Some brand lessons from the World Cup

Some brand lessons from the World Cup

Aside from witnessing some remarkable soccer we are also seeing a complex portfolio of brands playing out.

These brands include FIFA, the World Cup, Brazil the host country, South America, the stadium cities, the country team brands and the individual super-stars. We then have the different networks of association such as the official sponsors.

It is as a result of this portfolio of emotionally-charged brands within the soccer category, that we have substantial revenue streams flooding into Brazil, FIFA and the national teams and players. This is perhaps the first lesson: brands cause business. If a brand has no magnetic attraction, and no consistent and expected standard of delivery, fans won’t support, corporates won’t sponsor and without revenue, there can be no profit.

Perhaps the second lesson is that brands are made up of many parts and it is debatable whether the more visible and audible components are even the most important. Perhaps they are indeed, just the tip of an iceberg. Making up this tip then are the iconic country flags, jerseys, the national anthems and merchandise worn by the fan tribes.

The third lesson is that the real substance of a brand is in its purpose, its values, its distinctiveness, its history and stories. Ultimately a brand is about its expected behaviour and performance.

As Shakespeare suggested, life is but a stage and we all have our entrances and exits (Spain). On stage we are required to give a compelling performance and every actor must know their part. In a great production there is a brilliant theatre director / conductor and some star actors. If the performance clicks, and goes per the script, there is a standing ovation.

We have witnessed remarkable brand leadership and management in some of the teams like Germany. On the other end of the spectrum, we have seen dysfunctional brand behaviour and an absence of disciplined performance. The best example of this, must be in the 4 - 0 loss by Cameroon when playing Croatia. Aside from the red card for punching an opponent, Cameroon team mates got into a brawl and had to be separated from a punch up and head-butt. Maybe the most important lesson for a great brand is how its team behaves when servicing consumers.

The question is whether the delivered service aligns with the expected traditions and meets the expectation of its consumers or fans. Is the performance even adding something innovative and distinctive which then provides a memorable WOW factor? This is what great brands do.

Finally, all decent brands should have some sense of class and behave within the rules and norms of the game category. We have seen this displayed by some teams who played their heart out but, even in losing, showed respect for the winners at the end of the game. Some teams just sulked and sobbed.

We will pick up more lessons as the tournament unfolds. Perhaps you would like to share some of the brand lessons you have learnt from the World Cup?

Celebrating activism.

1916 - 2014 -  MaMbeki - A Life of Activism

This topic is inspired by the life of MaMbeki and my re-listening of the Bob Dylan song: Only a Hobo. It is also informed by recent media coverage on Tuberculosis in South Africa.

We work hard at Vega to immerse our students in the different ways of imagining and thinking. We then encourage them to do. To implement.

In a broader sense, we emphasise the importance of considered and relevant activism within a social context.

I believe that if we can think, then there is a collateral responsibility to act. Do we think enough? Act enough?

We have the capabilities and resources to resolve most of our worlds wicked problems and issues. TB in South Africa is an example. The experts say we can get rid of it like we did with polio. But we don't.

Is it because we don't think enough, or if we do, do we lose our resolve when we face down the work needed to fix things? We then then divert our gaze onto - it must be someone else's problem? Or is the issue that we, who can think and consider broader issues, are too satisfied with, and caught up in, ourselves?

Satisfaction, is in my view, the soporific that anesthetises and paralyses action.

It is my experience that chronic dissatisfaction is what leads us to action. Consider the following:

asleep                                                  awake
static                                                   dynamic
answer                                                question
comfort                                               discomfort
satisfied                                              dissatisfied
passive                                                active
dying                                                   living
dead                                                     alive

Activism is about embracing the right column. The upside, is that while this is challenging, it does make us feel more alive.

Activism means we do not accept the so-called current reality because, in human terms, our reality is often too narrow, too exclusive and too selfish.

Increasingly we must break out of these reality bubbles and rather engage from a human-centric position. The driver or fuel to help us achieve this is, I submit, chronic dissatisfaction. While this is not an easy space to live in, it affords us the correct perspective and demands that we ask better questions and to push ourselves to find answers.

In the last poem written by contemporary American poet Raymond Carver, just before he died of cancer, he asked himself whether he got what he wanted from his life. He answered:

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

Can any of us be satisfied in our lives while the majority of us do not feel beloved? Or is our immediate response that this is not our problem. It is their problem. I suggest we must re-contextualise and consider this a human issue and therefore we are inextricably part of it.

The reward is that engagement with others, beyond our immediate circle, makes us feel more alive. It has taken me a long time to realise that without this, we have our heads buried in the sand pretending, denying and dying as human beings.

May you escalate your dissatisfaction. As the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas implored us:

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage rage against the dying of the light.

