So, she did what any right-thinking person would do. She wrote a letter to our local newspaper, The Ham & High, to warn the local populace of the likelihood of encountering little green men congregating outside The Flask at opening time, and also posted an alert on the UK UFO Sightings website.

We’re all doomed!

Huge jolliness and silliness erupted throughout the local population.

I rang the Ham&High and told them that there’s a chap who goes on to the Heath from time to time with his two sons, and launches Chinese lanterns. They have a small candle to power them, and these candles, which burn at a fairly low temperature, emit an orange light. I’ve seen them whilst I’ve  been having a run.

I spoke to two reporters, and explained. They were clearly disappointed. Literate aliens might have bought the Ham&High, too. And, anyway, it was a great story. Of course aliens would prefer Hampstead High Street to the stony and shopless Arizona desert after all that time travelling. Further, I think Arizona is dry, so if you need a beer after traveling 58,908,647 light years to get here, Hampstead is more likely to serve you a decent beer.

Well, people used to believe in spontaneous human combustion, but post mortems, irritatingly, tended to favour the following explanation. The dead person had had a heart attack, usually fatal, and fell on a candle but did not extinguish it. The candle melted the dead person’s fat, and burnt it. This explains, firstly, why the walls and ceiling of the room in which the person died always had a greasy, orange residue on them. It also explains why their hands and feet were never burnt, since they do not contain fat. And, finally, with the adoption of electric light, it is very unlikely to occur in wealthy neighbourhoods, such as Hampstead.

But….

But we all like the idea of UFOs. And we’d love it if we were walking along the street with a particularly irritating client whom we would just love to disappear in a sudden fiery ball of orange flame as he’s shouting, “The logo isn’t big enough..aagggghhhh!”.

And that, I think, is why people love wacky stories.

Advertisers should bear this in mind. Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream had a seriously wacky story, which their customers adored. So did the GM Saturn, which GM killed as soon as the car started to sell significant volumes. Ben and Jerry’s is simply not the same since Unilever bought the business. And, very likely, Apple will never be the same again now that Steve Jobs is dead.

I watched an hour-long program about Apple last night. Cindy Gallop, whom I hired years ago in London at Gold Greenlees Trott, appeared three times to comment on Jobs and Apple. When we hired Cindy, GGT had Honeywell Computers as a client, and I was in charge of account management. I’m certain that she never asked me if she could work on the Honeywell business even though we were winning awards on it. We even launched the first digital TV commercial anywhere in the world.

But, but Cindy was unmoved.

And I’m not surprised.

Honeywell had no story to get the blood flowing. And, if your business or brand doesn’t have something to make your customers want to remain buying from you, you’ll need to invent a story and then bring it to life, just as Jack Daniels has done.

Finally, I don’t know who the lady was who mistook the lanterns for UFOs, but I hope she doesn’t read this post. If she’s like me, the lady would prefer the UFO explanation.

The Martians have landed! You read it here first!

Related articles

• Are UFOs Stalking Mars Rover Curiosity? (news.discovery.com)
• Crayfish invade Hampstead Heath (telegraph.co.uk)

Despite the EU, spyware, malware and secret cookies are thriving.

A couple of weeks ago my laptop imploded.

For the second time in the last ten years, a hard drive had quit. The first was an IBM hard drive at the centre of a Dell laptop. The second was a Fujitsu in a Toshiba. I’ve kept both of the failed drives and use them as paperweights. They stop the paper getting blown around the place.

I took the wreck of my laptop to Computer Precision and handed it over to the genial and brainy Sunil in the murky depths of the workshop. Three days later, it was back in my hands, a new hard drive in place, with most of the data and links in working order.

Nonetheless, I checked.

All the programs I expected to find were there, but there were also some surprises. What were Yontoo, Snap.Do and WinPcap doing in my installed files? And what were they doing?

Yontoo is ad-ware. Snap.Do is malware which takes over your browser’s toolbar. WinPcap tracks your web behaviour. All three of these had eluded Norton.

