So I guess that's not the wine cellar, then....

Just as a writer bears ultimate responsibility for being understood, “If you’re a place, it’s up to you to present yourself legibly,” to make sure people can get your story.

This is some of the advice I give in a casual but insightful essay that Thinkingplace have published in their quarterly. I use examples from my work in East Timor and Northern Ireland. The piece was inspired by something I saw on a jog around Vilnius last year — something which was there but wasn’t there (you’ll have to read my tale to find out what I’m talking about).

I called the article The Seen an the Unseen. The title is an homage to my favourite 19th century economist Fredric Bastiat, who wrote an unbelievably brilliant polemic of the same name which you should stop everything and read immediately even before you read my article (or at least, certainly, before you vote in the next election).

PS The idea of legibility in place branding is immensely pragmatic. I’ve loved it since I laid eyes on it six years ago via the Bristol Legible City project.

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.

Something to be said for stick-to-it-ness: Jamaica still uses the same typography, and seems to follow the same rules, as it did 45 years ago.

My copy of Ogilvy on Advertising sits on a shelf miles from here. I wanted to re-read the section on advertising tourism for Jamaica, as that might be the closest this genius of promotion came to weighing in on nation branding. I found, however, a student’s book report which summarizes Ogilvy’s tips on tourism advertising: “Ogilvy then addresses how to advertise foreign travel. A classical campaign in travel advertising is Doyle Dane Bernbach’s (DDB) Jamaica campaign [from 1960s]. When Ogilvy started an ad campaign for Britain, it was the fifth most visited European country by the time he wrote this book it was first.”

About the communications side of nation branding, David Ogilvy says:

1. Advertising for countries should be designed to plant a long term image in the reader’s mind.
2. Choose to illustrate things that are unique to the country concerned and not something people can do at home.
3. The job of the advertising is to convert people’s dreams about visiting foreign countries into action; this is best done by combining “mouth-watering photographs with specific how-to-do-it information” (Ogilvy 133).
4. Whenever the advertising is for a little known country, it is important to give the people a lot of information in the advertisement such as the weather, language, food, etc.
5. Charm and differentiation work well in tourism advertising.

Everybody, please take particular note of 1, 4 and 5 on that list.

Now, a final, and separate, point about these particular Jamaica ads, I want to draw your attention to the original campaign. The only example of it I could find online is at the AIGA archives. It’s a grainy black and white full-page magazine ad from 1964 that shows a photo of the Blue Mountain Inn followed by an evocative long-copy story:

Under cover of darkness, the town’s lonely bachelors climbed to this secluded inn on Blue Mountain. And it wasn’t for dinner.

Blue Mountain Inn has led a wicked, wicked life. For years, she was the queen of Kingston’s bordellos.

Can you imagine a more beautiful location? A thousand feet up a mist-touched mountain, on the banks of a crystal stream, with its own waterfalls and surrounded by giant tree ferns, climbing vines, flaming wild flowers and gorgeously plumed tropical birds.

No wonder there were mumblings of discontent among certain segments of the population when the lady was rehabilitated into an elegant inn. (Even though she’s reformed, she’s lost none of her appeal. Jamaicans still climb there. But, now, for dinner.)

In this once-scandalous stone great house, you can now order Chateaubriand and Mouton Rothschild, ’47. These days, a plump bed costs you $10, including breakfast. On another mountain, four miles from Kingston, is Casa Monte, of a style best described as neo-Italian-Jamaican. $6.50 buys you a room with a view so fantastic, visitors have been known to cap their bottles of Jamaican rum—just so they wouldn’t miss anything.

At the other extreme of the island is a hotel room (if you can call something that’s 50’ X 35’ a “room”) that’s at the other extreme of price. It’s the Honeymoon Suite at the Jamaica Inn in Ocho Rios, $100 a day for two, including your own private outdoor swimming pool. At that price, you may want to leave here under cover of darkness.

For more information about formerly wicked inns, $6.50 views and $100 a day suites, see your travel agent or Jamaica Tourist Board, Dept. IA, 630 Fifth Ave., N.Y.C.

Now, my question is, why don’t more advertisements tell real stories like this? My suspicion is it’s because writing a good story requires, among other things, massive selectivity — a knack for including the telling detail, the discipline to eschew the arguably attractive but contextually irrelevant “And what’s more…”, and the guts to leave in certain bits which whilst factually unimportant (“Do we have to say it was once a bordello?” I hear the modern-day marketing director ask) are narratively or tonally vital.

People as individuals are bad enough at all that; committees and ’steering groups’ are hopeless.

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.

