Moustache - STALIN HAD ONE BUT THEN SO DID GANDHI.

This poster, seen in Saint Gallen, Switzerland, was the centre piece of a window display for the watch maker Maurice Lacroix.

The copy, a quote from Sir Bob Geldof, reads:

“I don’t want to live like you. I don’t want to talk like you. I’m going to be like me.”

Now I guess that Sir Bob, due to contractual obligations, wears a Maurice Lacroix watch. And I am equally sure that the manufacturers of Maurice Lacroix would like you to wear one as well.

Why else would they spend all that money to use his name?

Therefore isn’t the whole idea of wearing the same watch as Bob at cross purposes with his message?

The simplicity was overwhelming.

Candles, two musicians and a monologue.

The Bedouin delivering the ten minute narration asked us, in the words of John Lennon, to imagine.

Imagine Petra as it was 2,000 years ago.

Imagine the water flowing through viaducts, down the gorge and bubbling up through the nymphaeum in the Roman colonnade.

Imagine caravans, laden with gold, frankincense and myrrh, passing through this ancient city from the exotic east to the Mediterranean coast in the west.

Imagine the streets, palaces and tombs lit by 8,000 olive oil lamps.

And then finally, imagine what the people were like who could conceive and build this amazing place.

This was far more moving than the over produced, over scripted and contrived Son et Lumière that you’ll find at most tourist destinations.

 

This was the most common way I was greeted by the hawkers outside every tourist attraction, from Luxor to Aswan.

What happened after that, varied with every encounter.

They have all developed their individual ways of trying to separate you from your money.

Some are humorous and charming, while others are persistent and annoying.

A bit like being tied to a chair and forced to watch thirty minutes non stop of Harvey Norman ads.

What is also common to the hawkers, is the unwavering optimism they have, that they will make a sale and it will be from you.

This optimism turns from frustration to desperation as the backside of last tourist disappears up the steps of the tour bus.

I think we are all over the constant hassle but it’s easy forget that this is how they put falafel on the table.

And with tourism running at about 62% of what it was before the revolution, their desperation is understandable.

There is a belief in advertising to always try and make a positive claim about your product. That’s not a bad thing, if your claim has a consumer benefit like strongest, safest or most reliable.

However a number of brands, having achieved market leader status, rely on being ‘biggest’ for their claim.

They forgot what got them there and just reflected on their achievements, in the belief that this is important to the consumer.

The trouble with this strategy is that sooner or later their position at the top of the ‘biggest’ tree will be challenged by someone else.

Then they become second biggest and who wants to be in second place?

Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, boasts a lot of ‘biggest’ things.

The world’s biggest indoor ski slope.

The world’s biggest indoor aquarium with the world’s largest acrylic viewing window.

The world’s largest shopping mall. In fact Dubai will soon have five of the seven biggest shopping malls in the world.

And of course, they have the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.

In marketing terms this strategy might doom them to a certain fall. But their ‘biggest’ positioning has also become their strategy.

When you build a city out of the desert, on an area that 60 years ago had little more than a few houses, camels and date palms you need to do something spectacular.

When oil was discovered in 1966 the then ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Rashid, used the money to start a development program that would eventually lead to modern day Dubai.

They needed a city that would attract attention and investment from all over the world.

Their way of creating a unique product was to go with a strategy of ‘big’

They didn’t become big and then fall back on that, they started off with the idea to be big.

The entire city is a work in progress, building bigger and bigger things. I wonder how long this race to collect the most Guinness world records can last?

 

There are two seafood BBQ restaurants on the outskirts of Tekek on Tioman Island.

We have been there twice and both times one was crowded and the other empty.

There appears to be no real difference between the two.

Normally it would come down to reputation and repeat business. However in this instance the patrons are predominately tourists and are only on Tioman for a few days at a time.

I put it down to symbolism.

The guy hovering over the hot coals, at the popular spot, has a hat and it’s a very symbolic hat.

So much for blogging about globalised advertising and marketing.

I have just witnessed, first hand, what a lack of marketing to can do for a tourist’s experience.

I am currently on Tioman Island, a small pearl shaped dot off the east coast of Malaysia, in the South China sea.

It’s marketed as an unspoiled paradise.

Admittedly this is the off season but so far it has lived up to the spin. There are no touts and no pressure to buy this or do that.

What has amazed us most is the way the animals cohabitate with the locals, and the tourist.

Apart from the numerous birds and butterflies there are somewhat larger critters like giant monitor lizards and families of monkeys.

What is so surprising about Tioman is that these animals are very happy to respect your right to be there if you just let them be.

This is in stark contrast to places like Bali, where the locals have made the monkeys so dependent on food, sold to the tourists, that the they have become a pest. The Bali monkeys have become so aggressive that people are now too scared to visit some of the original tourist attractions that made the island so famous.

The fauna isn’t the only inhabitant of Bali that is discouraging the tourists, the locals are doing a great job as well.

Touting on the beaches, in the bars and on the sidewalk has become so aggressive that many people are put off returning to what was once the paradise of South East Asia.

The over marketing, of the natural and human resources, has lead to a devaluation of what was the original attraction.

Brands began to grow and become national and then international in the early part of the last century.

They then went through a growth spurt after the Second World War. This was especially evident during the Creative Revolution of the 1950s’ and 60s’.

Agencies like Ogilvy and Mather worked with their clients to expand into new areas by creating unique campaigns designed to tap into the different cultures.

Then, in order to reduce costs, marketers sanitized the advertising so it all looked the same and called it ‘Globalization’.

Now many of these brands are now suffering from Brand Decline, where their commercial and social viability is being questioned.

Communication has been revolutionised and the brand paradigm is being challenged. Social Media and online shopping are changing the way consumers consume. Even consumerism is being challenged, as a new generation find that they either can’t afford to purchase or don’t really want to.

In Australia the dream of owning a house on a quarter acre block is just not possible for many the current generation. The shift will be into high density living, much like 99% of the rest of the world.

This will have a knock on effect to many branded goods.

When you live in an apartment you don’t have a garden and don’t need half the products that Bunnings and other large hardware stores flog.

The demise of the Detroit motor industry came about because the marketers and manufacturers didn’t see the small four cylinder Japanese cars coming. That was until they knocked their big gas guzzlers off the motor show podiums.

The same thing has happened here as the Mazda 3 takes over as being Australia’s largest selling single vehicle. A position held by locally manufactured vehicles for over 100 years.

Long-standing branded goods are disappearing from supermarket shelves at an alarming rate. Fueled by a desire to give the consumer lower prices and make larger profits, the supermarkets are filling the shelves with Home Brand goods.

The brands that survive won’t do so by cutting prices or engaging in a retail war with their competitors. They will only continue if they remain relevant to the consumer.

Loma Linda in California, a town with the world’s best life expectancy, has no bottle shop and no McDonalds. Now this is an extreme situation but it’s not beyond possibility that it could be part of a growing trend.

If proposed new plain packaging laws pass the in the Australian parliament, cigarette brands as we know them, will be history.

Long standing brands like Marlboro, Dunhill and Peter Stuyvesant will lose their identity.

Lonely Planet grew out of a need to provide a new generation of travelers with information that was relevant to them.

Everywhere you traveled you could see the tourists clutching onto their Lonely Planet guide like Linus to his blanket.

Now many of them have replaced the guidebook for a notebook and especially an iPad.

Currently Lonely Planet has only 5 ebooks for the iPad.

I wonder if Maureen and Tony Wheeler saw that the writing was no longer on the wall or in fact, even on the book, when they sold out to the BBC in February last year?