War of the golden bunnies

Lindt, manufacturers of those golden foil-wrapped chocolate Easter bunnies you see everywhere in the supermarkets, have just lost a thirteen year battle to prevent rival German chocolate manufacturer Confiserie Riegelein from selling something similar (as the latter say they have been doing for the past half century).

Lindt did, however, win an earlier case against an Austrian manufacturer Hauswirth's similar bunny.

It looks to me more as if you might be expecting Lindt's rivals to be fighting it out.

Lindt has had mixed success in its efforts to trademark the actual three-dimensional bunny but has been doggedly pursuing a legal cull of other golden chocolate bunnies through the courts. One of its justifications is that it spends millions on promoting the golden bunny and so deserves all the rewards to itself - never mind how long other lesser firms have been making and selling similar products.

The interests of the customers don't seem to figure much in the legal wrangles. It is not a matter of passing off - where customer protection would be the prime motive. It is not even about intellectual property or design or copyright, which would expire in the public interest after a fixed term. It is about trademarks, which are forever. Trademarks used to be signs and labels, that were applied to a product. So anyone could produce and sell yeast extract but they could not put the Marmite label on it, or a label that looked like Marmite's. Now the whole three-dimensional object can, sometimes, be registered as a trademark. It's fortunate that was not possible when someone invented the wheel, or the barrel, or the sheep.

Lydgate and Bulstrode

There is, I read, a 'George Eliot Hospital Trust' in Nuneaton that wishes, under the new National Health Service 'reforms', to tender for a 'strategic partner' in order to secure its future.

I wonder whether they have read Eliot's Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life where an idealistic medical man also found the need to tender for a strategic partner. it did not end happily.

No to ID or no to iphone?

Not long ago there was great turmoil here about government proposals to issue what would effectively become a compulsory identity card linked to an extensive database of personal information. After much dispute, between the notions of state encroachment on personal autonomy and privacy, and blandishments of increased social efficiency and 'if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear', the political classes (to whom it appealed across the waning party political spectrum) backed off.

Now it seems, if we have a little patience, Apple will do it for us, as the iphone knows where we are, what we want, how we pay and goodness knows what else besides. Fingerprint technology is about to make it all 'secure' - secure against outsiders doing bad things to us and secure against us doing what we are not meant to do. Glitz it up - that's the message to politicians. Just another piece of out-sourcing (Apple, the greatest corporation in human history since the Holy Roman Empire and twice as holy, is probably better at that than governments).

As politicians increasingly throw in the towel (or their lot) with big corporations (which, of course, have everything to hide and nothing to fear, except from their fellows, and 52 per cent of which according to that tendentious source of conspiracy theory nonsense, the World Bank, conceal the full extent of their income from governments) - and note David Cameron's quiet introduction of ex-investment bankers into government ranks in his recent reshuffle (no wonder he doesn't want to 'reform' the house of lords, that handy back-door - revolving or not - for government recruitment - Lord Green is still lying low in his ermine) ... where was I?

Product placement

He's worried too

Lacoste, the people who provide golfers and others with fashionably anodyne clothes decorated with a rather twee crocodile, have reportedly asked the Norwegian police to prevent Anders Breivik from appearing publicly in their garments with logo visible to photographers.

It is not known what was the police response, but this clearly exposes a grave gap in international intellectual property protection legislation. It is to be hoped that world trade authorities will take rapid and effective action. Unless global corporations can control who associates themselves with their brands and how (and not only in such high-profile cases as this) the value of these brands, so important to the material and spiritual well-being of us all, will be undermined and social stability and growth will be betrayed.

We need a rapidly formalised and effective system whereby in purchasing any branded product we assent to terms under which the brand-owners can control when we should and should not display their goods to any group of more than three people, in what circumstances, in association with what other products and with what standards of personal appearance and conduct. This must be made to stick; get the legal draughtsmen onto it now.

I wonder, did they ask the crocodiles?

Which hole did we leave the money in?

Knighted for services to digging

‘Sir’ Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, the world’s largest advertising/publicity/media conglomerate, which he is perpetually promising to return to a UK tax base (returning the compliment of his knighthood), but not just yet (like the uncle who rewraps your Christmas present each year), has announced yet another bumper set of financial results. He points out that western corporations are sitting on several trillion dollars worth of ‘largely unleveraged’ assets, and that, by way of quaint illustration, Apple recently boasted greater assets than the US Treasury. Rather than invest in productive capacity (guess why), according to Sir Martin, those corporations are reinforcing their brands, thus accounting for WPP’s current success.

