So where are the opportunities?

Picture a man stood atop a snowy peak conquering the mountain and you have covered about 90% of all outdoor brand communication.

We think there are still three major consumer opportunities that seem to be slipping off brand’s radars.

1) The Women’s Outdoor Performance Brand.

In culture we avidly consume the “Performance Woman”. From Run Lola Run to Tomb Raider, Kill Bill and Million Dollar Baby it seems we can’t get enough of the contemporary performance woman.

Why then are performance brands almost exclusively concentrating their communication on men?

Why isn’t there a “Women’s Outdoor Performance Brand” – By women, for women?

The character of the Huntress is evident in culture but as yet not in brands.
This is the archetype of the heroic female. It can be traced back to Greek mythology as the Virgin huntress, Atalanta.

This archetype is winning acclaim for this year’s Oscars as the huntress, Maya in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. When the brand, the owners and venture capitalists open their eyes to the opportunity, you know where we are.

2) The Outdoor Youth Brand.

Where the boardsport brands are aiming firmly at a target audience below 25 years the alternative approach is taken by the outdoor brands to pitch their products at 35 years and upwards. Aren’t they missing a trick? Whilst the majority of outdoor brands are rushing at the same 35+ door, one brand seems to be quietly positioning themselves at the less crowded but no less lucrative 18 – 24 sector.
The brand that appears to have acknowledged this is Black Yak, the Korean mountain brand, which has pitched itself beneath the conventional radar and is definitely one-to-watch for the emergence of a leading outdoor youth brand.

3) A Luxury Outdoor Brand.

Do outdoor enthusiasts desire luxury goods? For the answer you need look no further than Range Rover. A ubiquitous sight at country clubs and ski resorts around the world – there are few brands that confer status as obviously and instantaneously as the luxury 4×4.
Of course there are luxury ski brands, which fulfill their niche well, but as yet none have staked their place as the super premium brand for the outdoors.

The question is therefore, when will outdoor performance brands occupy the Luxury Outdoor space that Range Rover has pioneered now for a quarter of a century.

So there you have it: Women, Youth and Luxury – but not together or at the same time.

When we read “Made in China”, what do we think? 

Firstly, we probably think of “products” and then we probably think of “bad products”.  
Now turn your iPhone over and read the back.

 “Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China”

Now we still think “products”, but no longer do we think of “bad products”.  To help see into the future what we need to be thinking is “craftsmanship”.  China has an ancient heritage of craft.  Dynasty after dynasty symbolised the best in global craftsmanship.
 
The West’s perception that “Made in China” represents poor product is a delusion.  It is a delusion created by the protectionist trading policies of Western governments in the 60’s and 70’s. They only let the cheaper Chinese products into their countries in order to protect their own manufacturing industries.  It is a delusion that obscures amazing opportunities for Brand Creators.

There are two consequences of China being the “Factory of the World”:  Firstly, China has amassed huge wealth with foreign cash reserves measured in the Trillions. Secondly, Chinese youth is now greater educated and whilst they want brands, unlike their parents, they don’t want to work in the factories that manufacture for those brands.

It is these conditions that expose the opportunity for Brand Creators. Here are ten key points:

One. The growing labour shortage in Chinese factories will restrict Chinese manufacturing’s capacity to grow.

Two. Increased profitability will therefore have to come from within existing output.  Simply put, instead of growing by making another product, China will have to grow by making more profit from the existing product.

Three. China currently makes one to two times margin by selling its product to Western brands.  The Western brands then double the margin by selling to Western stores and in turn Western stores then double that margin by selling to Western consumers.
Four. Chinese manufacturers know that they can more than quadruple their margin if they cut out the Western brands and the Western retailers and then sell directly to the Western consumers.

Five. The Internet now makes selling direct possible. (China has the highest number of Internet users in the world, 513,000,000 : Source Brandz)

Six. The missing link for the Chinese manufacturer is a “Brand”.  The “Brand” is the vehicle that will connect their product to the wants of the Western and Chinese consumer.