I cleared them all, and then bought an American spy hunting program called SpyHunter. Once I’d got the program running, it found several hundred tracking cookies and other stuff which I had not authorised. The EU takes a very dim view of this, and rightly so. It’s not their data.

The Cookie Collective summarises it thus: “On May 26th 2011 a new EU originated law came into effect that requires website owners to make significant changes to their sites, and may fundamentally change the whole web browsing and shopping experience for everybody. This Cookie Law is amended privacy legislation that requires websites to obtain informed consent from visitors before they can store or retrieve any information on a computer or any other web connected device.”

I then looked further.

SpyHunter provided me with a list of  spyware which was tracking my online behaviour. I list them below:

ad.yieldmanager.com, adserver, Adtech, Advent, Atlas DMT, Atwola, DoubleClick, Gator, Media, Mediaplex, Qksru, QuestionMarket, Saving-sys, Sex, Toolbar.Funmoods, TribalFusion, WebtrendsLive

Most of these are tracking cookies, but Funmoods is not. It had that day replaced Firefox as my browser, and had wormed its way into my installed programs. I can’t currently get rid of AOL on my toolbar, either. Other cookies are from media agencies watching your online behaviour so that they can match your browsing choices with clients who’d like to sell to you.

I’m going to take some action about this, and will tell you how I get on.

In the meantime, check your installed programs, don’t download free software and don’t trust what the websites say about not installing other programs if you click No in the acceptance box.

Finally, get some spyware protection now. Norton didn’t pick up the intrusions I had. Specialised software for downloading costs about £25, and is a good investment, especially if you do not have access to an IT department.

Finally, if you want to track the sources of the cookies that you might find on your own laptop, try Google’s mind-blowing Collusion. The numbers are big.

If you have an opinion about malware, spyware and cookies, please comment on this blog.

Related articles

• Not so funmood (ask.metafilter.com)
• HTG Explains: What’s a Browser Cookie? (howtogeek.com)

Cycling in Summertown, Oxford

You might have noticed recently that there has been a row about the marking and awarding of GCSE grades in the UK. GSCE stands for General Certificate of Secondary Education, and they are usually sat by pupils aged between fourteen and sixteen.

This year, there’s been a thorough-going row about the grades awarded. The marking was much tougher than in the Spring term, 2012, which meant, for example, that pupils expecting a C-grade got a D instead. What lay behind this are the clear signs over the past ten years that it has been getting easier every year to get A-grades.

The reason for this is that there are a number of Examination Boards, including an Oxford Board and a Cambridge Board. They are in competition for examinees, which means they want as many pupils to get high grades as possible, and that has led to a weakening of standards.

The situation is called Grade Inflation, and this summer action was finally taken.

Now, whilst I teach for the London College of Communication amongst other things, and my wife works at Parliament Hill School, and my elder daughter is Assistant Headmistress at The Jubilee Primary School in Hackney, I am not an expert on this subject.

However, I do have some experience which might be helpful for anguished parents and their offspring.

Many years ago, when Noah was still building the Ark, I finished my Finals at Oxford and then got a temporary job working for the Oxford Examination Board. This is in Summertown, in the north of Oxford.

Thirty or so of us sat for seven hours a day checking the marking of French dictation scripts at A-level, which are taken by 17 and eighteen year olds.

We looked at a number of parameters, including checking that the examiners had added up the students’ mistakes correctly.

Approximately 30% of the scores were wrong.

Now, this was a long time ago, so I expect some things have improved, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are still errors in collating marks in scripts which are cursive rather than numeric.

And that makes me think that any parent, whose son or daughter has achieved a grade lower than expected, should challenge it.

If my experience is still valid, for many parents the challenge would be worth while.

At a maximum, they might have a 30% chance of an increased grade.

Equally, they also have a chance of a downgrading, so it’s only worthwhile for parents who have good reason for expecting a higher rather than a lower grade.

But, if it was me, I’d complain.

My thanks to Casey Lessard for permission to use the photo at the top of this blog: http://www.caseylessard.com/

Related articles

• England phases out GCSE exams (todayonline.com)

We walked into the notary’s offices, which were surprisingly quiet. As we waited for Sr Clar, Jose said that a year ago it would have taken three months’ notice to get an appointment with him, but now, with the collapse of the building boom, he has time on his hands.

