic, but it makes you realize there's another side to the coin.

But my point is simple: I always try to remember that mine isn't the only way of looking at things, and -- possibly even more vitally -- that people's perspectives are always as real and truthful to them as mine is to me.

View related articles: Brand America, Branding: good examples, Branding: places

“No good joke ever survives a committee of six” and other superb insights into the creative process

I envy you who are about to watch this speech for the first time. You're not likely to run across it elsewhere, and it took me some hunting to unearth. God knows why because it's absolutely effing brilliant from start to finish. Phil Collins (not the drummer) was a speechwriter for Tony Blair. He gave this highly entertaining hour-long talk to a London writers' group called 26 on 16 October 2008. In it, he offers not only candid and hilarious behind-the-scenes tales from No. 10 Downing Street (apparently the prime minister liked to work on his speeches "wearing some combination of boxer shorts, Ugg boots and track suit") but also glorious tips and insights that can be extrapolated to the creative process generally ("The moment you know you've matured as a writer is when you delete a great line because it's not relevant."). Humble, eloquent, thoughtful.

Note: some of the best stuff comes in the Q&A, which forms roughly the second half of the video clip.

Annual 26 speech 2008 from Tom Clarkson on Vimeo.

PS Never mind, but at 56:50 of the tape, that's me in the audience winning a DVD with a smart-ass (but correct) answer to the question who said "History will absolve me". I was trying to explain that nobody said it, exactly, because it was Fidel Castro who said it and he said it in Spanish ("La historia me absolverá") in his 4-hour (!) courtroom speech defending himself in the Moncada barracks bombing trial in 1953 . Which I just happened to know because I'm weird.

View related articles: Branding: good examples

Everything I know about place branding

The new issue of the quarterly academic journal Place Branding and Public Diplomacy includes a long article by me. The abstract reads:

Editor Simon Anholt asked Jeremy Hildreth for his ‘ big picture ’ thoughts on the state of the place branding field – where it is, and where it might be going.

This article employs many evocative metaphors to define and describe the benefits and hazards of place branding. The article takes the view that, broadly speaking, successful place branding results when certain mistakes are avoided and certain other challenges are imaginatively and thoughtfully resolved.

The article proposes a generic, narrative meta-model of place branding, which any place may refer to regardless of the present level of development of its product, perception or promotion. Some of the tools of place branding – including graphic design, advertising, marketing communications, architecture and exports – are explored. And mention is made of the innovations and refinements that are needed in the near future, including cross-fertilization of the place branding discipline with insights from such fields as evolutionary science.

The article concludes by likening the current state of place branding to an old map of the world, where the continents have all been discovered and are in the right places but some of the landmasses are misshapen and many are are still marked unexplored.

You're welcome to download the full article for free here, HOWEVER, in order to keep within the bounds of the publisher's [rather hidebound in my view] notion that posting the paper to a public website would discourage people from purchasing an expensive subscription to the journal (whereas I reckon a free sample would spur business, more than likely), to gain access to my lovely paper you'll have to shoot me a quick email and I'll send you the password.

View related articles: Best of, Branding: places

Mark Twain on copywriting (inadvertently)

Just as people often have a tendency to want to blurt out exactly what's on their mind, so do companies seem to want to tell you, in their slogans and straplines, exactly what they want you to know about them, and in the least poetic, least inspiring, most pedestrian language possible. The unfortunate result of this bad habit is a surfeit of boring offical utterances like "The world's local bank" (which at least has an idea in it) or "The simple plumbing solution" (simple and solution are always in extremely heavy rotation; I wish I held shares in those two words!).

The missing ingredient, in a word, is musicality -- just, quite plainly, the way the words sound. Rhythm. Cadence. Tone. Timbre. Vibrato. Phrasing. When it comes to a slogan, these things matter not as much but MORE than the content. They are the forgotten criteria of sloganeering.