What I want you to notice is how it manages to be: 1) real; 2) helpful; 3) humourous but not jokey (good, since Innocent’s cornered the market in ha-ha quips). It conveys, “Yeah, okay, this is a computer talking to you, obviously, but behind that computer are real people who are competent and caring. And whom you can get a hold if you really need to.” Compare and contrast with the typical: DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE bla bla bla, and the brand value of taking this higher — and not any harder — road becomes crystal clear.

Hello,

It’s Little MOO again. I thought you’d like to know, the following items from your order are now in the mail:

1 x MiniCards (100)

You requested Royal Mail delivery, which means it should reach you between 1 and 2 business days.

Remember, I’m just a bit of software, so if you have any questions regarding your order, the best place to start is with our Frequently Asked Questions. We keep the answers here:

http://www.moo.com/help/

If you’re still not sure, contact customer services, (who are real people) at:

https://secure.moo.com/service/

Thanks for ordering with MOO – we hope you love your order,

Thanks,
Little MOO, Print Robot

MOO
“We love to print”

Swedish Lapland's new beta site

1) This mockumentary satire ad for the ski resort of Åre should make you laugh. A representative of Visit Sweden showed it as part of her presentation to the Swedish Lapland Tourismforum, at which I spoke also. I’d seen it before, but it reminded me that humour — unforced, of course, as a natural expression of one facet of a culture — is, well, funny.

2) Lars Huring, web maven of Luleå-based creative agency Vinter, had us all in stitches gathered round his MacBook Pro watching this two-part segment — “The Stockholm Syndrome” — from America’s incomparable Daily Show. Taxes are too high here for my taste. But the fact remains, educated Swedes (the ones paying most of the tax) all speak excellent English, meaning there are two countries in the EU (Ireland and Britain) they could move to next week and get a job, plus 24 additional EU countries where they are legally entitled to wodrk and reside. If they remain here, and the country’s tax base isn’t shrinking unsustainably, then the Swedish system’s either satisfying them or, as is the premise of this comedy sketch, brainwashing them.

3) On a related point, reading Monocle in a Stockholm cafe today (a pretty damn Moncole thing to do, think of it), I was struck by this, from the PM of Bhutan:

[Gross National Happiness] is based on the theory that since happiness is the ultimate desire of every human being, it is the responsibility of the policy-makers to create conditions whereby citizens can pursue happiness. Happiness is a state that one is able to attain when equilibrium is achieved between the body’s material needs and the mind’s emotional and psychological needs.

According to the never-wrong Wikipedia, the GNH incorporates seven measures of wellness: economic, environmental, physical, mental, workplace, social and political.

I don’t know a thing about Bhutan or how happy its people really are (I’m a little sceptical; to be happy myself, for instance, I need to travel a lot, and US$1,900 a year, which is Bhutan’s 2008 GDP/capita, wouldn’t cover much airfare). Nonetheless, I like that a politician (Jigmer Yoser Thinley his name is) can articulate this thought like that. Also might be nice if brand owners/managers (of place brands and private brands) would take such a holistic view of their marketing practices and their products.

More surprising to me was the thought — obvious enough when you think about it — that “trial volunteers who got real medication were also subject to placebo effects; the act of taking a pill was itself somehow therapeutic.”

What fascinated me most was this inset box, and what it suggests about design and branding:

What turns a dummy pill into a catalyst for relieving pain, anxiety, depression or the tremors or Parkinson’s disease? The brain’s own healing mechanisms, unleashed by the belief that a phoney medication is the real thing. The most important ingredient in any placebo is the doctor’s bedside manner, but the colour of a tablet can boost the effectiveness even of genuine medications.

Yellow pills make the most effective anti-depressants, like little doses of parmaceutical sunshine.

Red pills seem to contain power and can give you a more stimulating kick.

White tablets — particularly those labelled ‘antacid’ — are superior for soothing ulcers, even when they contain nothing but lactose.

The colour green reduces anxiety, adding more chill to the pill.

More is better. Placebos taken four times a day deliver greater relief than those taken twice daily.

Branding matters. Placebos stamped or packaged with widely recognized trademarks are more effective than ‘generic’ placebos.

In other news, buying branded handbags gives consumers more pleasure than buying generic bags. Anyway, read the original article if you want.

A year ago in a short piece for Moncole magazine, I forecasted a Rio win: “One question the IOC will consider,” I wrote in my submitted draft, “is what will the Olympics brand do for the host city and what will the host city’s brand do for the Olympics?…Rio holds the DNA of Brazil; and Brazil is the great hope of Latin America. And can you imagine a more endearingly colourful games after the explosive regimentation of Beijing and the jaunty high-mindedness of London? Boy,” I gushed, “does this one make sense.”