Se Vende signs are everywhere

The collapse has been astonishingly swift. Since my last visit to Javea a year ago all construction work has stopped except for one restaurant refurbishment in the port. All the other projects have simply been abandoned, including a shopping mall on the southern edge of Javea’s Arenal, and a large urbanizacion on the road to Benitachell. Se Vende and Se Alquiler are everywhere.

Consequently, all the construction workers are jobless, which has led to the unusual sight of Spanish unemployed workers begging at cafes and bars. Previously, the beggars were North Africans but they’ve all gone home. At Diego’s e Julie’s restaurant, business still seemed fairly brisk, but Julie said that was simply because of the Moors and Christians fiesta, which coincided with our visit. She also said that she’d pulled out of a new business project because of the lack of finance. At Azorin, a fish restaurant we know well, the owner asked that we pay by cash rather than by card. Furniture shops, estate agents, kitchen shops, swimming pool contractors and so on have noticeably started to disappear in Javea.

On the national level, graduates are leaving the country for Latin America, or for Germany or the UK. Adult unemployment is running at 25% whilst youth unemployment has reached 50%.

How are the Spanish going to turn this around?

King Juan Carlos warned of the building boom’s likely consequences

I don’t recall the exact date, which was probably five years ago, but I do recall King Juan Carlos warning his fellow Spaniards that the building boom was not only ruining Spain’s coastline, but that it would also end in disaster. He was right on both counts.

In earlier blogs, I’ve written about the economic calamity in Greece, but I don’t think Spain’s problems share the same roots with the Greek ones. The Greek collapse is partly to do with its poor export performance and the general unwillingness of the Greeks to pay their taxes. Spain, on the other hand, has an industrial base with, for example, a strong car manufacturing industry, a good export trade, and a generally honest attitude concerning taxes.

The economic implosion in Spain was mainly due to the building boom, and the subsequent collapse of credit. In this respect, the Spanish situation is much more like the sub-prime mortgage disaster in the United States three years ago than the situation in Greece.

Later, after we had returned from Spain, we borrowed a cottage in the Cotswolds in Kingham, and spent some time wandering round the shops of Chipping Norton, Moreton-in-Marsh and Hereford. I am relieved to be able to report that the antiques shops in this part of the UK are still doing vigorous business, a long way from the troubles in Spain.

The BBMF Lancaster and vessel of British myths. Copyright Jonathan Irwin Photography

The biggest event recently in the UK was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. On the Monday, my wife, two friends, Andy and Angela White, and I walked up Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath, where there was a gaggle of spectators, probably no more than seventy-five, and watched the RAF flypast. Everyone else was in The Mall. This is the road which runs from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace. Trafalgar Square commemorates Admiral Nelson’s defeat of the French and Spanish navies in 1805, in which he lost his life. The victory ended the likelihood of Napoleon invading Great Britain.

For us, the flypast was about three miles away, and it included four Spitfires, one Hurricane and a Lancaster. We could hear them better than see them. The cloud base was 500 feet at best. The sky was chucking down the rain. As we turned to go home, water dripping from our noses, we felt Parliament Hill begin to shake. The six aircrafts’ combined nine Rolls-Royce  Merlins drowned out conversation as they thundered over Parliament Hill at 300 feet, using the high hill as a waypoint for RAF Duxford.

We all stopped and watched them go. I don’t cry easily, being British and having been to a boy’s boarding school or two for rather more years than I might have chosen, but this hit me. I looked at everyone else, and, for everyone, men and women alike, tears were coursing down their cheeks as well.

Why? Because these are iconic aircraft with meanings deeply embedded in them, all of which we completely understand as a nation. Many of the myths of the Second World War are kept alive by these aircraft, and will do so long after all who were alive during WW2 are dead.