Seven. The opportunity is enhanced when we add to the mix the additional demands of the aspiring Chinese middle class. (Domestic Brands in China are now worth $320,000,000,000 USD : Source Brandz)

Eight. The opportunity is intensified when we consider that China’s manufacturing wealth is at risk of stalling unless it is converted into brand wealth.
  
Nine. The expertise and creativity necessary for brand creation is ready and waiting.

Ten. FreshBritain are pioneering this model with our partners in China.  The pioneering Brand is UVU.  UVU was created two years ago to enable a China-based manufacturer to connect their world-class performance apparel to a Western consumer.  UVU is the super premium, Ultra Marathon Brand for the discerning global running consumer.

China is the second largest economy in the world.  The largest market in the world for PC’s, Mobile Phones, Cars and Diamonds (source: Brandz)

Today, Made in China stands for “Product Excellence”.

Tomorrow, with our help, it could stand for “Brand Creation”.

Bread & Butter, the world’s largest trade show for street fashion, starts next week. Hundreds of Lifestyle brands will be there from Levis to New Era.

We predict:

One. Most brands will communicate that their brand is the most fashionable.

Two. Most brand design will be centred on validating that strategy by showing their models in a lifestyle portrayal representing the vanguard of fashion or trend evolution.

Three. Most brands will use third-party collaborations in their product design to deliver the notion of “Fashion and Trend Leadership”.

Four. In short, the brand and product design for Lifestyle brands in 2013/14 will be a sea of homogeneity. Homogeneity driven by a common strategy of how to best demonstrate “Fashion and Trend Leadership”.

Five. We predict a similar level of homogeneity at the world’s biggest Outdoor Performance trade show, ISPO.

ISPO starts on February 3rd in Munich. Hundreds of Outdoor Performance brands will be there, from Nike to The North Face.

We predict:

Six. Most brands will communicate that their brand can best protect you from the Outdoors.

Seven. Most brand design will be centred on validating that strategy by showing their athlete conquering the Outdoors in some way.

Eight. Most brands will use third-party branded lamination technology in their product design to deliver “Protection”.

Nine. In short, the brand and product design for Outdoor Performance brands in 2013/14 will also be a sea of homogeneity. Homogeneity linked to a common strategy of how they can best “influence” the Outdoors.

Ten. At both fairs, brands will neglect the power that product design has to differentiate.

So how can product design transcend brand homogeneity?

In the case of British institution Doc Martens, Fresh found a brand that had a strong product identity and plenty of customers who felt affinity with it on that basis. However they were struggling because their designers, like the rest of the competition, were making “trend-driven products” for a “fashion-oriented” customer.

 
Bob Sheard recalls the project.
 
“They were designing something which they felt represented fashion but in doing so they were trying to chase the high street. It takes 18 months to bring product to the marketplace and you will never “out-fashion” stores such as Topman.”

“We told DMs that they needed to focus on more enduring trends rather than short term “fast fashion”. We advised them to concentrate on longer term cultural trends, provenance and quality.”
 
“We observed that in DMs case, the key was not to follow the market in adopting “lifestyle and fashion” trends. In fact, it was the exact opposite. Just create honest product and let your consumers create their own meaning.”

Having been a Creative Director at Converse, Bob understood this mechanism well.

“A pair of All Stars are a blank canvas, they get personalised and develop meaning through whoever puts them on and makes them their own. It’s the same as a Dr Martens boot – if a copper wears them, they represent order. If a globalisation protester wears them they represent disorder. If a nationalist wears them they represent the far right, however if a socialist wears them they represent the left wing.”

At DMs the brand doesn’t give the product meaning, people do.

In the lifestyle sector DMs is the perfect embodiment of how product design more than brand design can differentiate.
  
At ISPO there will be another FreshBritain client who above all others will differentiate via product design.

