Twisted Worlds by Jeff Kubina, on Flickr

February is here, and we can hear the gentle pop of New Year’s resolutions expiring all around us. Like soap bubbles that once were full of hope, reflecting a better future, many of our resolutions are now reduced to a moist residue on the harsh pavement of reality.

It’s no surprise that coming up with resolutions is much easier than keeping them. A 2007 study by Richard Wisemen from the University of Bristol showed that 88% of those who set New Year resolutions fail, even though over 50% felt confident they will succeed at the point of making their resolution.

New Year’s resolutions are commonly articulated as objectives, and just like business objectives, common reasons for failure can include lack of strategy, inconsistent implementation, lack of stakeholder engagement and cultural fixations. But there’s one pattern of failure I’d like to point out: the search for meaning trap.

When we set ambitious change-orientated goals, we are engaging with our definition of purpose. We are articulating various “happy ending” objectives and laying out early chapters for new, life-changing, narratives. In essence, defining resolutions is one of the ways we explore the meaning of our lives.

Similarly, defining business objectives is an activity intertwined with the organisational search for meaning. When we define business objectives we are exploring the purpose of our organisation and redefining a vision of our company’s future. The more critical the objectives are, the deeper we will have to engage with the fundamental questions about our brand. We will discover that in order to make significant changes to the composite and priorities of objectives, we have to engage with the question of who we really are as a company. That’s why in strategic processes you will find that terms like mission, vision, purpose, values, brand story, personality and other terms suggesting deep meaning tend to connect, raising further complexities and challenges.

This is the point where the search for meaning trap kicks in.

Because the search for meaning is a never-ending quest. The meaning you were happy with yesterday, will start to degrade in your mind the moment you leave it be, and even faster if you continue to examine it. Suddenly, the sense of clarity of intent and enthusiasm you’ve felt begins to wane, and you wonder if this was the right idea in the first place… Maybe that brand idea isn’t right, maybe you need to re-examine your vision. Maybe what you lack is a positioning statement. Maybe it’s really the time to revisit your purpose, or corporate mission statement. And what about getting a good idea of how the market has changed since the last time we went through the process of defining those elements? And who’s our target audience again? And what about the different ways different departments or subsidiaries have been going about the same process?

Before you know it, you are running a new company-wide brand programme and engaging everyone from the receptionist to the chairman of the board.

Hang on a minute! Didn’t we go through this just 18 months ago?

Oh but how the world has changed since… So much that by the time you finish this exercise you will have to start it again, just like you did last time you decided to “shake things up a bit”…

Now, you can never accuse a strategist of a lack of love for planning, but I believe that being stuck in an endless corporate search for meaning is the equivalent of moving from one resolution to another, one fad diet or self-help book to the next, without ever achieving any of the intended transformation.

The solution? In one word – Act!

Let go of the notion that you will ever reach a perfect definition of your brand or purpose.  You are on a quest, so stay focused on the road ahead and deal with the obstacles head on. You need something good enough which suggests a clear course of action. Little changes make a big difference over time and once your plan is even half decent, the rest of your energy should be focused on coming up with actions that make things happen and get things done.

If I could suggest one new habit for brands in the new year, it would be to stay focused on action. So shift the resources you were planning to spend on your Nth strategic planning programme of the last few years into actual things you can do for your world.

Throw away that self-help book, and start doing.

Seriously. Talking to yourself is sometimes very healthy. But the trouser thing is always a problem.

Consider if you will, trousers with an unnaturally high waistband, that are uncomfortably tight, vulgarly patterned or with legs that are too short to cover the ankles. Any one of these characteristics should be seen as a warning that all is not well with the wearer.

They demonstrate a lack of self-awareness, a distorted perception of or a lack of affinity with the wearer’s social group.  In other words, the individual either doesn’t realise or doesn’t care how they look. In essence, what we’re talking about here is the display of incongruous or sub-optimal clothing. The most extreme examples of wardrobe errors demonstrate that motivation or cause are more important considerations than just an aesthetics. For example,  an elderly lady wearing her nightdress to attend the local grocery store or a creative director wearing an Hawaiian shirt to an awards dinner.