For its part, Chicago seemed to take itself definitively out of the running only during the final IOC deliberations when its champions, including President Obama and his wife, played too much to type. Here’s Monocle’s Tryler Brule (“All down to the Rio brand?“) on how Chicago’s team showed its Yanks-will-be-Yanks daft side:

From the moment Air Force One touched down at Copenhagen Airport, Kastrup, the Chicago bid team was doomed, [not by] the swagger that comes with a 747 thundering into a tiny Nordic capital…but [by the] over-rehearsed, stiff, slightly smug and overly corporate presentations…. Chicago’s bid might have been technically up to scratch but [when] Mayor Daley got up and pitched his town like he was wooing another Boeing to move its HQ there, he lost Europe. When Doug Arnot butchered the French language, he lost the Francophone bloc. And whoever allowed the Obamas to serve up such helpings of cheese so early in the day should be sacked. Michelle Obama’s overly personal story was disjointed and her husband just looked annoyed that he had to address such a small audience.

(“Helpings of cheese.” Ouch.)

Yes, it’s official: Barack Obama, however conciliatory and charistmatic he is as a world leader, is still capable of being humstrung by, and making his own contributions to, the dark elements of Brand America: earnestness, unctuousness, entitlement, etc. I might even take comfort in this realization, if it weren’t so damned disappointing. (Really, he never should have gone to Copenhagen. The New Republic was right about this.)

So, congrats to the cariocas. My friend Flavio Azevedo, who was a consultant to the Rio 2016 project, emailed me two days before the announcement: “If we win, I will pay you a bucket of caipirinha in Ipanema beach.” Flavio, you’re on!

I want to emphasize the word “evoke”.

Whenever you’re creating a tourist attraction, the key word, it seems to me, is evoke. You want to be evoking. A lot. The more evoking the better. Can you evoke too much, can you go overboard with a surfeit of evocativeness? I frankly doubt it, but let me know if you disagree, or if you can think of an example of a place that’s too evocative for its own good.

It’s easier to evoke if you’ve got ‘the place where it actually happened’. I wrote about this, in the case of Memphis and the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was murdered, in an earlier post. And I wrote about the Cabinet War Rooms in London for The Wall Street Journal back a few years ago when they opened up the new, adjacent Churchill Museum:

On display here are numerous bits of classic Churchilliana: among them, the well-chomped, half-consumed cigars (the image-conscious Churchill, understand, would never smoke a stogie to an unflattering nub) and the polka-dot bowtie famous from the 1941 portrait by photographer Yosuf Karsh (which, somehow disappointingly, turns out to have been a clip-on).

The full article continues here.

Victor Niederhoffer

Value created | Ballyhoo deflated | Damsels rescued

I was thinking of this because my friend Rhymer Rigby, knowing I’m an ‘identity guy,’ talked to me whilst researching a piece he wrote for the Financial Times. His article is about how people use business cards to represent themselves. My quoted contribution is meager –

“It’s an opportunity to be expressive and wear your thoughtfulness on your sleeve, and most of the time it’s a missed opportunity,” says Mr Hildreth.

– and I’d like to expand on my thoughts here.

By thoughtfulness I mean, for instance, leaving off the fax machine number. When was the last time you received a fax, or sent one? Yet, when was the last time you tried to ring someone up, got an earful of carrier tone, and realized you dialed the fax number by mistake?

Exactly.

My business card has the following information: name, email address, website URL, mobile phone number, and the three social networks I use most avidly. There’s some personality in the form of my doodles (which I’d been attempting, I think rather unsuccessfully, to incorporate into my corporate identity). I have found oftentimes I give somebody a card and a couple of days later he or she connects to me on LinkedIn or Facebook. The system seems to work.

The same rule applies to business cards, I suppose, as applies to good writing or good conversation: leave out the boring parts.

Postscript: Cheers to Wayne Elise for Tweeting about this post (and for partially inspiring it in some conversations we had last weekend). I could mention that Wayne — who probably doesn’t have actual printed business cards — identifies himself in his email signoff as ‘head honcho’ at Charisma Arts. I find this wonderful. It says exactly what his role is and communicates something of who he his as a person; it also suggests (i.e., communicates indirectly) far more about the company itself than would ‘CEO’ or ‘Founder’ or ‘President’, all of which would be equally descriptively accurate but far less evocative of the kind of outfit Charisma Arts is. Wayne’s title shows, furthermore, how personality can coincide with clarity and amplify it; one wouldn’t be perfectly sure what the ‘President’ did or didn’t do (or even whether her or she was a sole proprietor putting on airs), but if you’re talking to the ‘head honcho’ then you’ll probably guess the score pretty accurately: small and/or informal company closely run by one characterful individual.