Whilst the Outdoor Performance sector will continue to attempt to “Conquer the Outdoors”, in the case of the enigmatic brand Arc’teryx, their power resides in their ability to design a product that is “Inspired” by the Outdoors, not designed to “Influence” it.

But that is another story…

In the case of Salomon, Fresh became involved with the brand after they had been sold by adidas to their new owner, Amer. They required a pretty strong degree of re-organisation as their lifestyle driven positioning “Fuel your instincts” was struggling to connect .

FreshBritain Creative Partner Bob Sheard explains.
“We worked on repositioning the Salomon brand. We observed that their lifestyle positioning was fuzzy. They come from a relatively unknown part of France. Annecy is better known globally as a retirement resort, a place where people go to die, it did not have great lifestyle credentials.”

“We sought to unearth what Salomon’s truth was and the only way we could do this properly was by going there and interviewing as many people as possible. We found people in tears, the company was in a state of flux and yet they still felt immense pride in Salomon. Within France it was still very prestigious.”

“Eventually, after speaking to many people we were introduced to an old guy who worked in one of the factories in the Alps. He took us to a room and it was filled with racks and racks of files. It held over 8000 patents for innovation on mountain sports that stretched over 40 or 50 years. It was incredible. This discovery led us to conclude that Salomon was the ‘innovation company’. We found they had twice as many patents as NASA had ever filed, and four times more than their previous owners adidas.”

It was via this revelation that Salomon got back to its roots, became reinvigorated and the ‘lifestyle’ elements were ditched in favour of an innovation driven visual language, visual style and strategic platforms. Their brand truth was simply “innovation on the mountain”. As “The Mountain Sports Company”, Salomon have not looked back.

The perfect example of a brand not being in touch with its “truth” is the BrandBritain. 

If you look at Britain as a brand it is similar to Salomon. Britain brims with invention and innovation. Britain invented the jet engine, discovered DNA, invented the computer and the internet. BrandBritain has this amazing “Truth” in invention but the flipside is that the most successful internet companies are Google and Facebook. The most successful computer companies are Microsoft and Apple – none of which are British.

In theory, every DNA test in the world should pay a royalty to Britain. Where Britain fails compared to other countries is not in creativity but in commerce.  British Commerce continually fails to meet the opportunity exposed by British Creativity.  Instead Britain’s best designers, academics and inventors work abroad where they are more respected and better remunerated.

The Olympics and Jubilee are like a great ad campaign, in that temporarily they will hide deficiencies in the brand’s product and strategy.

The Truth with BrandBritain is that it has an opportunity drain. There is an inability to marshal British Commerce and exploit British Intellectual Capital. BrandBritain needs a brand vision based on “Truth”.  A vision for Britain that will connect Commerce to Creativity and produce for Britain plc a meaningful share of the 21st Century.

Britain as a brand has all the tools to become successful but it has, unlike Salomon, forgotten its truth. 

“Boxfresh used to have the tagline ‘We are you’. We told them you don’t tell people you are them – you prove you are like them by how you behave!”
 
The difference between what a brand ‘says’ and what a brand ‘does’ is key. 

When Fresh worked with New Balance we were able to turn them into the anti-fashion shoe. 

Perversely we knew the ‘anti-fashion’ route was successful when half the designers at Milan and New York fashion week were wearing New Balance at the end of their shows on the catwalk. That may appear as if it’s a contradiction, but designers don’t want to be defined by the status quo, and anti-fashion in fashion is definitely not the status quo. 
 
“We were able to make them the anti-fashion brand by focusing on what New Balance did really well rather than talking them up all the time. They didn’t need that. New Balance don’t sponsor athletes. Secondly, they try to source, manufacture and create their compononets in each specific country the shoes are sold, for example the USA, UK or Japan. That’s important. It ticks the provenance box for a start and is a perfect example of a brand ‘doing’ and not needing to sugarcoat it with words. New Balance bahaved in a manner that was the antitheses of fashion and sports brands but never spoke about it.”