With acknowledgement to the photographer

...the half-brained, half-baked, maths and science debate

We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist, using technologies that haven’t yet been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet - Karl Fisch, educator

Maths and Science is the clarion call for our schools to heed. We are wringing our hands about South Africa’s low global ranking in Maths and Science performance.

It seems this focus is because we believe that better ratings will make us more competitive and better prepare our youth for the workplace.This is barking up the wrong tree on a number of levels.

Firstly, Maths and Science does not maketh man or woman. If we study history we learn that most of our greatest leaders have been neither mathematicians nor scientists. As Sir Ken Robinson argues, there is a much richer conception of intelligence and ability available to us than is promoted by conventional education.

Secondly, we must re-calibrate our thinking in school education to focus on graduating whole-brain thinkers, whole-people performers. Es'kia Mphahlele correctly proposed that education should be seen as a process of self-discovery, a search for self.

Thirdly, schools should not be preparing people for careers. That comes much later.The great educationist Piaget argued that the principle goal of education is to develop people who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; people who are creative, inventive and discoverers.

What we require is a fully rounded education in our schools. We need the humanities as much as we need maths and science. We must unleash the ability within our learners to think both creatively and critically. 

Most importantly, we should unlock the confidence to pose questions and to moot different possible answers. A fixation on the right answer is damaging (because this is a world without absolutes). 

Ultimately we should enable our learners to marshall and present an argument. To be able to absorb and have some grasp of the fundamental issues facing us both as a species and within the context of our society and continent.

In short, I believe we need schools to graduate well rounded and confident thinkers. An education that fosters respect for the human imagination and the vital need to innovate and experiment so we can improve our condition.

We can select more career directed programmes in tertiary institutions but even here, I would argue that all university programmes need to consider a mix of analytical subjects and the humanities.

I recently heard that some South African schools are dropping history as a subject and on the playgrounds the message is, if you are not cutting maths and science, you then do art and drama - the sub-text being - shame, at least we can keep you busy.

Unless we make dramatic changes in our approach to giving a full education, I would have to agree with Dr. Stephen Heppell who said it would not be the end of the world if schools don’t make it. It would be, if learning doesn't make it.

Welcome to gordon d cook's blog 2



Are brands pretty bubbles of hot air?

COMMUNICATE visual by South African artist Simon Ford 

I've had a long term ethical struggle with the concept of brand along with the omnipresent communication campaigns that stimulate rampant consumption in our societies.



I have eventually resolved that, unique to us as people, is indeed the concept of becoming conscious of our own identity and then associating ourselves with networks of other identities with whom we relate. In a way, this is how we select friends and partners and schools to send our children to and companies we wish to work for. 

This extends further to buying things which will further expand our network of associations and thereby reinforce our assumed, actual or envisioned, identity. Perhaps we buy a Rolex to suggest our sophistication and success, a Jeep to signal that we are connected with the outdoors and are robust by nature. Pathetic as it may be, I have come to believe this is how it works.

The issue now is which associations do we promise consumers and customers in our quest to sell brands? I think the history of advertising and brand communication is littered with puffery, over-promising and, if not deceitful, blatant lying. One can just think of  the grand cinematic advertisements for cigarette brands to being your passport for meeting the most beautiful bodies on the most beautiful beaches of the world. Of course the truth always was, and remains that it is simply a passport to hospital.

The more competitive the category and greater the clutter of communication, the more spaced-out seems to become the promise. Let us stop this nonsense and find ways to develop more meaningful and honest value propositions and communication promises.

An opportunity


I would suggest that the opportunity resides in linking brands to, not only honest reality as the Dove campaigns do rather well, (by promising you will still look like you after bathing with Dove and that is beautiful) but to extend this approach to linking brands to relevant community, social, cultural and or environmental causes. Thereafter for the brand to actually make tangible contributions to such causes.

The fact is that the combined intellectual and economic wealth of brands and their respective businesses exceeds the tax generated wealth of most governments.

National social and other issues will never be solved by government budgets alone. The private sector has to adopt a more open-system approach and contribute beyond the paying of salaries and providing returns to share holders. Rather than spending millions of dollars on arbitrary campaigns to suggest our soap cleans better, lets accept the truth that all soaps clean us but to then link our particular brand of soap to an issue relevant to our current and potential customers; maybe even as a category of soaps to work together to ensure, for example, hygiene at the birth of babies in Africa. This would immediately reduce the current unacceptable child mortality statistic.

In the meanwhile, let us use social media to dismiss the inflated, and often pathetic messaging of so many brand campaigns.

Ironically, I have come to believe that brands are indeed, perhaps one of our greatest assets for constructive change. Can we then ensure that these wonderful resources enter this space in a significant and authentic way.