HMS Victory, in a dry-dock in Portsmouth, keeps alive myths from an earlier war, the Napoleonic War. Napoleon posed the same threat to us then as the Germans did in 1939. When you ask kids in Portsmouth who poses the biggest threat to the UK, they always say the same thing: “The French!” Hmm, they might still be right.

Later, I rang my Mum, ex WW2 RCAF. She asked, “Did you see the Lancaster? It made me cry.” She wasn’t the only one.

And that is semiotics.

John Klawitter, who lives in California and whom I thank, added: “I have similar feelings when the last of the B25 Mitchell bombers roar by overhead at the airshows here in the West San Fernando Valley. They were built in Burbank, 19 miles east of here. As a young boy on a farm in Northern Illinois, flocks of them would fly overhead, stopping off in Chicago on their way across the Atlantic to help in WWII. A distinctive, very loud, rattly even, sound of the twin engines. I’ll run outside from my studio, to catch a glimpse of that or any other warplane from those days of yore.”

Finally, I’ve stumbled over a photographer, Jonathan Irwin, who provided me with the shot of the BBMF Lancaster. The photo is copyright, so please ask his permission first before downloading a shot. His Flickr site is outstanding, and well worth a visit. My thanks to him for his help with this post.

It was a dismal experience, starting as soon as I went through the front door and presented myself to the lady on Reception, who took a long time to look up and acknowledge my arrival. She was very low energy.

Looking round, I felt my energy levels beginning to fall out of the sky, too.

The room had a grey floor. The walls were white or black, depending  upon which way I faced. Black is the colour of death, mourning and the night. Grey is one of the colours of depression. White is often linked to tranquillity, but it only added to the gloomy atmosphere. The colour temperature of black, grey and white are all low. There were plenty of surprises to follow, possibly the subject of a separate article, but let’s stick with the colours.

I was teaching some French students recently at The London College of Communication. We were discussing the importance of having an art director who paints as well as directs. This got us on to the subject of cars. I asked them, “What colour is a fast car?”

A sports car is red because Ferrari made it so.

All nineteen said, “Red!”

I held up a photo of a red Ferrari 458.

“Yes!” they hollered. “That’s a fast car!”

And that, of course, is why you should judge a book by its cover. Any half-capable art director will put in all the cultural clues needed by a potential purchaser to judge if the book she holds is what she’ll enjoy reading.

So why had this digital agency got some key cultural signposts so badly wrong?

It turned out that nobody seemed to talk to each other. They went into work, booted up their computer, plugged in their earphones, ate sandwiches at their work station, went home and disappeared.

I think this was a failure of both leadership and management. The showreel looked lovely, but had no substance. I had no idea what was the point of view was which the agency hoped would win it new business.

The meaning of colours is a tiny part of semiotics.

Greg Rowland, who runs Greg Rowland Semiotics, says, “Semiotics is about understanding how the world of culture works. By analysing symbolism across brands, products, design, communications and popular culture we can uncover amazing new insights.”

I have found this to be very true. For example, I pitched for Sheridans a little while ago. We used Ginny Valentine and

Sheridans, a semiotic liqueur full of cultural tension

her partner, Monty, to look at what the contrasting black and white liquids might mean to purchasers. As we discussed it, Ginny said, “It reminds me of the chess game between Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair – tremendous tension.”

So, we took that observation, turned it into a pitch and an advertising idea, showed it to IDV, now Diageo, and Tony Scouller more or less gave us the business on the spot.

Semiotics covers all those areas which we mutually understand but never really need to discuss. In the UK, recent immigration has stretched this thin in some cases, but not maliciously. I recently discovered in a talk at the Jubilee School in Hackney to 5-6 year olds, most of whom are recent arrivals from Turkey and Africa, that they do not think of the Luftwaffe when the word bomb is used. They think of car and vest bombs, which explains their confusion as my ex-WW2 Royal Canadian Airforce mother, Myra, attempted to describe what the Blitz in London was like. The children were imagining old VW Beetles, stuffed full of TNT, being pushed out of the rear of Dornier 17s at night.

Finally, semiotics really do matter when it comes to being assessed by someone else.