Brands or brand identities are often described or explained using the analogy of clothing. It was once commonplace for well-intentioned branding consultants to ask their client “If your company were a hat, what kind of hat would it be?” The bemused client would then shrug and suggest a white trilby or a purple sombrero and the consultant would nod and scribble earnestly.

It’s a simplistic approach but not entirely unhelpful. But how we walk and talk and with whom we associate are also essential components. So, if we consider not just the aesthetics of our brands but also why and how we wear them, this method can provide real insight.

Brands, like clothes, can be true reflections of attitudes and ambitions. They should be. Outfits, like brands, can also be contrived to accentuate or attenuate personality traits. That’s usually at the heart of the brief.

I have a friend who works in the City for a well-known financial institution. His pinstripe suit covers a piercing and a tattoo that would not look out of place on a fairground worker.  (In light of the recent financial maelstrom, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that this little secret is in itself some way emblematic.)

Here’s some food for thought. In his early years, the Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi dressed in simple army fatigues. He progressed to a more grandiose, “vajazzled” military look. In later years he took on the appearance of an Arab prince. His visual identity provided a useful, albeit alarming, insight into his self-perception and political motives. Although founded on psychosis, the Gaddafi values were communicated in a clear and unambiguous way. When a corporation chooses to replace its wardrobe, whether with a fresh contemporary cut or a radical new colour palette, we should also assess not just the ‘new look’ but also the motivation behind the makeover…

With all this in mind, I was mesmerised when the latest British Airways brand campaign landed. The central theme hangs on a direct, literal connection between branding and clothing. The flagship communication is a TV commercial appropriating a plethora of historical icons. In what could best be described as a “faux-reel”, BA struts about, brandishing its forefathers’ medals. References to quixotic, outmoded and largely irrelevant endeavours are stitched together to construct a patchwork retrospective with a narrative curve of which Stalin would be proud.

We conclude with the assertion that BA pilots have a moto, embroidered inside their clothes. “To fly. To serve.” Behold! The “brand as a garment” metaphor is realised!
If you’re confused by all this, BA offers an explanation online:

“These four words were painted on the tailfins of our early aircraft. And our pilots still wear them with pride. In the lining of their jackets and on the peaks of their hats. They’re rarely noticed, but they’ve always been at the heart of everything we do. Because they’re not a slogan. They’re a promise.”

Now, in assessing this work, less charitable critics have been drawn to unpicking the details. These include:

- the origins in the state-owned precursor to BA, BOAC
- the flaming Concorde
- the offal-based TV script extolling “safety systems, built of brain… and heart”
- a disingenuous reference to 3 babies [accidentally] being born aboard BA planes
- the Grade 1 piano music,
- etc, etc.

All unduly harsh and quite misplaced. I think we need to overlook the styling to make a useful assessment. I think we should also ignore the jumbo in the room: that ‘flying’ and ‘serving’ are basic requirements of all commercial airlines.
Fundamentally, the work seems flawed because BA looks neither confident nor comfortable in this worthy, vintage-inspired get-up. The outfit forces us to ask what aspirations they have, other than self-aggrandizement. And, if these hallowed four words have been integral to the company’s ethos for all these generations, what has changed recently that warrants our re-appraisal?
Striving to be synonymous with the history of their sector is not just bombastic, it tells us little about the true company culture, nor how they see their future. Majoring on the extraordinary overlooks the fact that really great service manifests itself in the mundane minutiae, the personal and prosaic. And presenting pilots as the focal point of the brand experience overlooks the fact that pilots are intrinsically detached from passengers.

Where are the quirky service signatures?
Where are the accents to differentiate the tone of voice?
Where is the smile that welcomes me aboard?

For the record, I’m a fan of BA and I think this campaign includes some glorious creative work. I’m just not sure about the fit. In my view, this work won’t help to win hearts (and brains) anymore than donning a leotard will make me a ballet dancer.

