With Christmas jumpers all the rage this year, Lacoste have had a go capitalising on the festive clothing bandwagon with their own take on the polo of the future. Not surprisingly it features clever interactive gadgetry and personalised designs which change with respect to the wearer’s environment. All this is to mark the 80 year anniversary since Henri Lacoste designed the now ubiquitous Lacoste polo, originally designated the L.12.12. It goes to show even designs as iconic as Lacoste have to move with the times. Think I’ll wait for it to catch on a bit before one appears on my Christmas list. Seasons greetings.

http://www.lacoste-future.com/en/

The news that BT have bought the rights to show 38 live Premier League matches for each of the next two years is interesting for two reasons.

It could be said to be a milestone in the journey towards technology platform integration when a telco company outbids TV rivals to win the right to broadcast the most watched domestic soccer league in the world. Are BT setting their stall out for a bigger TV play?

Secondly, the money. The £3bn price tag that the Premier League has put on the 154 live games values each game at an average of £20M - which makes next year’s season the most lucrative yet. BT must have decided that the potential advertising revenue and additional subscribers to their service is worth the outlay. Who can blame them, when this is the exact same model that Sky used to grow their subscription base in the 90s?

What isn’t clear however is what BT are going to do different to make being second choice to Sky as a football broadcaster work for them when ESPN and Setanta before them struggled to top the viewing league table.

It’s funny what you notice when you’re hungry and scouring the aisles for something to eat for lunch…

Stuck with having no lunch with me, I ventured down to the local shop in search of sustenance one lunchtime recently and considered the various options. I normally avoid ambient ready meals because of the various nasties found within them, but in a moment of weakness I relented and returned back to the office with a Reggae Reggae pasta chicken meal.

Now, I love Reggae Reggae sauce and keep a bottle at home which I regularly splash over food to dial up the taste of whatever I’m cooking. I hesitated over buying the meal, however, because of my perception of all products in this category as being full of highly artificial ingredients.

As my meal was heating in the microwave, I read the ingredient list on back of pack and was amazed at what I saw:

Cooked Free-Range Egg Linguine Pasta, Chicken Breast, Tomato, Red Pepper, Onion, Reggae Reggae Sauce, Mozzarella Cheese, Vegetable Oil, Demerera Sugar, Tomato Puree, Cornflour, Ginger, Garlic, Spices, Lime Juice, Coriander, Salt, Scotch Bonnet Chilli Puree, Thyme

And that’s it. No preservatives, no colourings, no flavourings, and free-range eggs in the pasta! I was pleasantly surprised, to say the least. All of the ingredients were those you might find in any cupboard at home.

It struck me that Reggae Reggae is missing a trick by failing to mention any of this on its packaging. Many brands work their product packaging hard to claim natural credentials – often with the slimmest of justifications – yet here’s a product that appears to be squeaky clean, but is saying nothing. In fact, the lack of any claim on front of pack actually caused me to question the truth of the ingredient list I saw – surely they’d want to shout about such a positive message?

Doing so would be particularly effective in this case, as new consumers may well be prone to make the assumption (as I did) that foods in the ready meal category will be packed full of artificial nastiness. With health considerations coming so high on the agenda for many food shoppers, the message would surely resonate strongly, creating an extremely compelling proposition. A product like this – made only with natural, store-cupboard ingredients – would be a great meal idea for parents to serve to their children. The fact that it features one of the most interesting and colourful brands around, in the form of Reggae Reggae, would surely make it as popular with health-conscious mums as with brand-literate teens.

So come on guys, put some claims on your packaging!

On this day in 44B.C. Julius Caesar was killed at the Theatre of Pompey.  While various versions of the story have been told throughout the years (including that which featured Kenneth Williams’ now infamous outburst), if you believe the version told by Shakespeare, Caesar had been warned by a soothsayer to: “Beware the Ides of March!”

Now that the Ides of March have come around in 2012, I’m wondering which brands could have been saved from a sticky end had they been more vigilant and heeded warnings.

We often refer to the complacency of the American railroad business in the 1920s, which led to them completely ignoring the threat posed by domestic air travel – which subsequently supplanted the train as the default mode for traversing the country.

However, there are more recent examples in which businesses have gone from industry leader to graveyard in just a few years.  In a world where change has become the one constant, the need to monitor consumers’ evolving needs and competitor activity is becoming ever more acute.