So western business have no faith that economies are set to grow but are spending to try to hijack business from their competitors and ensure that their brands are the last to drop off the public’s shrinking shopping list.

Sir Martin, however, still backs the UK government’s economic policy of cutting the deficit ahead of all else. It’s just as you do with any company, he explained, you get the balance sheet right first… Some may find it depressing that not only so many businessmen but also so many politicians profess to believe that the principles for running a national economy are indistinguishable from those for running a private company, or even a household budget.

Meanwhile banks, despite their plunging share values (and who holds bank shares apart from other banks and financial/ investment corporations?) have some largish amounts of money too (albeit not large enough). ‘The US banks are not lending but not because they don't have the money. The Big US banks have $1.7 trillion on overnight deposit in the NY FED. Most of that is QE money. It is doing nothing for anyone except the banks. US tax payers 'gave' it to them and the banks are now being paid interest on it ... by the tax payer.’



The only show, or hole, in town

‘Hopes that the Bank of England could unleash a new round of quantitative easing to rescue the ailing economy were boosted on Thursday when a member of its monetary policy committee said there was "undoubtedly scope" to restart the recession-busting policy if necessary.’ The member in question is said not yet to think it is necessary but today in the US and elsewhere all eyes are turned to Jackson Hole, former beaver trapping location, in the hope that Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, is about to announce the third round of US quantitative easing. Opinion is by no means unanimous that QE3 is either desirable or possible but ‘David Blanchflower, economics professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and a former member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, believes that QE3 is the "only show in town" for the Fed.’

It has been pointed out that, with the fantastic concentration not only of wealth but of influence and financial decision-making in a very few hands, western economies are becoming effectively not ‘free-market’ but planned and directed economies, essentially similar in structure to the Soviet economy before the collapse of communism.

Macmaharajaisation - or local market adaptation

Habitat loss

In its heyday what Habitat offered and was new was ‘design’. It had to be affordable to the youngish people who were anxious to buy it but cheapness was not the main attraction, and, a bit later, it offered an upward pathway to more expensive versions of the same thing, through the Conran Shop and Heals.

That particular historical moment passed. ‘Design’ became more widely and diffusely available; the market became rather more affluent; the Conran ‘style’ no longer singly characterised a particular social aspiration. You could see a dilution in the Conran Shop, but Habitat became trapped in its old model, with no clear way out or forward, and passed on to become a kind of sub-Next or Laura Ashley, unaware of its identity or place in the market (‘Next’ of course being a deliberately chosen name).

Some few years on, the new flagships in the consumer retail market are IKEA, TopShop, Primark, answering to a new need, in harder times, for permanent cheapness. ‘Design’ is important to them all, even essential to some, but ‘design’ has become a commodity, something we simply expect to be there in what we buy, and chose this or that version of. It is no longer the new dawn that Conran offered with Habitat. Cheapness is now the essential oxygen and, at least with the fashion shops, the relationship with ‘design’ has become predatory, hijacking the style of the rich for the rest of us – quite different from the old Habitat-Conran Shop ladder. The survivor and inheritor of Habitat is, I suppose, Benchmark, which, thriving though it apparently is, thrives in something of a niche.

There was no good reason to think the Kamprad family could breathe new life into Habitat when they were trying to turn it into something that was neither IKEA, their great current success, nor the original Habitat, Conran’s old success. The demise of Habitat was perhaps symbolised when they modified its logo to put a heart inside the house instead of the old table and chairs (oddly reminiscent of Wall's icecream).

Alongside the IKEA, TopShop, Primark constellation in the modern retail sky, one can faintly discern that dimly glowing star Argos, survivor of a far distant galaxy, once known as Green Shield Stamps, predating the days even of Conran, and now certainly not shining with ‘design’ brightness but equally certainly belonging in the low-price zodiac. It is this Argos that is the new owner of Habitat – the brand, the website, the marketing operation, if not of the shops, whose premises will probably swell the ranks of charity shops and pound stores.

Logomotion

FDMA is busy choosing a logo. It is not finding it easy. As Wikipedia tells us “designing a good logo is not a simple task and requires a lot of involvement from the marketing team and the design agency”, although at the same time we learn that the famous Nike swoosh was designed by a student paid, originally, thirty-five dollars for her work.