A prospecting shaft. Mch. 26. Claim 44 below Discovery, Hunker Creek (1901) by Joseph Burr Tyrrell, 1858-1957, CC: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto

Strategic brand ideas are rarely linear textbook answers; they often call for an original reframing of the problem or reinvention of the rules. Strategy is sometimes called “The creative before the creative”, but fundamentally both share a similar ambition – the quest for breakthrough ideas.
Breakthrough thinking is just as mysterious as breakthrough creativity – the two are intertwined. And while there have been attempts at exploring it, you won’t be surprised to know that there are no recipes. However, occasionally there are some useful tools and models.

One of my favourite descriptions of the quest for breakthrough ideas, highly applicable to design thinking, is found in David Perkins’ book “The Eureka Effect: The Art And Logic Of Breakthrough Thinking”.
Perkins constructs a model of breakthrough thinking based on the analogy of digging for gold in the Klondike. During the gold rush, everybody is looking for gold, and there are various methods of digging for it. When you find gold, if you have even little experience, you’ll know you’ve hit gold. But the big question is “how do you know where to dig?”

In that tricky terrain, the breakthrough answers and brilliant ideas are out there somewhere, but to get to them, the creative thinker must confront four types of thinking traps:

1. The wilderness of possibility – The terrain is hectic and full of details. Nearly every spot looks either suspicious or promising. Every nook and cranny may be hiding the answer, but where to dig? Which opportunity to choose?
2. The clueless plateau – The terrain is so bereft of any information or detail, it’s impossible to identify the potential areas where solutions may be buried.
3. Narrow canyons – You may not realise it, but the path is taking you further away from the solution and limiting your exploration to barren areas. You may struggle, but there are so many limitations that the range of actions possible seems extremely narrow, almost as if there’s no way out. A worse incarnation of the canyon trap is when you may think you are choosing the right path, but actually you have a distorted view of the territory. You’re walking trapped in the canyon and you don’t even realise it.
4. The oasis of false promise – This is it, you’ve found a spot that looks promising, this must be it. But actually, there’s nothing there, and you may dig and dig and sweat and nothing will come out of it.

There are techniques to mitigate and attempt to get over those traps, and sometimes half the job is realising which trap you’re dealing with. Here are some tactics to deal with the aforementioned traps:

1. Spoilt for choice? Develop qualifiers/filters to make you choosier. Find a system for your roving. (And if that doesn’t work, rove randomly enough to hit something).
2. No idea where to start? Try and generate more opportunities, roam more freely, and stay alert for any clue, however small.
3. Stuck in one direction? Try removing any constraints or reframe the problem and see what new directions open up.
4. Going for a promising direction but not yielding results? To begin with, don’t limit yourself too soon, don’t fall in love too quickly with solutions, keep roaming for a while. Have been focusing on an area of promise with little result? Try moving away, explore a new area and see what new possibilities open up.

Thinking back on brand challenges encountered through the years, I’m surprised to discover that most projects tend to fall into one of the first two types – Either you’re drowning in information and possibilities, with dozens of seemingly exciting alternatives and little evidence to what is worthy of staking a claim, further development or exploration. Alternatively, you find yourself in a bleak “insight desert” grasping for shards of useful information or any clue to point you in the right direction.

Why are the other two types more rare?
Simply because if a client falsely thinks they have the solution already or believe they are on the right path and nothing exists outside the box – they are unlikely to turn to strategic or creative advice in the first place. Instead, those “non-project” situations will sit there, waiting for someone to sound the wake up call of reality (to get out of the oasis trap) or for someone to breakthrough a new direction (to get out of the canyon trap) – either from the inside, or the outside.

[Cross-posted on Marketing Babylon]

For example: I find the nature of BA’s on-board service (long-haul) is neatly summarised by the warning noise that sounds throughout the ‘plane just before the aircraft turns its engines on to full at the beginning of the runway for take-off. Here are my reasons for this:

1. It’s not designed to benefit passengers (we are already strapped in to our seats). It’s for the crew, to tell them to sit down. Much of BA’s service seems centred around what suits the crew rather than the passenger.

