Read all about it (redux)

I love newspapers.

I know I wrote a B&T story here that lamented their fate (a shape–up–or–ship–out type of story).

And forget the fact that I have a blog, Twitter feed, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Plus an iPhone with all sorts of strange apps. All things that would suggest to the average consumer researcher that I don't know my broadsheet from my Berliner.

But they couldn't be more wrong, and there's no getting away from the fact that I love newspapers. And, in particular, I love The Australian.

As it happens, The Australian is undergoing a bit of a makeover at the moment and the associated commentary makes for some interesting reading – and viewing.

It's not often that you get to see inside the creative process as it hits the shelves, and it's equally rare that its creator takes you on a personal tour, although not quite so rare now that we live in the grip of web 2.0.

That said, I have to admit that the commentary wavers between resounding insight and a slightly hollow ring. I realise it's only part of the story (and I prefer to focus on the deeper, more insightful part), but I would like to believe that there is much more besides to be gained from a redesign of The Australian at the dawn of the 21st century. And I say that not as a cynic for whom nothing is ever good enough, but as an optimist in the eternal hope of utilitarian prosperity (which is not necessarily as complicated as it sounds).

I daren't write more for fear of journalistic retribution on a karmic scale given that I write as a mere amateur on the subject of not only my favourite newspaper, but also the patron of writers far more expert than me.

But I do write as someone who believes in the future of the printed newspaper (and its dull thud as it is delivered to the doorstep). Long may it linger.

One-name-fits-all

Naming anything is one of the hardest things you can do in life. And naming a business is no different.

It's especially hard because everyone is looking for a degree of differentiation. Not simply from a market perspective, but also from a legal one. And it's the latter that's the really tough part, because the vast majority of names have already been taken. In fact, according to a CNN report that I quoted as part of this article I wrote for B&T as long ago as 2003, 98% of the words in a typical dictionary have already been registered by one company or another.

As I outlined in the article, there's a whole range of pitfalls when it comes to naming, but here I want to focus on the question of differentiation.

In particular, I want to focus on a curious example of an entire industry where differentiation is almost absent when it comes to the name.

British pubs.

From the King's Head to the Queen's Arms. The Red Lion to the White Horse. There's an endless list of pubs with either exactly the same name, or at the very least ones that are very similar.

Maybe it's a quirk and the rules don't apply here. Maybe it's a problem, and that's why dozens of pubs are closing each and every month.

If we were to believe one of my favourite authors, George Orwell, then the name doesn't really matter so much. That is, just so long as it's called "The Moon Under Water" – the name he gave his ideal pub in a 1946 article he wrote for The Evening Standard. He may well have been right, and given that he was labelled "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture" by none other than The Economist (and as recently as 2008), it seems only fitting that the final word should go to Orwell.

"And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms."

Incest is wrong, right?

It goes without saying that incest is ill-suited to the human race.

I don't just mean legally, morally or ethically, but more so on physical or biological grounds. The make-up of our DNA demands diversity, although this is also tempered by natural selection: successful characteristics become more popular over successive generations – a fine-tuning effect, if you like.

But diversity is key.

And in the words of those towering pillars of pop philosophy, Groove Armada, "If everybody looked the same, we'd get tired looking at each other".

So forgive me the slight exaggeration, but then why do so many brands look as though they've been designed by one of the inbred hillbillies from the 1972 film Deliverance? Why do they seem so intent of denying themselves the necessary advantages of diversity, opting instead to settle for more of the same?

In their book Funky Business, published in 1999, Kjell Nordström and Jonas Ridderstråle wrote about what they termed the surplus society. In their words, "The surplus society has a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people, with similar educational backgrounds, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things, with similar prices and similar quality".

Sounds like the commercial version of inbreeding if you ask me. People who are so scared of being different that their anxious conservatism tries to eradicate our fundamental need for diversity.

In business as in life, it is the drive for similarity that is unnatural. And our need for diversity is no less a necessity for brands.

But in spite of this, a brisk stroll down a supermarket aisle quickly becomes a blur of swooshes and swirls as brands seemingly decide it's easier to copy than compete. In the profile piece that appeared in B&T a couple of weeks ago, I wrote that most of the Australian packaging industry think "it's acceptable to regurgitate the same old boring ideas, year in year out. Even the smart people I know...can't seem to help themselves". As unfortunate as that might be – and assuming the inevitable standouts – that statement's true. The same goes for a catalogue of corporate brands, from law firms to the world of finance.

We all know that incest is wrong. Don't let diversity die.

Read all about it

This week, the lovely folks at B&T have once again taken it upon themselves to add me to their line-up of contributors. (If any of you are reading, thank you.)

467 words on the future of newspapers: barely enough to make even the smallest of dents on the issue, but then who's got the time to read anything longer these days? Maybe I should try and edit the column to a 140-character tweet?

Now we are 10

I thought I'd give myself a break this week and recycle something that appeared in this week's B&T.

The editor was kind enough to run a profile on me and my career. I've included it below so you can read it at your leisure.

Not much more to add than that – hope you find it interesting. See you next week.