Creative minds in agencies may interpret my argument as a campaign ideas killer. I would counter argue that there is little creativity in suggesting that a beer will find you a friend. We need far more fearless, visionary and responsible creative thinking.

The brilliant creative director, Sir John Hegarty wrote: Great creativity has a life beyond the confines of the audience it was originally conceived for. It becomes iconic. Instantly recognisable and powerfully influential. In reaching this status it becomes the benchmark for everything else that follows, rewriting the way the world looks at things.

Brands can be the great agents for positive change if we change our thinking about how we build and communicate them.

gordon d cook's blog 1; NO WHITEWASH

Welcome to Blog1 of a weekly trailblazing conversation.

A dialogue to challenge the status quo. Please engage in this movement.

Poster Visual; WHITEWASH  by Artist Simon Ford

My parents, priests and teachers always told me to follow the rules, to not cross the line. The army, which I escaped, wanted us to march to a single tune. Employers would raise the concept of ‘the real world’ as the ultimate reality. But much of my life has been to question and challenge the so called real world and many of the rules, conventions, regulations and policies which too many of us define our lives by.

The simple reason for this seemingly contrarian view is because the following question burns inside me: How can we be satisfied with the ‘reality, and how dare we embrace the status quo when, from a global and human perspective, it is a space with unabating tragedy, injustice and desperation.

The actual reality is that we generally have aberrated societies, organisations rampant with power abuse, psychopathic leadership, cultures of meanness, greed and aggression with the majority of us living in undignified oppression. We seem to anaesthetise independent thinking. We repeat: don’t upset the apple cart, let sleeping dogs lie and don’t fix what aint broke. Yet most of our social, economic and political systems are cracked and broken. So, as Robinson Jeffers said: Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

The terrifying image given us by poet W.B Yates should make us sit up and focus:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world….

trailblazing hopes to be a catalyst to continually light the fuse for change and to propose better ideas and new ways. Even if the status quo was taking us down the right path, the rate of change and spread of new knowledge requires us to ratchet up our critical and creative thinking. Like George Lois, I do believe that creativity can solve almost any problem – the creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.

Educational institutions should be the fly wheels for change but most seem paralysed by systems, structures and regulations making so much of our curricula passing the expiry dates.

This blog will peddle optimism, activism and provocation to challenge the never ending line of sacred cows.

Indeed, the launch of Vega was to celebrate a new trail of thinking. Amidst the flare of rockets at the launch event, a parade of visual images and words celebrated a diverse collection of trail blazers, trouble makers, revolutionaries, reprobates, miscreants, maestros, martyrs and malcontents; the mavericks, rebels and legends of history. Because, as a famous Apple ad highlighted, it is such people who change the world. A piece of the Beethoven 9^th symphony was played because the opening chords batter not only against the terrible constraints of his deafness, but also against the musical conventions of his time. The music is at once demented in its effort to overcome both and triumphant in its resounding victory.

trailblazing would like to contribute to the creative fire that spreads across boundaries of culture, language, race, age and gender. As we hurtle into the early stages of the 21^st century the human imagination has new tools and media to dance with.

The starting and end point of trailblazing will be chronic dissatisfaction. In our world, satisfaction is at best fantasy, myopia, a form of sedation and fairy-tale thinking. Not even thinking. Not even dreaming. It is denialism which is the glue that locks the status quo together. This blog will hopefully raise anger from which there can come action to change. To reconceptualise, to re-look, review and reinvent. There are no rules for doing this.

Wicked problems

The plethora of human and environmental issues holding us back, retarding and even destroying humankind should be our focus. This raises a raft of wicked problems and issues about which we need breakthrough thinking.

We can surely speak about:

• The social class systems implicit in our organisations
• Eradicating violence against women and children
• The barriers to private and public collaboration
• Making brands more authentic and assets for social change
• How to free us from being either part of the oppressed or part of the oppressor
• Poverty and the wealth gap
• Retailers over charging the poor
• Making education more relevant and students more activist
• New measures, beside economic ones for the condition of our societies
• Our inability to create work for people

Let me know of those issues burning you up. Collectively we can then try to unpack them and propose new and better ways for solving or fixing them.

The challenge always is to keep a balance. As Yeats also warned:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

We must strike a balance between smug comfort and self-righteousness - while clutching on to a sense of humour! A tough ask. But at least let us begin conversations for they are the foundation stones for any change.

Let us also recognise individuals and organisations who do ask the hard questions and steer us toward some answers.

Come trail blaze with me. Join a movement envisioned by Lois to not sedate but to awaken, to disturb, to communicate, to instigate and even to provoke.