2. It sounds awful. It would be hard to find another two-note sequence that has such tonal dissonance. It manages to sound hostile at just the point that passengers need the opposite. Dissonance and hostility are wider themes in BA service too.

3. It is laughably out of date. The timbre of the sound is unlike anything I’ve heard since my ZX81 computer got thrown away in 1982. BA’s service hasn’t moved with the times either.

I could go on (I really hate this noise) but won’t. The point of this example was not to go deep into BA, but to explain the concept behind the word I am looking for. The noise is just one small thing but, for me, it represents the wider issue of which it is just a part, rather well.

So, what’s the word? I have spent some time searching for this of course, but haven’t quite found an answer that seems right yet. Some contenders have emerged though and I list a few here together with the reasons why I don’t think they are right:

Microcosm. Probably the closest, but implies that the thing is really a miniature version of the whole thing, which is not what I’m saying. I’m looking for something more conceptual than this. Back to the example, saying that the noise is a microcosm of BA’s service doesn’t seem right.

Epitome. In the sense that it means “the perfect example” then it is not wrong, but the thing here is not the perfect example, it is a perfect capture of its characteristics – and that’s not the same, I think.

Synecdoche. I read this piece in The Guardian at the weekend that suggested to me that this was the word I crave. But my OED suggests that this is more a linguistic term – a substitution of a word describing a part of the whole for the word describing the whole – than a way to describe a more abstract concept.

Now, I’m holding my hands high in the air at this point in admission of my ignorance. Perhaps one of these words is indeed the right one, and no doubt there is some word – obvious or not – that describes what I seek. Please, readers, make your suggestions in the comments section below.

But the reason I am searching for this word is not just out of intellectual curiosity (although I admit that’s part of it) but because the concept is an important one in the professional world of brand consultancy and design. In fact, it is the perfect way to describe what we do. We define and create things – words, identities, communications, objects, events, etc. – that are conceptually representative of the broad intent of the wider proposition to which they belong. When audiences experience these things, together or in isolation, their experience is therefore representative of the wider proposition, i.e. to have the experience of the thing is to have the experience of the organisation, company, or brand of which they are part. Because the human brain looks for patterns and consistency, positive experiences will build positive expectations for similarly branded experiences, driving willingness and enthusiasm to engage – ergo, business success. But by the same token, negative experiences will create wider negative expectations, and these may prevail over positives (that’s a human brain thing too) so consistency across all experiences is important too. In the ideal brand, every experience of every thing is, in itself, representative of the whole; experiences are interrelated and multi-dimensional, spider’s web on spider’s web of interconnected threads. There are tangible things, like products or buildings; intangible things, like customer service or social media; meta-things, like brand identity or how an organisation engages its own people in its brand; and, micro-things, like a small detail on a piece of packaging that just makes everybody smile. Each one of these is a representation of the brand and needs to be properly aligned.

There is a really important distinction to draw here between brand consultancy and management consultancy or, to put it better, those consultancies that have a design capability and those which do not. We both start out by setting out the master proposition at the organisation-wide level. That, in itself, is a complex and involved task. But where I am convinced that band consultancies, like The Partners, offer far greater advantage to clients, is that we then translate the proposition into the things that audiences actually experience: the things that take strategy beyond theory, and make it real. We create things that embody the characteristics of the wider proposition of which they are a part, thus making the proposition more compelling, more desirable, and better understood.

Now, if only there was a word for that…

Wayne & Garth Spotted

Alongside the part of my phone that actually makes calls (the old fashioned bit), my Google Maps app is probably one of my most used. It’s become indispensable in the same way that being able to text once was. What would we do without it!