No matter how hard we try to be fair when we’re interviewing  job candidates, we know within thirty seconds if we’re going to get along with the applicant. You can start an interview as a candidate well and end it badly, but you cannot start it badly and end it well.

Chaps: shower, shave, brush your teeth, don’t eat garlic or baked beans the previous evening, wear clean shoes, be on time, get your girlfriend to tie a tie around your neck, and look interested.

Girls: I don’t need to tell you what to do, but do bear in mind that many interviewers now are older women. I have recently seen this go hideously wrong.

If you want to know more about semiotics, and want to boost your new business hit rate, click on the links below, or send me a comment, and I’ll get in touch.

Finally, many thanks to Roger Morris for suggesting this topic. He had looked at the new lay out and colour of this blog, and had wondered what the transition from green to red might mean  to the blog’s readership. If there’s enough interest in the topic, we’ll take it further in a longer and more thorough post soon. If you have observations of your own about semiotics, please post a comment. I’m also interested in guest blogs on the subject.

http://www.semiotic.co.uk/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

Greece might be worse off by reverting to the drachma

I do apologise for this, but I have to come back to the Greek situation.

Briefly, on 4 July 2012, Roger Bootle and his team of six beat something like 400 other competitors for a £250,000 prize. Roger Bootle used to be the Chief Economist at HSBC, and now runs Capital Economics, which employs nearly 100 people.

The task was to recommend how a euro country could leave the eurozone without a complete catastrophe. The winning submission is 25,000 words long, is in English, and can be found at www.policyexchange.org.uk

It is the second biggest private financial prize after the Nobel Prizes, and was funded by Simon Wolfson.

Briefly, the key recommendations by Bootle’s team included:

1. Plan your exit in secret, and only tell Europe once your planning is complete
2. The new currency, in this case the drachma, should be introduced at parity with the euro
3. Credit cards would be needed to fill the gap whilst sufficient supply of drachmas build up
4. Wage indexation would be prohibited (why don’t they do this now?)
5. The country’s national debt would be moved into the new currency

I have read some but not the whole report. I have also used a short article by Kathryn Hopkins of The Times, but it seems to me that the drachma would instantly go into freefall using this plan, the reason being that the Greek economy‘s cost of servicing its debts, whether in euros or in drachmas, is beyond the ability of both its economy and its taxpayers to sustain. It may well be able to effect an orderly exit from the eurozone, but the future beyond that looks unremittingly grim.

Layla Album Cover 1970

I recently visited an old friend at Publicis in London.

Publicis is a large French advertising agency, and has offices in Baker Street. Michael Winner, who, apart from being a long-standing and successful film producer, writes restaurant reviews for the Sunday Times.

He recently wrote, “I hate Baker Street. It’s a nothing street that starts near Oxford Street (another horror), goes in a straight line north, leads you one way or another to St John’s Wood (don’t like that either) and then goes on through Hertfordshire (nice), the north (strange) and Scotland (adorable) and ends up at the North Pole. I suppose, if it had the energy, Baker Street would carry on down the other side of the planet and go to the South Pole.”

I feel rather the same, but my reason for not being very happy about Baker Street is markedly different.

In the 1980s, musicians and record labels started to make their music available for use in advertising. This was bad news for writers of advertising jingles. Their business was killed overnight. What it led to was the launch of  Microsoft’s Windows 95 using Start Me Up by The Rolling Stones and the birth of a new business, that of reselling hit songs for advertising.

During the late 1980s, Lowe Howard-Spink was looking for a more effective way of branding Vauxhall’s advertising. Vauxhall is General Motors’ main brand in the UK.

The idea was to have a standard sign-off at the end of every Vauxhall TV commercial, which would be a well-known, popular musical motif of less than five seconds.

This was not as easy to find as you might think, but the agency eventually settled on Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street, and intended coupling it with, “Once Driven, Forever Smitten.”

Unfortunately, Mr Rafferty was less than keen, so Alan Cluer, I think, was dispatched the The Robert Stigwood Organisation, and came back with the rights to Layla.

This song was written in 1970, in two parts with the piano coda being composed a week after the first section.