In his book You Are The Message, Roger Ailes gives an anecdote about Mark Twain which illustrates my point. Twain, trying to get dressed one morning, pulled out three shirts in a row that were short a button:

Twain flew into a rage, swearing like a stevedore. When he was through, he was startled to see his wife standing at the door, fuming in her own way at his intemperance. Carefully, slowly, and without a trace of emotion, she repeated every obscene word just uttered by her husband....When she was through, she stood impassive and silent, hoping her display would shame Twain. Instead, with a twinkle in his eye, he puffed his cigar and said, "My dear, you have the words, but you don't have the music."

There you go: it's what you say and the way that you say it.

View related articles: Branding: bad examples, Branding: good examples

One great lesson from brand valuation

Something I've just run across has stopped me in my tracks and compelled me to write a quick post about it. If you work with marketing or branding in any way, this idea -- it's kind of a thought experiment, or in NLP terms a "re-frame" -- may interest you, also.

First, two seconds of background.... I'm working this morning on my chapter on measuring and monitoring place brands for the upcoming third edition of Destination Branding. Doing some reading and research for it. I discovered that in the Q4 2005 edition of what was then called the Anholt-GMI Nation Brands Index (which was less than a year old at the time), a company called Brand Finance added "a new and very exciting dimension" to the NBI: a financial valuation of the 32 country brands in the index.

Now, I'm a huge sceptic of brand valuation -- or, to put it more exactly, I'm a vociferous champion of the limits of brand valuation; brand valuation can be useful, but mostly by examining its delta, its change over time (the absolute figures brand valuation comes up with, in the context of place branding at least, I don't trust [speaking of provenance] for a New York minute).

Having said that (as Larry David would say), I love the idea behind the "royalty relief" method Brand Finance uses to perform the valuations:

This approach assumes a country does not own its own brand and calculates how much it would need to pay to license it from a third party. The present value of that stream of (hypothetical) brand contribution payments represents the value of the brand.

Even if the figure arrived at by the valuers has little more validity than a finger in the breeze, "royalty relief" is still a great way to think about your brand -- whether you're a place, a company or an individual person: if somebody else owned your brand, your good name, how much would he or she charge you to rent it?

Or, to turn it around and add action implications, if you owned your brand (as you, in point of fact, probably do), and wanted to rent it out, will what your doing right now, today, this week, this month, mean you can charge higher rent for your brand in the future?

Follow up: As if to confirm my point about the delta being the thing, Simon Anholt's just written a piece for Foreign Policy about how Obama raised America's brand value by $2 trillion.

View related articles: Brand America, Branding: good examples, Branding: places

Product America vs. Brand America

As I prep for the launch of the new edition of Simon Anholt's and my Brand America: The making, unmaking and re-making of the greatest national image of all time, I've been taking more notice of the signposts of America's future -- both the encouraging ones (e.g., the election of a black president per se) and the dispiriting ones (e.g., the non-fate of the auto industry).

Having lived and worked in Europe for the past seven years, where everything to do with mobile phones is always noticeably better than what's on offer stateside, I was amused by this fake tirade by the Fake Steve Jobs, who describes a phone call in which he berates AT&T head Randall Stephenson for not realizing what a gift the iPhone is (AT&T mentioned offhandedly the other day that they'd like to encourage some people to use the iPhone less on their network, which has the device exclusively, as apparently 3% of the customers are responsible for 40% of the data usage).

Fake Steve Jobs screams down the line at Stephenson, comparing the iPhone to "Meet the Beatles":

Now there was a lot of demand for that record — so much that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz, the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do you think they said that? No, they did not.

About America, Fake Steve Jobs laments:

We were leaders. We were builders. We were engineers. We were the best and brightest. We were the kind of guys who, if they were running the biggest mobile network in the U.S., would say it’s not enough to be the biggest, we also want to be the best, and once they got to be the best, they’d say, How can we get even better? What can we do to be the best in the whole fucking world? What can we do that would blow people’s fucking minds? They wouldn’t have sat around wondering about ways to fuck over people who loved their product.

And now here we are. Right here in your own backyard, an American company creates a brilliant phone, and that company hands it to you, and gives you an exclusive deal to carry it — and all you guys can do is complain about how much people want to use it. You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country.

The whole article is an extremely tightly written piece of satire. Recommended for a hearty, bittersweet laugh.

