We love the Good For Nothing crew. So when an email went round asking for people to take part in one of their Creative Riots to find a way to raise £1 million in 50 days for the East Africa famine crisis we were more than happy to pitch in. Ambitious? Yes. A bit mad? Yes. Impossible? No.
Why?
Farm-to-Table
It’s a funny concept when you really think about it.
Isn’t all food from a farm?
Isn’t all food consumed at a table?
Well no, not really… and no, not always.
In fact, a whole lot of the food we eat these days is created in a lab and consumed in a car – if we’re being really honest, a lot of it is designed in a lab specifically to be consumed in a car. Fast food is as American as… well, fast food. The concept itself was born in America, it was raised and continues to thrive in America and has now become one of our most powerful and influential global exports. Fast food has fundamentally shaped the landscape of the United States and the world – quite literally and figuratively (pun intended).
Technology changes lives, and sometimes quite literally, sustains lives. But that awe-inspiring ability can be its greatest enemy. People, amazingly, often take a stand against things like advanced fertility treatment, artificial organs (an artificial heart transplant patient broke new ground this week in being able to leave hospital, go home and begin living an independent life) or stem cell therapy. There is a quite common view, that we will not let technology’s ability exceed our own. Two thousand years of a human centric world is built on this notion.
Also in this category of technologies too clever by half, is GMO technology. GM foods – Frankenstein foods – are often assumed to be insecticide or herbicide resistant crops and are frowned upon (this seems less right in a world still so challenged by famine). But GMO properties extend far beyond this – offering massive nutritional advantage. Purple tomatoes can carry a much heavier load of the good things that vegetables give us – health promoting anthocyanins. Golden Rice fights vitamin A deficiency and therefore the malnutrition that causes blindness. Other GM benefits can include significant reduction in carbon used for food production and the production of alternative energy sources for fuels and pharmaceuticals. We’re looking at hardier food, potentially better for us, able to fight disease and produce biofuels. The difference these technologies can make to vast parts of the world challenged by hostile environmental conditions is enormous.
Whilst it’s difficult to talk about GM in one lump - they, and their effects are too diverse (and there is no doubt, given their power, that they need to be deployed carefully) - there is much to suggest the need for a new climate of opinion. As long as the public don’t support research in this area, it will remain in the hands of private companies who can pursue opportunistic, sometime monopolistic intentions. We have to stop shooting ourselves, and the people who need help, in the proverbial foot. We have to bring GM into the mainstream – to serve public interests, not such commercial agendas. That means that it has to become something people feel much more positive talking about.
The biggest source of general resistance to GMO seems to be the idea that it is not ‘natural’. And yet our bodies moved beyond natural a long time ago – we continually consume all kinds of additives and drugs, apply a wealth of lotions, breathe in polluted air and literally shape our bodies and minds to physical technologies all around us. Natural is a fantasy. Ironic then, that one of the possibilities of GM technology could be to get plants and crops back to their original traits – to undo the muddying of plant and crop varieties which has happened already as a result of centuries of farmers’ cross breeding to create stronger, tastier, prettier variants which suit prevailing tastes.
The idea of ‘natural’ is holding us back and potentially depriving people of life-saving improvements to how we live. This is exactly the kind of issue that companies like Wolff Olins need to get their teeth into. How can we ensure that a one-sided story doesn’t take over, and that technologies with so much potential aren’t ruled out wholesale? It’s our role as a brand consultancy to keep looking at difficult issues with fresh eyes, in order to ensure that the pervading opinion does not shape our reality for the worse.
Suzanne Livingston
If you want to know what is going to shape the way we live more than any other factor – look no further than food. As food gets scarcer, prices go up, and players in the food chain start getting very rich very fast. More importantly, they will exercise enormous control over the resources that we all rely on – literally – for our survival.
Depending on how you count we all have spent progressively less of our disposable income on food (for the UK 30% in the 50s, 17% in the 80s, less than 10% today) and correspondingly more on housing (10% in the 80s, 20% today).Yet now bread, vegetables, eggs, cereals, milk, cheese are all rising in price faster than they have ever done before. So is fuel. Meanwhile real incomes are in decline.
My hunch is we’ll have to spend significantly more on food from now on. Because we simply won’t have a choice. The question is what’s going to give in return?
(Nick Keppel-Palmer)
Probably not. And definitely not if you have been eating KFC. Greasy, unhealthy, deep fried, heart attack in a bucket.
At least that’s the way I think about them and I haven’t been inside a KFC for decades. What if anything would change my mind?
Will dropping their tagline be enough? Of course not. But it might be a start.
I think they’d have to go a lot further though to win me back. What’s required probably involves more than a bit of transparency over calories.
It’s still chicken in a bucket. It’s not health food so why dress it up as if it might be? Maybe the unashamed honesty of Burger King’s Pizza Burger is a more honest, more authentic approach. 2500 calories. In a bun. Eat it if you dare.
(Nick Keppel-Palmer)
Big news of the week -and no, I’m not talking about AOL acquiring the Huffington Post - Organic Avenue has officially opened an outpost on Sullivan Street (aka 5 mins from Wolff Olins NY offices, aka I can now get my green juice fix any day of the week!)
For those who don’t know, Organic Avenue is a sweet little vegan raw foods / juice company - started as one small shop in the LES about 10 years ago, slowly expanding ever since. I first happened upon the company as a summer intern, who happened to moonlight as a bartender at the (then) newly opened Pure Food and Wine - one of NYC’s first (and certainly most gourmet) raw foods restaurants.