Modern spoils aside, the success of Google’s mapping technology may partly be down to its adaptiveness. As with all good web services, the Google Maps API has spawned a mass of location based mash-ups. Google, for example, recently partnered with We Are What We Do to create the wonderfully rich Historypin. It’s all too easy to forget about the history that surrounds us here at The Partners HQ, but a quick post code look up perfectly placed archived and geo-tagged photos from over 100 years ago. To refer to images like this in isolation is one thing, to see them in context and contrast with our modern surroundings (places we inhabit everyday without considering the past) can completely transform our sense of place. Today, Berg London announced Dimensions. Born out of a series of workshops with the BBC, this set of mash-ups forces us to reconsider our surroundings by overlaying historical, political, and environmental data on to our own neighbourhoods. With these filters and layers applied, mapping becomes less about wayfinding, and more about changing perceptions of our sense of place; both of our own locality, and of others’.

With Google’s Street View, the mental images and memories of our surroundings are at once put to test, and the sheer volume of imagery captured by Google’s roaming cars across the world must represent one of the most significant image archives in existence. It provides us with an almost complete panoramic view of the urban environment, albeit one recorded in 1/100th of a second. For the virtual tourist, or the freeze frame voyeur, street view offers a world of exploration like never before. Last year, Art Fag City bought together snapshots of some of the more weird and wonderful findings. Our treasured Daily Mail more recently got in on the act with the story of a seemingly dead girl laying in the street.

Thank god last year’s AR craze has seemed to have died down, when every brand seemed desperate to get a piece of the emperor’s new clothes. This highly ironic video summed it up perfectly. Why do something that could be much better achieved without the added layer of a webcam? Context, of course, is key. ART + COM showed that there were practical and meaningful applications for the technology when they bought dinosaurs out of their skeletons and bursting into life at Berlin’s Museum of Natural History. And with dedicated hardware in gaming consoles, the opportunities still seem genuinely engaging. Oh to be a kid today!

Of course mobile and augmented technologies are a match made in heaven. Amsterdam’s Layar first launched on Android some years ago now, but the potential still seems to be slowly unfolding, and marketers are quicker now to spot an opportunity. While The Rolling Stone’s take on the Layar app for their Exile On Main Street album may have been overly literal, it’s interesting to think how we can begin to engage an audience not just online, but in the real world too. Over in Japan, where adoption of new technologies is often quicker than anywhere else, the Sekai Camera app spawned an ‘Air tagging‘ phenomenon. Surely it’s just a matter of time before this spreads. Let’s just hope users can learn to leave data behind that actually enriches our surroundings, and resist the kind of comments you’re likely to find in a shoreditch pub toilet.

Yesterday I received a notification from Google informing me I was now being tracked by Latitude. I’d opted in for this some time ago, only to be disappointed to find very few of my friends had shared my enthusiasm. Sharing your location with Google (search now factors in your location) is one thing, sharing it with your friends, it seems, is another.

The social aspect of location awareness is, however growing fast. And while Foursquare’s success may be in part down to its reward schemes and gaming aspects (ultimately, its competitive nature), the check-in concept now seems to be spreading beyond the merely physical, with more & more start ups like Gomiso allowing us to ‘check-in’ to movies and tv shows. It’s yet another way of allowing us digital natives to define ourselves not just by where we hang out, but also by what we consume. In 2010, privacy, and personal space appear outdated concepts, while the commodification of the personal reigns supreme.

If anyone can popularise the concept of location in the social space, it’s Facebook. Sure enough, Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed rumours that Facebook will soon be adding location to its services. Facebook might just show Google how it should be done here. Friends & followers, are you with me?

Six centuries and three years later it’s not unreasonable expect financial services professionals to have built upon that learning, evolved and moved on. So consider this piece in last week’s Marketing Week by Cheryl Toner, Group Marketing and Communications Director at AXA – a contemporary pan-European financial services giant – speaking about a review (presumably lengthy and costly) of their brand positioning, in which she says the following:

“One of our key findings was that trust was key to the relationship with our customers. We have been looking at all the areas where we need to be seen as reliable, which is a key driver of trust in our industry. It’s basically about keeping our promises.”

No shit, Cheryl. You don’t say! Even Sybil Fawlty, whose responsibility for customer experience didn’t extend beyond the outskirts of Torquay, might have found that statement of the bleedin’ obvious a bit too, well, bleedin’ obvious to commit to print.