21 December '09: A few days later the follow-up fake phone call story appeared.

View related articles: Brand America
Travel writing

Yes, sir! (No thanks.)

Is it because I'm from California? This could be the reason I prefer hotel and restaurant service that's casual and friendly rather than obsequious and formal.

A generous client treated me to a suite at the Fasano Las Piedras in Uruguay. I loved almost everything about this uber-posh resort in the hills above Punta del Este. The modernist bungalows, paired with a converted hacienda main building, were a revelation, and I savoured the impressive ensemble from the moment of arrival. I padded barefoot around my flagstone-floored room like it was my fourth home and rode the golf cart to the lodge like I was Hemingway on safari.

But it weirded me out that the help acted like I could have them killed if they displeased me. I found awkward their stiffness and their practiced posturing of pedestalizing my every whim. (Call it false modesty, but I don't feel a request for a little more pepper on my gnocchi requires a ceremony rivalling the changing of the guard.)

So, to my next waiter or bell hop: please, just act like you're a nice, confident person, my equal in every basic way, who happens, at this moment in time and under these circumstances, to be paid to look after me. We'll get along just fine, and if you make me feel like a million bucks, I'll endeavour -- as Michael J. Fox's concierge character put it in "For Love or Money" -- to leave a tip so big it feels like passing a kidney stone.

Deal?

[Click to enlarge above panoramic photo -- my first effort with the wow-inducing and oddly named Dermandar app for iPhone]

View related articles: Travel writing: the fun stuff

Heavenly puffs

I'm loving Mongolia. Yesterday I stood in a stockroom containing US$2 million worth of de-haired cashmere, combed, carded, teased and fluffy. It was taupe, and cream, and bursting the drawstring tops of stagecoach-ready sacks piled ceiling-high. I'd like to think it was destined to be knit into sweaters for gods and demigods. But I know it'll end up, ill-fitting and pilled, on the backs of dolts like you and me who haven't got even 10% of the requisite appreciation for this exceptional fibre, and who (to boot) are morally unworthy to possess such a precious, rare and laboriously-had commodity.

Okay, maybe I'm taking my job too seriously. But they're paying me to make a big deal out of cashmere. That's my reason for being here. So I'm practicing.

View related articles: Travel writing: the fun stuff

Yo ho, a bi-continental life for me

San Salvador, Bahamas, a sandy coral cay that would meet the specs for Desert Island Discs, was the first land Chris Columbus sighted in the New World, on October 12, 1492. “I believe Japan is only a short distance to the west,” he wrote in his logbook. (Really.)

Some 189,000 days later, I awoke at San Salvador myself, 200 yards off the beach in the anchored 55-foot sloop Far Niente, which belongs to my best friend from university, Chris Robbins. It was the Fourth of July, and for two reasons, I greeted the day with a feeling of disorientation not unlike Columbus’s.

Firstly, it was a strange place to be on American Independence Day. The Bahamas are Commonwealth islands first settled by loyalists who fled the American colonies at the time of the 1776 revolution. Read full story »

View related articles: Travel writing: the fun stuff

Taking the waters: special places and the power of suggestion

20110805-041501.jpg

There *is* something about old spa towns. Maybe it's just the exaggerated power of suggestion induced by knowing that generations and legions of people have been drawn from far and wide to a particular place to have a particular experience.

Druskininkai is in southeastern Lithuania, near the borders with Poland and Belarus, and people get here in cars and buses from all three countries.

In Soviet times, there was a full-service aqua health park in Druskininkai. I'm standing in front of the mosaic mural at the entrance to it in the nearby photograph. Now the park is dilapidated but I like walking its grounds. I imagine buying it and bringing it back to life -- which would be a very health-spa thing to do, really.

I picture Druskininkai in its mid-20th century prime, filled with workers on holiday "trying to cram lost years into five or six days," in Jimmy Buffett terms -- a Commie ROAD TO WELLVILLE, as it were, animated by a Soviet pseudoscience every bit as hopeful and hopeless as Kellogg's Michegonian variety.

I get it, though. Whatever side of the Iron Curtain you're on, we all want to live forever.