Born and raised in a town like Boulder, CO, the smell of wheat grass was nothing new to me. But at that time in Manhattan, the idea of raw foods, green juice or ‘eating clean’ was pretty much an alien concept (or at least a novelty delegated to the select few, rather crunchy natural foods stores around the city).
Fast forward to 2011… times have certainly changed:
friday is my day for yoga.
while i walk to the gym nearly every morning (up west 4th street, across west 11th), today i noticed the following:
- dog poo (customary)
- 3 used condoms (not as customary)
- stomped-on cockroach
- vomit
- sleeping homeless man
- various pieces of food/litter disgarded on the sidewalk
- overflowing trashcans
as i sat in my yoga class i contemplated why it is that i love and live in
new york city.
there’s something about being a new yorker that presupposes a
skewed sense of reality.
one that accepts all the bad
in order to soak up all the good.
it’s all about perspective, which is what makes brands so interesting to me.
“new york city,” the brand, is something i full-heartedly buy into, cockroaches, condoms, vomit and all.
but at what point (if ever) does a new yorker become a former new yorker?
at what point do people stop buying the brand in favor of something sunnier, cleaner, prettier, easier?
at what point does that skewed reality come into focus?
if it ever happens to me, i think i’ll blame it on advertising.
om.
(marissa)
On my way to work every day I pass through the W4th St. subway station in New York, where I walk by an installation of Gatorade advertisements. These images depict real athletes as they live some athletic moment of truth. This campaign accompanies Gatorade’s evolved design – a blocky “G” with a lightning bolt superimposed, and block CAPS on labels that scream messages that could have been written by my high-school gym teacher:
BRING IT.
NO EXCUSES.
BE TOUGH.
They’re DARING you to drink it.
You can’t measure up! Why are you even trying?
This bit of brand aggression suggests that Gatorade is seriousness and performance and results in a bottle, and by drinking it you’ll be about performance and results too.
But Gatorade has become just as aspirational as its target customer – both striving hard for health and performance that the product won’t deliver. The drinks pack 50 to 310 calories per serving, and are carbohydrate, sugar, and sodium rich. It’s angling to be tastier than water, healthier than a soft drink, using health, performance and testosterone as a wrapper.
It shows how design, communications, and even product development can become disconnected from the needs of the business and consumer:
There must be a sweet spot between what the world requires, and what Pepsi has to achieve as a business, that doesn’t require re-skinning Gatorade as something it’s not. To do it, business and brand have to lead what’s innovated, designed, and ultimately communicated.
Imagine the customer loyalty and affinity that could come, and the impact on sport, wellness, and overall public health were someone to innovate for the results that advertising in the health drink category promises…
(Britt Bulla)
So Starbucks have opened a new non-Starbucks themed coffee shop in Seattle. Their claim is that they’ll eventually have only three of them.
It’s pretty interesting that much of the Twitter traffic on this has been of the “Starbucks brand is so tarnished they have to change it” variety, which if you’re not a fan of their coffee is probably pretty tempting.
However, there are two more interesting thoughts. The first, as suggested by Seattlest is that this is going to be a lab where they can test ideas fast and without danger to the core brand. This may well be the case as using market facing labs in locations close to your headquarters is a tried and proven trick. Just ask Bank of America.
However, there may be something else going on here.
When large corporations look at markets they are often looking for the mass proposition. The proposition that will fit the largest number of people, encouraging scale economies and scale growth.
The challenge is that to be “good enough” for a large enough group of people means that you have to compromise on creating a “special enough” experience for a specific group of people. This is possibly why Budweiser has almost no flavor - because it is designed to be “good enough” for as many people as possible, and hence the product cannot be special for any one group.
Starbucks appears to a great example of this in action - as it has grown, it has worn away the edges of specialness in the experience in order to appeal “just enough” to a broad group of people.
Unfortunately for them, this has now brought them dangerously close to the McDonald’s of this world, who’ve begun to eat their lunch.
How to respond?
Well, changing the core Starbucks proposition would be both costly and perhaps a little dangerous (as you’d be messing with the familiar), so adding a new niche proposition or perhaps even propositions may well be a smart move in the search for growth.
This allows them to keep the Starbucks franchise robust and add new experiences to reignite the innovation/growth engine. While it is easy to decry their initial pilot as being derivative, not everywhere has the robust coffee culture of Capitol Hill in Seattle. What may appear old hat there, could well be quite unique elsewhere.
Which, of course, raises interesting questions about the future of innovation for mass brands. As the Internet has very explicitly shown us, mass is really a collection of smaller niches - where the individual consumers within these niches now have tremendous power to self-identify and organize themselves.
As mass players max-out on their potential, they have to look elsewhere for growth. This suggests we may well see more innovation of the kind that Starbucks has done here and not less - where mass brands look for ways to stretch from their core into more specific niches.
The trillian dollar question will be whether mass brands can embrace the specialness which is a defining characteristic of a niche brand, or whether they will need to create whole new brands to do it. So far we’ve seen examples of three different approaches:
In the extend the brand and try to make it feel special camp, we have Pepsi Natural, which appears to be a very contradictory marriage of brand and proposition. Particularly when we consider established niche competitors in this area such as GUS soda.
Starbucks (as shown in the image above) have chosen a different brand, but with the modifier of a more subtle “inspired by Starbucks” endorsement.
Finally, in the create a new brand in order to be special camp we have Sunglass Hut, who chose to completely seperate their Ilori brand in order to create a completely different experience to drive growth.
It’s not clear right now that any one approach will fit everyone, but I’m tempted to think that the more mass - and hence the least special - the experience of the core brand, the more difficult it will be to stretch it into a specific niche.
(Paul Worthington)
Photograph borrowed from Seattlest