I mean, come on, this is hardly an original insight in to what makes financial services brands tick, is it? Trust, and therein keeping of promises, is the foundational principle of money itself – “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of twenty pounds” it says on the British notes in my wallet; “In God We Trust” on a US dollar – not a 21^st Century phenomenon hitherto unseen. For years, centuries and millennia of financial transacting it is a basic and obvious truth. That Axa describe it as a “finding” makes me wonder where they’ve been looking all these years.

My point here is not that Axa is wrong. Sure, trust is important. But it always has been, so unless this is a confession to past untrustworthiness, I really don’t see how or who this helps. It’s not a brand strategy, it’s table-stakes for staying in business. It’s not differentiating, every financial services business in the world is pursuing the same goal. It’s not a ‘big idea’ that will spawn innovations in products, services and customer experience. And it’s not a rallying cry for internal staff or customers to get behind – no one gets excited for very long by the Emperor’s new clothes. So, for me, that’s a waste of time, effort and money because if you’re going to review your brand strategy you should make sure it aims to achieve every single one of those things.

Even if you fail to achieve that, at least try to come up with something that a medieval brand manager would not already have known.

To anyone who’s read my previous posts it will also come as a surprise that I would be praising a rail company, but believe it or not here it comes…

Just before Christmas I had to make an urgent trip from London to Essex. I arrived at Liverpool Street station, checked the departure time of my train, shovelled a big wedge of cash into the ticket machine and just as my tickets printed out the automated departures and arrivals board lit up in a frenzy of flashing lights as one-by-one the trains changed from ‘On Time’ to ‘Cancelled’, ‘Bus Service’ or ‘Delayed’. Mine was cancelled. The tickets, still warm from the printer, cowered in my clenched fist.

I then embarked on the most excruciating train journey of my life. Both the outward and return journeys were subject to cancellations, delays, lack of onboard refreshments due to a broken boiler, overcrowding and general displeasure.

On my return I set about drafting a letter of complaint to the train company responsible, National Express. Seeing as there has been a lot of talk of will they/won’t they mergers with Stagecoach recently I wasn’t holding my breath in getting a positive response to my request for a full, and immediate, refund.

As Christmas set upon us I received a letter from National Express to inform me that they had read my letter and would attempt to come back to me within 6 days. Actually, it was more like 15, but hey, it was Christmas and who’s counting? I was stunned to receive another letter the other day profusely apologising for the ‘unforgiveable’ experience I had had to endure that day on the train, and explaining the reasons for the delays/cancellations but in a tone that was more apologetic and responsible than blame-ridden and bitter. Neatly tucked in the folded letter were vouchers for rail travel (on ANY network in the UK) for not only the full return fare but for the full fare + 25%.

Now, I’m not too sure whether it should be a big cheer for National Express per se, or a big cheer for the cranky insistence of a grump like me, but regardless, I thought the communications tone, and the ‘above and beyond’ value of the vouchers were a great example of a brand’s ability to create a positive experience out of a bad one. Well done National Express.

So yesterday via Twitter I received two identical tweets from the same ‘company’. Being a little more specific, one form the ‘official’ Twitter feed of that company, the other from the ‘personal’ Twitter account of the MD of that company. I say personal, however in the profile he states that he is MD of X…. so in my book, that counts as a representation of that company is a ‘pseudo corporate’ feed. So, two identical tweets, sent from the same ‘company’, to the same individual, me, in the space of a few seconds.

Now if that happened with email, to which I had subscribed, i.e. which is permission based, as is Twitter… I’d be annoyed and think ‘what a stupid company’. Well the same thing happened with those tweets, I thought ‘what a stupid company’. Just because they are short, possibly less intrusive than email, it’s still really dumb to send identical messages over different accounts when you have the same person subscribing to both accounts on the other end! We wouldn’t do that with email would we? And as the business that did this was, surprise surprise, a social media agency (ROFLMAO)… that makes it, as we say on the Internets, an EPIC FAIL.

