Moustache - HANDLEBAR, PENCIL, HORSESHOE OR TOOTHBRUSH.

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?

It’s not as simple as trying to make money, if you’re the seller, or finding a bargain, if you’re the buyer.

Well, not if you’re on eBay.

There’s a whole new psychology at play.

The reasons for buying and selling are very different, to what we understand in the rarefied world of Sales and Marketing.

On ebay, selling can be a way of life, a way to find people with similar interests, make contacts and expand your network.

The same goes with buying.

Buyers often spend money, they don’t have, in order to meet people, they may never have met. Again it’s the social interaction that’s more important than the purchase.

We recently sold a clothes dryer on eBay for $30.

We were glad to get rid of it, at any price, because it would save us from having to hire a van and take it to the tip.

This would have cost us $100+.

Now the guy who bought our dryers only concern was, does it work? He wasn’t interested in what it looked like or was it the latest model.

His wife, who was new to Melbourne, had discovered the vagaries of our weather and needed to have more control over the drying of her laundry.

So his motivation was to get his wife off his back while ours was to save a dollar, not make one.

Brands or marketing spin played no part in this sale.

We had a needed to sell, and he wanted to buy, however our motivations were not the normal supply and demand paradigm.

I wonder if, in these times of social media, the psychology of buying and selling might become redefined and be more like the eBay model?

In one of the early episodes of Mad Men I watched, in horror, as Don Draper tossed all the rubbish from a family picnic into the surrounding countryside.

Betty and the children looked on but no one said a word.

Then I realised that this was the 1960s and littering hadn’t gained the social sigma that it has now.

This was way before Keep Australia Beautiful, Bin It and Do The Right Thing campaigns. Or whatever were the US equivalents.

Most old farts my age wouldn’t dream of leaving their Fanta bottles in the park or dropping a Four’N Twenty meat pie bag on the street.

It’s the same with the X-Gens, Y-Gens and Generation Text. They were either influenced by the earlier anti litter campaigns or have been brainwashed by their peers or parents.

So why is there so much crap in my local park?

I wonder if there is a new generation, one that never got the message. This generation comes from all walks of life and is made up of all ages and genders. But there is one thing they have in common and that is they have never been influenced by the early anti litter campaigns.

Why? Because they weren’t here when the campaigns ran.

There is an entire generation of immigrant Australians who just don’t know that it’s a social no-no to leave your Subway wrapper, Domino’s Pizza box or Red Bull can on the street.

I don’t blame them, just as I didn’t blame Don Draper, they just don’t know any better.

I think it’s about time to recycle some of our old anti litter ads again.

How do you sell a proposition to a market that is disinterested or negative about what you’re flogging?

You reveal a point of view that gives them a new insight into the issue.

Bob Brown, leader of the Australian Greens, has discovered the power of numbers.

In a speech to the Canberra Press Club, Bob revealed that the Australian mining industry is 83% owned by offshore investors.

This suddenly casts a new light on a mining tax.

This new tax means that now we aren’t taxing Australian companies but overseas ones.

He went on to support his argument with more facts:

“Some $50 billion reaped from Australia’s mineral resources will be sent overseas as dividends to foreign owners…”

“In the next five years foreign owners will earn about $265 billion from their investments in Australia’s mineral resources.”

“For every dollar of sales, mining companies make an after-tax profit of 26% versus the average across all industries of 8%.”

What the politicians need, isn’t more spin-doctors, opinion polls or one-liners but more marketers who know how to ‘sell’ an idea.

The concept of using facts to bolster an argument has been around forever.

Back in the 50s and 60s Bill Bernbach, sold the new Beetle on facts, wrapped in a blanket of self-deprecating humor.

Many regard ‘Lemon’ as one of the greatest ads of all time and it’s full of facts.

“There are 3,389 men at our Wolfsburg factory with only one job: to inspect Volkswagens at each stage of production. (3,000 Volkswagens are produced daily; there are more inspectors than cars.)

“Final inspection is really something! VW inspectors run each car off the line onto the Funktionsprüfstand (car test stand), tote up 189 check points, gun ahead to the automatic brake stand and say “no” to one VW out of fifty.

Bernbach could have waxed lyrical about build quality of the VW. Except he chose to highlight the negative fact that sometimes a lemon is discovered on the production line, and that’s why you won’t get one.

This was all done at a time when ‘big was beautiful’ in American automotive design. Equally, platitudes and clichés formed the basis of most advertising copy.

If you tell people something they didn’t know, in a persuasive and entertaining way, there is a lot more chance that they will side with your point of view.

Over the last three nights SBS, Australia have aired a TV show called Go Back To Where You Came From.

It has been described by the producers as a social experiment.

Here is a description of the format.

“Go Back To Where You Came from is a world first, three day television event following six ordinary Australians who agree to challenge their preconceived notions about refugees and asylum seekers by embarking on a confronting 25 day journey. Tracing in reverse the journeys that refugees have taken to reach Australia, they travel to some of the most dangerous and desperate corners of the world, with no idea what’s in store for them along the way.”

SBS is Australia’s multicultural TV channel so the audience would have a positive bias towards the subject. However what has been interesting is that over the last three nights the ratings of SBS have skyrocketed, culminating in over 600,000 viewers tuning in last night.

It wasn’t to everyone’s taste, as Channel Ten’s MasterChef Australia had an audience of over 1.5 million.

What is amazing is the interest and sympathy it has created in the subject of asylum seekers.

By placing these six people in the shoes of the refugees they have also opened the eyes of the average viewer to their plight.

So much so that the interest in the program went way beyond our shores and became the most tweeted subject in the world for several hours last night.

Empathy is a very powerful communications tool.

Australians have been shocked by the cruelty that’s being inflicted on animals in Indonesian slaughterhouses.

So much so that domestic red meat sales have dropped.

The meat and livestock industry have always been very careful to separate what we throw on the barbie from how it got there.

The supermarket or butcher has always been the middleman, shielding us from reality.

Now the consumer has been confronted with the reality that your prime porterhouse actually comes from a real animal, not a polystyrene tray.

I must confess that I am a blood-sucking carnivore and even I felt a pang of conscience as I tossed my slab of steak onto the flames the other night.

The interesting fact is that it’s only the butchers and markets feeling the financial pain, not supermarkets.

Does this mean that the perception of supermarket meat as being ‘faux’ animal is still the reality for most people?