View related articles: Travel writing: the fun stuff

Wandering enhanced: this is how I’m gonna roll from now on

20110721-113925.jpg

Warsaw, Poland -- I'm just capping off a 5-day solo ramble (more accelerated than an amble, you see) to Ukraine and Poland. I travelled with only a daypack and an iPhone 4, and it was the freest I've felt on the road in years. This is in spite of a tight schedule and a lot of ground to cover. Here are my lessons, plus a few key app recommendations.

But first, a paragraph of background. My ancestors on my mother's side are from somewhere near Lviv, in present-day Ukraine. I've been curious about the place for years, especially since visiting Kyiv last December to speak at a conference where the director of tourism for Lviv presented some beautiful slides of his city. I decided to use Lviv as destination one of a mini-Eastern European odyssey.

I started the trip in Vilnius, Lithuania, where I'm based for the summer. Read full story »

View related articles: Travel writing: the fun stuff

Distorted London: straightened out at last?

The Tube as it really is. "Wow," right?

The London Tube "Map" (which is really a diagram, because of its gross geographic inaccuracies) is beloved. Even the normally hyper-rational Edward Tufte seems to approve of it.

But I've always hated the damned thing, and seethed with resentment at the distorted view of London that's been forced on me (and others) by its ubiquity. I understand that it's elegant--using only horizontal, vertical and 45-degree lines--but it so obscures the true street-level layout of Europe's largest city (as well as the transit time between lines at certain stations) that, according to one NYU researcher, the famous map (read: loathsome diagram) can cause 30% of all travellers to take a longer route than necessary.

Having lived in London for eight years, how many hundreds of times have I been one of these travellers? How many hours have I lost thanks to this lovely piece of iconic design (read: overhyped purveyor of misinformation)?

Fresh off the boat to London, I lived in Earl's Court, on the Piccadilly Line. The Piccadilly Line opened in 1906, so I was able to use the 1924 edition of the London Underground map, which I printed in colour and carried with me. However, too much of the rail system was built after 1924 to make this eccentricity of mine sustainable. Reluctantly, I went back to the ubiquitous diagram.

Now, someone named Mark Noad has created an accurate Tube map. The Economist has written about it. I hope it catches on. I have downloaded the PDF to my phone and I'll see if using it, instead of Mr. Beck's fatally flawed legend, improves my public transport experience of London whenever I deign to take the Tube (like most Londoners, I prefer travelling by bus or foot).

View related articles: Travel writing: the fun stuff

New destination

The WhereBrands place branding blog is the new soapbox for my strong opinions and invaluable wisdom about place-related marketing.

You’ve found me!

Not always easy. As an international brand copywriter, Wall Street Journal arts page contributor and near-nomad, the road is my home.

The constant stimulation of an ever-changing confluence of people, place and moment has shown itself to be the ideal salve for my painful curiosity about this astounding phenomenon we call human conscious life.

So I travel.

Meanwhile, I tell my stories and I help others tell theirs, doing my bit make the world safe for good writing and good marketing. I've had an eventful career so far (read the full "about me" stuff here; for better or worse, it's almost all true).

At present, I am creative director of WhereBrands, a company I founded to coach cities, countries and companies on how to make the most of [a] place. WhereBrands' site is devoted wholly to place-related marketing, branding and communications, as is the WhereBrands place branding blog.

The rest of my brilliant insights about marketing, writing and travelling you'll find right here (along with the lousy ones). I encourage you to leave comments, or, if you feel yourself a kindred spirit, drop me a line; I'm always glad to hear from clever, exotic people like you.

Speaking on YouTube

Speaking on YouTube

A string of funny and insightful anecdotes about the way countries regard (or loathe) themselves, and how that affects outsiders' perceptions (clip: 2 mins).

In the news: Branding the hard way

In the news: Branding the hard way

Jeremy tells CNN/Fortune that Estonia getting the Euro is an 'unfakeable' positive signal for the country. "It's something that they've earned from scratch."

In the news: Jeremy’s new book is out

In the news: My new book is out

Brand America (2nd edition): the making, unmaking and remaking of the greatest national image of all time. Co-authored with Simon Anholt.

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