Why I write

Earlier this week, I read an article in The Australian about how today's teenagers use an average vocabulary of only 800 words each day, preferring instead to use the abbreviated language of text messaging and hip-hop. I've never counted, but from reading the article, it would seem that 800 is not very high – in fact, it appears that "800 words will not get you a job". What's more, "yeah", "no" and "but" all feature in a top 20 that accounts for about one third of the words they use.

All of which I find a little sad. Especially when I think about how much I love words.

Here's a quick 50 from Australian poet Kenneth Slessor:

I looked out my window in the dark

At waves with diamond quills and combs of light

That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand

In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze,

And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys

Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,

And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard

Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal

Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells,

Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.

Incredible writing if you ask me, but then Kenneth Slessor was far beyond the reach of teenage angst by the time he penned Five Bells.

Which brings me to another of my favourite writers, George Orwell. I must admit to a touch of hubris in taking the title for this post from an essay he wrote in 1949. That said, there's nothing particularly unique about the title, and it does seem fair given that I'm discussing a similar subject – although maybe not quite with the same degree of finesse.

In his essay, Orwell took the time to outline "four great motives for writing": sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. By his standards, I'm guilty of sheer egoism simply by continuing to write past the age of 30; I'm not the sentimental type, so posterity in the guise of historical impulse holds little appeal for me; and yes, I am political, if you subscribe to Orwell's broadest definition of the term.

But what most strikes a chord in my heart is aesthetic enthusiasm: what Orwell describes as everything from "words and their right arrangement" to typography and even the width of margins.

For me, there's something wide-eyed and beautiful in an elegant turn of phrase. Each word gently pushed along by a mix of alliteration, juxtaposition, onomatopoeia, repetition, rhetoric, tempo, crescendo, cadence, the list goes on.

Which all goes to explain why I love the work we're doing for Griffin Theatre Company – apologies for the shameless plug!

And I was pretty excited when I found this recent Fiction issue of Vice, with every page dedicated to new writing.

However, words don't always comes all that easily for people. It takes time and effort and discipline, as well as creativity and flair and ideas. And that even goes for some of the most prolific writers, as Stephen Fry explained in what will be his last blog post for a little while.

For me, writing isn't always easy, but it is important. In a previous post, I wrote about how they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a single word can start ten thousand stories. That said, not too many of them start Yeah no but.

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."

Every brand is an icon

Religion and the illegal drug trade have always had a lot to teach people about the merits of a telling a good story with focus and purpose to an audience whose specific needs they are targeting. As a result, both can lay claim to millions of loyal followers and a very high incidence of repeat purchase.

Too many brands nowadays take a more scattergun approach, hoping to reach anyone who'll listen with a message that contains something for everyone. And in the meantime, the definitive meaning of the brand itself is lost in the wash.

In particular, I am continually surprised by the number of brands who promote themselves as an "icon" without truly understanding the facets and implications of the term. Most brands claim icon status through sheer perseverance and heritage alone, but more often than not, their audience has simply grown as old as their brand. From personal experience, none of my grandparents found any solace in their old age, but instead they discovered every reason to rejoice in their youthful spirit. This is the crucial recognition that all brands must make in order to survive. Age has always just been a number, while a strong and youthful spirit is the driver of all life’s pursuits. Good brands never grow old. Unfortunately, too many brands die with their audience.

Brands face this battle against extinction on a daily basis and it is the very iconic nature of branding that enables customers to make instant purchase decisions without having to review a company’s entire corporate history to help make them. Technically speaking, every brand is an icon. Brands act as symbols to represent a larger entity and deeper meaning than simply the logo, a critical signpost for what you can expect and your invitation as a customer to participate. It is branding that makes it possible for you to purchase hundreds of products for your weekly supermarket shop in a matter of hours, or buy a car without having to inspect the factory itself and interview key personnel about production methods.

For any brand to be successful, it must by definition be iconic. However, too many brands start and end with the logo without investing deeper meaning in their brand. In countless taste tests for beer, people generally have difficulty picking between products until you serve the beer in branded glasses – and as it turns out, your favourite brand is sometimes not your favourite beer.

Apple means a lot to people. More importantly, the Apple brand means more than the specific technical features of the products themselves. The uplifting experience of breakthrough innovation and user-oriented technology is championed by employees and cherished by customers – even Steve Jobs’ keynote speeches were met with an exuberance and excitement more typically seen at political rallies and football matches.

If you were to take Virgin at face value, it clearly would not make sense to put your trust – and, in a variety of different ways, your life – in the hands of someone who is quite literally a virgin.

Similarly, Orange represented little more than a colour somewhere between red and yellow until Hutchison Whampoa injected it with the promise of demystifying the telecommunications market for consumers. The Orange brand symbolised not just a phone plan but more a philosophy that recognised customer needs and responded to them with a refreshingly candid approach to a complex and cluttered market. People liked the plans, but they liked the brand even more.

Apple, Virgin and Orange are all iconic brands. Not because they have discovered some holy grail of branding that lies beyond the reach of most marketing departments and their agencies, but simply because they have spent the time and energy creating a deeper meaning for their brand, their customers and employees.

What’s more, they are all brands that have invested in reinventing themselves over time – they have grown up without growing old.

Nudie achieved huge success with an entertaining story that meant so much more than communicating the real fruit content of its juice by blithely mirroring this with images of real fruit on its packaging. However, the big question for any successful brand like Nudie is always what they do next – sales figures signal a successful past, but they do not provide any guarantee of an equally successful future. And it seems that the copycat characteristics of the juice category that gave us a sea of spritzed oranges have now turned their attention to creating the comic book caricatures that have dragged Nudie back into the pack of pretenders.

One category facing this exact problem is wristwatches. Having enjoyed phenomenal success over the years, many watch brands have seen their premium cachet diluted by the fact that your watch is now far from the only personal accessory to showcase your luxury lifestyle in a split second. The unprecedented rise of the mobile phone as a statement of luxury (and not just a communications device) has drawn brands like Tag Heuer out of their shells and into the business of designing mobile phones as watches for the 21^st century. Car manufacturers picked up on exactly the same status cues when they started to invest more heavily in the branding and design of their car keys.

What a brand means is the single most important factor in its success. The most successful brands are built around a sustainable idea that transcends time and context. This is the basic premise for a brand’s equity and one of the key elements that enables businesses to value their brand both in financial terms and measures of commercial goodwill. Successful brands have to succeed financially if they are to deliver true and tangible value to the businesses that they represent, and too often in the past has the iconic nature of branding related purely to cult and boutique brands that never make it on the commercial stage.

A long and impressive heritage, a cult following, or a hero product is no longer enough to sustain a successful brand. What makes brands tick is the ongoing investment of time and energy that goes towards creating and codifying the meaningful expression of a unique point of view. As a result, inventing – and reinventing – the future is much more significant than reflecting on the past, something that has been impressively evidenced by the way in which Pacific Brands reinvigorated the once faded icon that was Bonds through their product development and communications.

To paraphrase George Orwell, all brands are iconic, but some are more iconic than others.