When Friends Reunited was bought by ITV in 2005 the competitive threat from Facebook was given little attention. The business believed that the two brands were targeting different audiences with different offers.  Six years later, Facebook has achieved a 49% penetration of the UK population – while Friends Reunited is estimated to be worth less than 5% of its 2005 value.

But who could have foreseen the meteoric rise of the Zuckerberg empire in such a youthful and ill-defined market?

Perhaps less deserving of sympathy are the management of Kodak, who oversaw the demise of the one of the world’s biggest consumer brands. The company from a market leading position - possessing 90% of film and 85% of camera sales in the USA in 1976 – to filing for Chapter 11 protection earlier this year.

To make the story even more damning, it was Kodak that invented the digital camera which ultimately led to the demise of its mainstream photographic film business.  In fact, Kodak executive Larry Matteson wrote a report in 1979 that detailed the predicted gradual shift from film to digital photography. It outlined the order in which market segments would be affected, predicting that digital photography would finally reach the mass market in 2010.  The prediction was remarkably prophetic, and accurate to within 5 years.

The changing landscape of the category came as no surprise to Kodak, nor to Fujifilm, which was in a similar situation at the turn of the 1980s. Yet Fujifilm managed to adapt, and remains a profitable business to this day. So what went wrong for Kodak?

Kodak was slow to act and had become complacent in its position as market leader.  It also had a culture of producing the ‘perfect product’, which slowed the speed-to-market of its innovations and limited the number of those innovations that made it to consumers.  Kodak was also slow to abandon its “razor blade” business model, whereby it sold cameras at low cost in order to make money on film sales (as Gillette does with blades). It was a model that was not compatible with the digital world.  By the time the firm finally developed a sizable digital camera business, the camera phone had taken over.  It was too late to execute change.

In contrast, Fujifilm listened to the soothsayer and avoided the theatre on the Ides of March.

But such a scale of change is notoriously difficult to predict, and even harder to react to successfully.  So what can brands do to help them avoid a similar fate to that of Caesar?

• Take a long term view.  (Kodak was right to commission the report on where the photography category was going.  Its mistake was not acting on it in time.)
• Think about all possible competitive threats, including those from suppliers, customers and new entrants.  (Think Porter’s 5 Forces. The attack may come from the least expected places. Does ‘Et tu, Brute?’ ring any bells?)
• Don’t waste time developing the ‘perfect product’.  By the time it hits the shelves, your customers may have moved on.  (As they had done when Kodak finally got around to its digital business.  Facebook’s mantra is: “Move fast and break stuff.”)
• Incorporate competitive war-gaming into the innovation process, in order to ensure that there are as many competitive barriers to entry as possible.  (Innocent has created a great product in its Veg Pots, yet has not managed successfully to defend its position from attack by own-label retailer copies.  Cf. Covent Garden Soups, which built trial and awareness through inner M25 c-stores, giving the business a decent timespan to refine the product and communications, as well as build a loyal user base.)

I wonder how many businesses today are sleepwalking slowly to disaster, with words of warning ringing in their ears…

Every so often there is a new product which comes along and makes you smile because they seem to have got it so right.

In a recent workshop conducted as part of a brand identity development project for our client, we saw a slightly different snack that offered something more relevant, targeted and original than the  usual array of caffeine-infused hot beverages, sugar-filled cakes and biscuits and the requisite rarely touched fruit.

It’s a sweets brand, but doesn’t make you feel bad for indulging. It’s artificial but you can justify the e-numbers, and it’s fun but will improve your concentration and therefore performance as a serious grown up. Crucially, it is also not a boring apple.

‘Tagungs Tiger’ is the workshop or conference treat of choice for the ambitious delegate who knows he could become the all-conquering business tiger if only he had the energy. The sweets are superficially Haribo-esque gummy bears, but because there is a successful looking tiger on the front of pack dressed in a smart suit next to a flipchart, you know that these will help turn your tired and uninspired mind into that of an alpha-tiger, the king of the corporate jungle!

‘Fruitgums with taurine’ gives you the necessary scientific verification that soon you will be back to your best and prowling for your next killer idea.

Being cursed with a warp-speed metabolism, I occasionally find that I am in need of something sweet to tide me over to lunch and all too often resort to stuffing down cake, pastries and other calorific temptations. Next time I feel the onset of an energy lull, I hope to be able to reach for the tiger. Of course, such need for stimulation is thankfully rare when taking part in the always engaging workshops run by The Value Engineers!