There has been some criticism that what was recently the most favoured suggestion, a bold typographic design, was too anonymous and could belong to ‘any multi-national company’. Perhaps it could, to the older breed of corporation, like IBM, but more recent multinational companies, like Nike, look to their logos to be anything but anonymous. The modern logo is essentially odious in that it is a deliberate attempt to manipulate the public perception, so different from the printers’ or publishers’ colophons, from which it is partly descended, where the emblem was chosen from a sense of attachment or appreciation possibly unapparent to a public, which nevertheless came to recognise it. See for example the early twentieth-century colophons of the once independent British publishers, Jonathan Cape or Chatto and Windus, now both part of Random House but still thought to be ‘brands’ worth preserving.

DSK: the latest

The arrested suspect, now released on millionaire bail, has been unable to take up residence in New York’s super luxury Bristol Plaza building, where the management is said to have banned him from occupying the two apartments that his wife had booked there.

In the Plaza chambers of New York opinion is distinctly unsympathetic:

‘one resident said the media scrum was the first news he had heard of Strauss-Kahn's arrival. "It's outrageous. You think someone would have told us. I am going to object to this," he said.’

Meanwhile on the streets of Paris a more sceptical attitude prevails:

‘some people think Dominique Strauss-Kahn was stitched up by President Sarkozy. Some think it was the Germans, executing that well-known route out of a common currency, where you honeytrap the main defender of the euro. And some people think it was the Americans, acting out of sheer anti-French malice, or objecting to Strauss-Kahn's observation that the US has breached its debt ceiling (it stands at $14.3 trillion). What I didn't find was one person who actually thinks Strauss-Kahn could possibly have attempted to rape a chambermaid.’

Parisians point out that the gentleman had ample means to indulge his sexual appetites more discreetly, and that his power and wealth could command many women’s favours without protest. Another speculates that the maid, perhaps not knowing who he was, may not thereby have found him attractive:

‘By this rationale, DSK was brought down by his poor brand reach.’

As usual it’s all about brands. Would J**** D**** have had such a problem?

Brands

The Hands of Jobs

An American company, owned by our very own dearly beloved WPP, has just released its annual ‘global brand power list’, where Apple has shot to the top of a scale that estimates brand value on the basis of such key metrics as ‘desirability’ and ‘buzz’. (Somehow you can tell this is the work of an advertising company, but I think money’s in there somewhere too.)

BP of course (wrong kind of buzz) has slumped to number 64 – do we still love it?

The top of the list is dominated by the commuter and communications world – not just Apple but Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Vodafone, IBM and not forgetting China Mobile – with a strong showing also from staff-of-life companies, MacDonald’s, Coca Cola, Walmart and Marlboro, and a sprinkling of lightweights such as GE.

Many of these brands of course, like WPP itself, share internationally creative taxation practices.

Our own Furniture Designer Makers’ Association doesn’t seem to have made it into the top hundred – perhaps because we haven’t sorted out our logo yet.

The Hands of God and Man

A brand too far

Furniture designer-makers – well, British ones, mostly – well, some of them – have been busily changing their association into something more ‘outward-looking’ that will make them much better known, and much better off. DMOU becomes FDMA. It has taken more than two years of discussion and debate and some people – well, me anyway – regret that the open and fluid character of the old association will be lost for no actual gain. So this is a post only for furniture designer-makers and those with a direct interest in such things.

The association will certainly have to change the ‘About Us’ page on its website.

Now we have a committee, whereas before we prided ourselves that we did not, and it takes its first small steps into brand definition with a quest for a Iogo. To what extent, I wonder, is it possible to advance the interests of all members by the promotion of a single FDMA ‘brand’?

Members get touchy at being differentiated from other members, at least at the upper end of the spectrum, but we cannot sensibly ignore the fact that, having already taken our association down the road of ‘inclusiveness’, our membership embraces a very wide range of work.

Of course the FDMA can say, ‘At whatever level you wish to acquire a piece of furniture you can find a small independent designer-maker who can provide you with something individual and satisfying.’ But that’s hardly compulsive promotion. As soon as the promotion tries to be more effective it has to concentrate on some differentiated particulars. Can we really advance the fortunes of --- --- and --- --- in a single breath? Do we all sell to the same market? I think it is difficult to answer ‘yes’; the membership as a whole just does not constitute, in a commercially meaningful sense, a single ‘brand’. We do have a, rather frayed, ‘philosophical’ identity as ‘designer-makers’, but, although that is real, I do not think it will be much called upon in commercial promotion: it is sometimes difficult to get our membership to understand it, let alone the buying public.

