DG RANTS: Oh the horses, the horses
The Mickey’s DG HAS SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT Banks and their shit brand purpose advertising.
“Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.”
So said Karl Marx - but the modern world contains a lot of things that have no discernible functional utility for us as human beings, yet they are still useful in how they convey and hold meaning for us. You might have noticed that brands put a hell of a lot of bloody work into creating meaning for their meaningless products and services. Of course, there is external, functional meaning, and then there is internal, emotional meaning (which, if you are unlucky enough not to have made it that far up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, you won’t give a f#@k about - or alternatively, it might be the only thing that you do give a f#@k about). These two types of meaning are termed utilitarian and hedonic. So something that is useful to us - a toilet brush, a screwdriver, a torch - is utilitarian but is not hedonic, because it has little brand-meaning, as it does not represent anything except its function.
Now, take that torch and make it a very expensive, beautifully designed Dyson wifi-enabled torch, and suddenly that utilitarian object becomes a hedonic object, because now it doesn’t just light up my path at night, it tells a story of my aspirations, my values, my credentials, my wealth, my appreciation of beauty and I can read my email on it and do my online banking in the dark.
The application of a brand to an ordinary object can transform it in our hearts - and brands have used this for decades to sell us shit we don’t need or really want. What we want is purpose, success, immortality - impossible, mostly unreachable stuff that brands have cleverly mimicked and made attainable, however momentarily, via the consumption of their products and services. Clever little fuckers. And, if we are honest, we are totally dependent on brands to navigate our modern lives. Imagine doing the weekly shop with no brands. How would you decide between 20 different butters, 30 different chocolate-chip cookies, 12 different washing up liquids, 7 types of salt, 4 types of baked beans? Yes, you could choose by price alone, but how would you discern the difference in value? It would take f#@king hours, and at the end, you would be no different to everyone else queuing at the till. How would you know who you are if you were denied the objects to define yourself by? We would all be the same - wearing the same f#@king clothes, eating the same f#@king foods, driving the same f#@king cars. Some people would be horrified by that vision, and others would say that it is how we will save ourselves from environmental destruction - but a key aspect of our modern existence has been defined by the definition of ourselves as differentiated beings.
We spend our entire life trying to distinguish ourselves from other f#@kers just like us, and brands are the low road, the easy way, the cheap seats, to getting there. And amazingly, we will believe nearly anything a brand tells us in order to get our differentiation fix. But digital and technology have changed something - the movement away from ownership to sharing, away from buying stuff to experiencing stuff, away from products to services - means we now judge a brand’s meaning on the usefulness of the experience we have with it. We now demand experiences from brands that drive an emotional connection in us, and that have some use to us. To put it bluntly, we want brands to be useful again. We want them to do shit for us. It is no longer good enough for brands to tells us how great they are - we want to see it in action and we want to experience it live. We don’t want the bullshit unless it is backed up with real shit. We want our hedonic brands to be utilitarian too, and vice versa. We want them to be both useful and meaningful - that is, we want brands to be useful and through their usefulness we want them to give our meaningless, modern lives meaning. There is a technical way of putting this, and it is - we now measure brands not by their passive perceived value, as told to us through their marketing, but by their active, experienced value as shown to us through their usefulness.
Now, the digital revolution has thrown up a lot these utilitarian/ hedonic brands - but the f#@king poster child, the brand that has nailed this beyond any other - is of course those f#@kers at Apple. Apple makes products that do what they are meant to do functionally, and through that perfection of the doing, do what they are meant to do emotionally. They help us in our daily, physical lives, and they help us in our daily, emotional lives. We feel f#@king blessed, special, loved and wanted when interacting with Apple products because of their beautiful utilitarianism. We will no longer accept shit products and services, and we will continually check the gap between the perceived value versus the experienced value.
So if you are a bank - a very large bank that has spent decades providing the f#@king bare minimum of services to your customers, and charging them tons of money for the privilege of those bare minimum of services - and you want to relaunch your brand in the utilitarian environment described above to really reconnect with them, really communicate your value and usefulness to them, show them that you are with them, for them, one of them - what do you do? What’s the message? And how do you convey that message? What you don’t f#@king do, is film a load of people watching a load of horses running down a f#@king beach, with the f#@king waves splashing at their f#@king feet. You don’t f#@king claim to have been by these people’s sides for hundreds of years, when everyone knows you never gave two f#@king shits about these people, and the only reason you do now, is because you are being disrupted by companies that actually do give a little bit of a shit and have created products and services that are actually useful.
How do I know this? How do I know that this throwback brand ad for Lloyds Bank is f total horse shit? I was their customer for 25 years, and in that time I had my first job, got married, bought two houses, had two children, got life insurance, got house insurance, got car insurance - and what did their ‘being by my side’ amount to in that 25 years? F#@ king overdraft letters informing me of their f#@king charges for going overdrawn. That was the sum total of their communication with me. It shouldn’t be f#@ king horses in that ad, it should be donkeys. It should be f#@king donkey rides on a plastic-strewn beach, with screeching seagulls dive-bombing ugly, unhappy people with unhappy lives. That would be the authentic thing to show. That would represent the real experience of having them by your side for the last couple of hundred years. And as we all know authenticity is all the rage, I think it could work for them.
The Director General
Future Trends Futurist
He sleeps in the boot of his S-Class Jag Shirley, he’s a middle-aged trend setter, and he gets very angry when the world gets ahead of him without him noticing (so he does his best not to take his eyes off it). Once a Colossus of the Creative Industries, now not so much. He’s looking for redemption in the Lady Grey tea leaves of future innovation, and he is so confident he is on to something that he has just got himself a desk (with lockable storage) at WeWork. He’s our very own DG and he is soon to have his own show on Sky Channel 679.