So, to an extent you have to say ‘bless’, let’s face it a lot of people working in social media, on the face of it, aren’t that experienced in the grand scheme of things, email is for old people right? But more seriously it points to the fact that platforms such as Twitter, even when combined with some of the 3rd party corporate tools, are still massively lacking in maturity and functionality to run at the same level of ‘permission’ and accuracy as email or more traditional direct communications. To my knowledge, (I did say this was ill-informed) no tool exists to manage Twitter subscribes across a companies multiple accounts in the same way as email (i.e. with really thorough, get prosecuted if you mess up, list and subscriber management… yes I get that Twitter is a little less complex in that if you unsubscribe that’s that, to an extent). If it does I get the impression many companies aren’t using it. As far as legislation goes, again I’d welcome an update on this… however, if the law doesn’t hover channels such as Twitter in b2c communications, isn’t it about time it did?

However, fret not, as deliveries of the important stuff – the parcels and presents ordered up to the 11^th hour from on-line retailers such as Amazon and John Lewis are destined to find their way to their recipients in a timely and reliable fashion. These businesses you will not be surprised to hear have opted to drop Royal Mail in favour of alternative providers. There are unfortunately some on-line retailers who won’t have that choice.  Just as Britain is trying to fight its way out of recession, not only will Royal Mail potentially lose over £100m of combined letter and packet business, the disruption could cost general business over £220m in direct lost business and increased delivery expense not to mention damage to reputation and customer loyalty.

So it would seem that the current dispute of Royal Mail employees with the management over pay, conditions and modernisation plans continues to erode not just the trust and reputation of another institutional brand but ultimately drive it closer to the edge of an inevitable precipice.

Sure, the history, politics and organisational issues that underpin the machinations of Royal Mail and the current dispute are complicated but the stark reality is much simpler. This is a business model that makes little commercial sense or in its current guises delivers a relevant consumer service for modern Britain.

Royal Mail was created in 1516 by Henry VIII when he established a Master of the Posts. It was no doubt of formidable use in days gone by for sending threatening letters to the French or Scots, communicating with your army, courting another potential wife or demanding taxes and favours.

But today, my letterbox at home is rarely straining under the weight of anything of such urgency, value or contempt.  Bank statements, mobile phone bills, energy bills,  tax returns, passport and driving licence applications are all now managed on-line. In our fast-paced digital society, we can’t wait a few hours, let alone a day or two to for a piece of communication to wind its way through the ‘Snail Mail’ plumbing.

So what future for our postal champion and its significant army of foot soldiers?

The solution for Royal Mail is to leverage its capabilities in a more effective and innovative manner.  It benefits from an amazing local community presence and infrastructure. It just needs to mobilise it and charge for it in a more valued and valuable way.

Perhaps Royal Mail should consider stopping those daily letterbox deliveries of increasing amounts of junk mail.  Household mail only accounts for about 10% of volume anyway.  Apart from certain government departments, rarely do we send anything of real urgency or value through the postal system.  Perhaps we need to be educated that we should go and collect our mail from the local Post Office.  Use the Post Office as a micro-sorting office from where we rent our own PO Box for a convenient Saturday morning collection before popping to the coffee shop next door to peruse it.

Equally, Britain is a universe of micro and small and medium sized enterprises. These smaller businesses need to move things around and most often within a fairly narrow geography and relatively minor window of time.

Couldn’t Royal Mail do this? Couldn’t Royal Mail be exactly the kind of local community logistics champion that we could really use on a daily basis.

With assets out on the roads local independent grocers or traders who can’t compete with the likes of Ocado can offer to deliver direct with Royal Mail. Plumbers, electricians and tradesmen can call suppliers for parts and have them picked up and delivered by Royal Mail within 90 minutes. For domestic customers, dry cleaning can be delivered or collected and  those cakes you’ve baked for old Mrs Jones who lives on the other side of town can be sent and received and still be warm.  Maybe if I’m really running late, they can pick up and deliver my kids home from nursery.

Now that really would indicate a level of trust and give valued meaning to those letters within the Royal Mail brand name that make it a service we can all be proud of.