We were surprised to get it, but everyone was delighted, especially the clients in Luton.

The key riff was re-recorded by a session guitarist, and the music ran on Vauxhall’s TV advertising until, I think, 1995.

It could have run longer, but everybody concerned began to lose interest in keeping the riff following the death of Clapton’s little boy, Conan, who fell from a window in New York in 1992. The marketing director at Vauxhall, Gio Cantarella, sent flowers and commiserations to Clapton in New York, but they were delivered to the wrong address.

At this point, we wondered about re-approaching Gerry Rafferty’s management, but they said that they had no idea where he was. And, as it turned out, that remained the situation, on and off, on a regular basis until his death on January 4, 2011, of liver failure.

Consequently, the two words, Baker Street, don’t conjure up Sherlock Holmes in my mind, but they do make me wonder if we would have been better advised to go for a jingle instead.

If anyone reading this post writes advertising jingles for a living, I’d love to hear from you.

Is Ronnie Bond still alive?

Finally, I’m interested in your opinions about this new layout, please.

I’ve just been to a cash machine in London’s Kentish Town. This machine cheerfully told me my current balance. I nearly fell over with excitement. Had my bank account somehow become muddled up with those of Bill Gates, The Aga Khan and The Queen of Sheba?

How many helipads should I specify for the ocean-going yacht which I would now have to buy?

How did I go from being an impecunious scribbler, marketing consultant and teacher for both The European Association of Communications Agencies and the European Communication School – yes, I know, I get confused, too – to being a Master of The Universe with more than £9.42 in my current account?

The answer is straightforward.

I had help.

But, first, how do you get your way when all seems hopeless?

If you’re Nikita Khrushchev, you can bang your shoe on the table, as he did at the United Nations on 12 October 1960 as he aggressively berated a hapless diplomat from Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong who accused the Soviet Union of having swallowed up Eastern Europe and deprived the population of “the free exercise of their civil and political rights”.

Khrushchev: where does a 900lb gorilla sleep? Anywhere he damn well likes.

Or you can loudly berate the North Americans, as José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, did in Mexico yesterday, shouting that it was all the North Americans’ fault, and that it was about time they looked at themselves in the mirror before criticising Europe, or words to that effect.

In my case, the situation was that I had worked for a client at half my usual rate for three years in the middle of the last decade. The deal was that I should receive shares in recompense.

They never arrived.

Yes, not quite the trigger for nuclear war, but vexatious nonetheless.

Then something changed, and my former client was suddenly keen to talk, but didn’t seem to be offering me what I thought I was owed.

So, I did what any sane chap would do, and had lunch at Eyre Brothers in Shoreditch with the splendid Andy White of Carter Backer Winter, whom I’ve known since the beginning of the 1970s. Andy is an accountant, and is also Senior Partner in the firm. CBW was named as UK Mid-Tier Firm of the Year at The British Accountancy Awards 2011, so he clearly knows what he’s doing.

Professional, funny and polite, Mr White FCA, Senior Partner CBW

I am very pleased that I kept in touch.

Andy suggested that we involve Adam Blain, a lawyer and a partner in CKFT in Hampstead.

This was a very good decision.

The two of them did a superb job, for which I warmly thank them.

Adam Blain, very bright and very effective, and polite, too

How did they get the right deal which left both sides feeling happy?

All good deals need to have both sides leaving the table with no hard feelings. This was one of them.

The core strategy was to be polite.

Politeness, respect and a strong position put gently go a long way. By comparison, José Manuel’s outburst yesterday was definitely not a good idea.

My former client and I are probably never going to be drinking buddies again, but I feel a lot less heated than I did a few years ago, and I both hope and expect that my ex-clients do, too.

Consequently, if you need a great firm of London accountants, or a great firm of London lawyers, or both, I can heartily recommend CBW and CKFT.

Just ask, politely, for either Andy White or Adam Blain.

You won’t be disappointed.