There are some members scarcely involved in one-off commissions; there are great disparities of scale (some members head companies that employ around 40 people, others are one-person, or even half-person bands); enormous variation in the character of ‘artistic’ approach; there are members concentrating just on particular types of furniture; and so on. But the most obvious disparity is in – I struggle to find a word that expresses what we all recognise without giving offence – ‘sophistication’? ‘refinement’? ‘originality’? maybe just ‘expense’. Not all our members can meaningfully offer to inlay their client’s coat of arms into their purchase. A few of our members have achieved almost ‘heritage’ status, actively admired by a section of the public who cannot possibly aspire to own a piece of it. You have only to look at the published results of successful PR about our work, with that vulgar or pretentious vacuousness that so often characterises it, to see that we cannot blithely ignore unwanted externalities in constructing our promotion. These are marketing facts. The world is not about to change, even if we are.

So, ill equipped as we are to direct the public attention with any developed distinguishing discourse of our own about our work, we focus it (or allow it to be focussed) on the small group of individuals whose work we know, from experience, provokes the readiest response, a small group selected by the even smaller group that runs the project, one perhaps not completely distinct from our (non)-executive committee. So FDMA becomes a successful public brand; we have created stars, or at least buffed up our existing ones – but is it a successful association?

Once an identity of structure and an identity of brand are adopted they require, for their effective functioning, an identity of membership, and one will be acquired and imposed by process and practice if it is not chosen by discussion and consensus.

The question of our identity needs answering not only in deciding what to do in defining FDMA as such, but also in forming the relationship between individual projects and the FDMA ‘brand’. It is difficult to see that most marketing or promotional projects will not be slanted towards the ‘upper’ echelons of one-off commission work. I don’t mean exclusively so, but, given our inability to select or characterise our work by any criterion beyond a general and unarticulated notion of excellence or expressiveness (to award it a Guildmark so to speak), it seems all the more likely. That is the easiest sector to promote; those are the members most likely to have the resources, the time, the money and the appetite to support projects; that is the territory from which the FDMA idea sprang and it is quite prominent in the committee make-up.

In that way FDMA will become ‘aspirational’: with people joining expecting to serve a long apprenticeship before they can hope to participate fully in the tangible benefits of membership. That is not how DMOU/FDMA has presented itself to designer-makers hitherto, and it is not, in my view, a sustainable format for the association.

I am not suggesting there are dark forces at work here, or that this is the exclusive character of FDMA’s likely development, but I do think it is a real danger that, over time, after the initial enthusiasm, a significant body of members (including some who voted for FDMA) will come to see FDMA (with some justification) as benefiting mainly those ‘upper echelons’, those who, to their minds, least need it.

They will say nothing at first and so, in that sense, the association and its discussion forum will appear undivided. But the resentment will grow, and from time to time break out in fractious and slightly them-and-us. This is the classic path of broad-based but formalised ‘professional’ associations, especially those (and FDMA is quite likely to join their ranks) where membership is seen as essential for professional advancement.

All the talk now of course is of success, democracy and solidarity, but this minority will feel more and more ignored and become less and less inclined to take any part in the association, and so sets in its slow decline, or else its conversion into (or supplanting by) a more frankly selective and ‘aspirational’ body.

The more our committee tries to define the single FDMA ‘brand’, moving on past logos, thinking they are being ‘inclusive’, the worse it will become, because it can only be a pretence that all our interests are served by a single kind of promotion and FDMA will become effectively identified with the kind of work that is easiest to promote. It is our own backyard globalisation, our surrender to the deracinated concept of the ‘world-class’, where creativity is validated not by the individual, rooted imagination but by general commercial endorsement – a concentration on the kind of furniture whose market depends upon a globalised, high-input, low resource-cost, high wealth-polarisation economy, which, it seems to me is what the Guildmark culture links into. We are in danger of adopting a cult of mindless excellence, complete with its own external identifiers. DMOU/FDMA, despite in practice always veering towards inclusiveness over any individual membership application, has already, in its outward pronouncements, begun slipping down that slope by putting first, in its list of indicators for potential members to use in pre-assessing themselves, awards, selection for particular exhibitions, and membership of other groups.

Maybe it won’t be as bad as I fear; maybe we’ll just rub along with nothing terribly remarkable being achieved for any of us. So that we all stay a little disappointed, but no-one gets resentful of others. I doubt it, but, if we want to maintain a broad association more than we want to achieve substantial advantage for just a section of it, that may be the best we can hope for, unless we take radical and determined steps to disaggregate the FDMA commercial ‘brand’ and get back to our original vision.