Down the tube

The other day someone asked me where I’d got an obscure piece of information, about Bhutan, from. “Metro,” I said, “the source of all knowledge.” It was a tongue-in-cheek reply – I remembered later that I’d read it in Monocle — but it wasn’t made without some foundation. Metro is one of my favourite reads and a consistent source of brain fodder, sometimes trivial, sometimes not, that fuels the brand consultant within me. But what it is that makes Metro so good is something more profound than just news, sport and gossip; it’s not the content that makes it work so well, but the context. It works because it created a unique circumstance for itself, one that satisfied a latent need that many people had without necessarily even knowing it. It took the dead, do-nothing time of tube travel (or train/bus/etc) and made it into something useful instead. Something easy (it’s a simple read) yet something of intellectual and/or entertainment value. Whether by accident or pre-meditated design (and I’m always sceptical on such matters) it takes just about the same amount of time to read cover to cover as the average tube journey affords. It’s free, in every respect – no money and no extra time required. Perfect.

Maybe I’m just predisposed to Metro because the logic of it appeals to my own professional philosophy about thinking differently and inventing new opportunities rather than just iterating the same tired old ideas all the time. But in any case I’ve long considered Metro to be a great example of a brand that fundamentally understands its proposition and knows how to deliver it. Until now.

So this week I see that Metro has launched a campaign intended to persuade us to take our copies of the paper with us when we leave the train and put them in the recycling bin. It’s littering, apparently, if we leave them. And that shows me that Metro doesn’t understand its brand anywhere near as well as I had thought. You see Metro has established itself so firmly in the unique circumstance it created that it has transcended its functionality and become cultural. When you travel on the tube it is not littering to leave your copy of Metro on the shelf behind the seats, it is a public service to your fellow commuters. To take your paper with you, and to bin it, is to deny someone else the opportunity to pass their travel time productively. Pick a carriage of people and ask them, they’ll all agree, “please leave your copy of Metro behind in case one of us wants to read it”. In fact almost the only emotional interaction that ever takes place between non-acquainted human beings on a tube train is the brief smile and warm eye contact that is exchanged when one places a paper down and another immediately picks it up. It is that, dear Metro, that is your brand. And this advertising campaign undermines it.

As all discarded Metros get collected by LUL staff at the end of the line, and are presumably recycled, I’m not concerned about the environmental impact of my objections here. I just hate to see a good brand get it wrong.

Jim.