This will be the last posting on Greensted Blog using the current format, Akismet. The site now has 116 posts, and is too big for Akismet to handle. The next format also makes it easier for guest postings, such as those from John Klawitter and Andrew Levy, for whose terrific contributions I’m grateful. We’re looking for guest bloggers. Please get in touch if you have something to say. The blog is not commercial, so don’t currently expect payment, but we might go commercial depending upon our stats. This is still up for debate. We’d be interested in your views, please. We’re looking for articles on the world economy, marketing, digital , USA and UK politics, and lessons for business from personal experience. Your opinion is as important as the facts you recount, so make certain that the article has a strong point of view, please. Don’t be shy, we can handle three outside posts a day. Max word count: 750.  I’d also be grateful for your comments on the new format, please. And, yes, Greece is still doomed. Anyone want to write about it? The G on my keyboard has worn out.

We met when we both worked at an advertising agency called Lowe Howard-Spink. He ran the agency’s biggest international account, General Motors, and I was the Group Planning Director.

Andrew Levy, founder of MiFynder

I started my career in Ted Bates where Rosser Reeves had, in frustration at the amount of fuzzy thinking going on, first come up with the idea of the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) that dominated advertising thinking in the 1960s and 70s.

The USP fell into disuse as a combination of product convergence and more rigorous communications regulation led to it becoming virtually impossible to find a unique proposition in the first place, or be permitted to claim it in the second. In the pursuit of ever more elusive uniqueness, USPs inclined towards the trivial, an example being from “The fastest 2 litre production car in the world” to “The only car with colour fade resistant interior leather.”

The tension between how unique a proposition was and how compelling it was as a selling point led to a downward spiral.

By the 1980s lifestyle and imagery based communications had pretty much replaced USPs in the mainstream. As consumers, we were no longer asked to believe the advertising, but to identify with it.

In the USP era advertising’s key role was to communicate a product truth (an incomplete and one-sided version, but nevertheless a truth.) The ubiquitous availability of alternative product evaluations on the internet has now largely rendered this role of advertising obsolete and, with it, the USP.

But with the loss of the USP, we also lost a valuable discipline it imposed on our thinking. The USP forced us to ask the basic question: what was actually good about the product we were promoting? Why, in this planet full of stuff, did it exist? The USP had made us look for only rather narrow answers, but at least it made us look for answers. The lifestyle and image advertising that replaced it encouraged the marketing community to give up on substantive product questions altogether.

This was a dereliction of duty. Most of the world’s best brands still have what you might call Corporate USPs, or at least

Rosser Reeves, the father of the USP

can offer a compelling answer to the question: why do you exist? The demise of the USP in marketing came from a change in what makes sense in modern communications channels, not from any change in what’s important.

Over my years in brand planning I never gave up on the basic disciplines of the USP. I developed a proprietary technique to help brands get clear about their message. Whereas most brand development models build layer upon layer of detail, my approach stripped away all these layers and focused instead, on just one question: why does your brand exist?

I called the answer to this question, an Existential Proposition (EP). By insisting on eight separate criteria that the answer must satisfy, I found that once you get clear on this question, all the other answers usually fall into place.

I left Lowe’s to build my own company with partners. After 15 years we successfully sold to a big group, and I left the industry in 2008 to take a break.Then, some months ago, I was asked to help someone develop the brand positioning for their new company. Afterwards they sent me an email:

“It was great. It’s not just that I’ve got clarity about my brand, I feel I understand what I am here for too – me, as a human being, not just me as a company owner.”

That’s when I realised I could use what I know about brands to help people gain clarity and make positive sense of their professional lives – and the idea of MiFynder was born.

Brands are formidable competitors, because that is precisely what they are designed to be, and people can improve their own career performance by positioning themselves as individual brands. The question I now focus on is, “What is your working life for?”

Using the same eight criteria, I guide people to their own clear and personally satisfying answer to this all important question. And as with brands, I still find that once you get clear on this, everything else falls into place.

If you are interested in giving it a try or just in finding out more about MiFynder, please email me at: andrewlevy700@gmail.com or visit www.mifynder.com

(I’ve known Andrew for at least twenty years, and have a very high regard for him. If you need help with your business and your career, he’s well worth a call. Stephen)