But in this case, no such conversations need take place.  That’s because the drawing has been produced not by a well-remunerated corporation, but by a child. It is the work of nine-year-old Florence Jackson, from Bristol, who was one of 17,000 children who entered a BBC Blue Peter competition to design the new coin. The media, the public, most (not all) designers, when they know that it is designed by a child, will soften their eyes and celebrate, rather than criticise its flaws. And, even if they missed the press release, no one’s going to be in any doubt about its youthful provenance because the design is so obviously juvenile. Crude, puerile and naïve her art may be, but in the context of such a competition these are exactly the criteria that the competition judges would have desired. Indeed, I am confident to assume that many more accomplished submissions will have been rejected for being too good; not childlike enough. This competition was never about the quality of the design but what it is that the design represents.

This highlights a crucial aspect of human judgment that applies to design and much more widely beyond. It’s the reason why brand consultancy is not only the most important discipline in the marketing mix but a critical component of modern business strategy. It might even help us to define what “brand” means. Yep, I’m making a big deal of this one, because I think Florence has hit on something important here.

To up the ante a little from 50p, let me ask you a question about another piece of art. If the Madonna of the Pinks that hangs in The National Gallery turns out, as some suspect, not to be by Raphael but a fake, is it worth less than the £22M it cost to buy? Philosophically, the painting could be said to exist in two parallel universes. One, where it marks a brave and progressive watershed in the history of religious portraiture that inspired not just art but generations of social history. Another, where it is simply a derivative work by a talented, yet insignificant forger. Physically, the two universes of the paintings collapse into one – its tangible attributes are the same. Intellectually, they are forever apart.

Old Masters may be an extreme example but the point is this: we judge things not for what they are but for what we think they mean. To truly understand something we need to look beyond its tangible qualities and consider its intangible attributes too. We seek to explain what we see (hear, touch, taste, or smell) by giving it a back-story – a meaning beyond the physical experience it provides. The Madonna of the Pinks is not just a well-executed painting of the Madonna and child but a landmark moment in art history. Florence’s coin is more than a badly drawn picture, it represents the hope, potential, and the carefree joy that only a child would have the courage to see, yet to which all adult human beings aspire.

Don’t just take my word for it. This aspect of human intellect is a fundamental philosophical concept. In the 4^th Century BC, Aristotle defined hypokeimenon, literally meaning the “underlying thing”, as the quality that sits behind a thing’s physicality and persists through any change. In the 13^th Century John Duns Scotus described haecceity, literally “thisness”, as the quality of a thing that differentiates it from another with identical form (where its form expressed in generic terms is called quiddity, or “thatness”). Neuroscientists have explored these concepts in their analyses of how the human brain makes decisions, examining the complexity of the relationship between rational and emotional processing. Some, like Chris Frith, even suggest that rational decision-making is an illusion created by our own brain to defend us from the incomprehensible reality of our truly irrational selves. The scientific and philosophical facts are clear: things are not as simple as they seem.

And this helps us explain what a brand is. A brand is the complete set of criteria upon which the human brain decides. (Note that lower order mammals don’t use ‘brands’, just sub-conscious instincts; they don’t ‘decide’.) Brands are a complex interdependency between rational and emotional propositions where each works to shape and explain the other. They are about hypokeimenon (essence), haecceity (differentiation) and quiddity (experience) and touch not just logos and marketing but every aspect of what an organisation thinks and does. It follows then, that managing a brand requires profound and holistic consideration, with the intellect and imagination of a deeply enquiring mind. If we are to believe Chris Frith, then it’s the most important thing that any business should consider, overriding all the rational considerations that businesses typically prioritise in their plans.

Of course some philosophers (the empiricists and phenomenalists) disagree with this point of view. For them, a thing is no more than its tangible self: The Madonna of the Pinks is just paint on canvas, worth no more than, say, 50p. They would consider a conversation about brands to be an exercise in vanity and a waste of money and time. Such people should be introduced to Florence. Sometimes it takes the perspective of a nine-year-old to help you open your eyes.