 
The real benefit to brands who act in the right manner, rather than just communicating it, is that once they achieve this they create so much more brand equity and credibility. It’s a very powerful and robust brand position. It’s not so much communicating what the brand says about itself, it’s getting the brand to behave over a length of time in a consistent way that enables people to draw their own conclusions. That’s more powerful than an ill-conceived tagline or slick, short term marketing campaign.
 
If an agency comes up with a great idea without immersing itself in a brand’s behaviour, then what they have is a campaign and not a strategy.  Effectively the brand knows what to ‘say’ but not what to ‘do’. It is all about having a strategic platform which relates to a brand’s truth from which you can then create the platform for what you ‘say’ and more importantly what you ‘do’. Therein lies the long-term health of a brand.

“Working with UVU we ran the North Pole marathon. Our team ran across the jungle, we pounded the desert and this then culminated in running the North Pole marathon. You don’t just turn up with your trainers for something like that. It was hard but it was all a vital part of the immersion process. It meant training for six months, running in mud, running in sand, fog and snow. It meant getting up at 2am because that is when it is coldest and running at 50km runs with sleep deprivation prepared us for the North Pole marathon. Only then could we truly get into the mind and soul of the UVU consumer.”

To illustrate their commitment this is FreshBritain’s Business card at precisely 90 degrees north:

“We knew from experience that there will come a time in a runners life when your physical exhaustion has to be overcome by your mental resolve and that is what inspired us to name the brand UVU – you versus you. You can’t make this stuff up. You have to live it to understand it.”

The authority when building a brand from scratch comes from connecting to the soul of the consumer. In all cases, FreshBritain seeks to connect with them. They know that we understand them because we become them. From scratch you have to create a process and a DNA that creates a behaviour that generates the authority for a brand to do what it needs to do. UVU has more authority in the sphere ultra-running than any other brand in the world right now.

That appetite for immersing into the brand isn’t restricted to UVU either. Bob continues.

“When we worked for New Balance we ran marathons and when we worked for Nike ACG we went to live in the mountains for six months. When we worked for Karrimor Travel we sent our creative director to the Alps with £30 and told him he had to get back to the UK. On his return we asked him to tell us about his experiences and only then did we get to the core of what it meant to be immersed into a brand.”

FreshBritain has a commitment to finding out everything there is to know about a brand. The only way to do that is to become the brand and its consumers. In the movies, there are method actors. At FreshBritiain we try to be the method actors of branding.

That track record can come in many forms. While UVU has invested in proving itself in the toughest climates over a 2-year period, Levi’s had no such requirement – they have been doing it for 160 years.

Getting a brand back to what made it successful is the challenge. Some of the most powerful and potent brands in the world are owner run. So for instance when Steve Jobs was at Apple, he was the ultimate consumer for Apple or Phil Knight, the ultimate consumer for Nike or Armani, Ralph Lauren – not always the case but the brands that seem to be the most potent tend to be owned and run by its own consumer who then short circuits the need for all that information, all the focus groups and decision making. Fresh behaves like that as an agency and immerses itself in the brand.

In the case of ACG, Nike asked us to re-launch the brand in Europe. When we initially went to meet them they asked us what was right with ACG. We explained what was wrong with ACG, chiefly that thing in the middle of their logo – the Swoosh.

The Swoosh is imbued with over 20 years of individuals’ values, of personal glory and victory. The values of glory and victory are the antitheses of why people go snowboarding or venture into the outdoors. That’s the consumer barrier but there is also a retail barrier and that is that retailers do not want you to dominate their outdoors sector like Nike dominate the sport sector.

Bob explains how they advised ACG:

“We told Nike to behave their way in. We got them to take all the buyers from all the major outdoor stores in Europe and took them on a trip to the Alps on an avalanche warning expedition. So basically, we skied and snowboarded with them a little bit beyond their capabilities. We taught them about avalanches, we used products all designed by Nike. We designed a route down the mountain to ensure that they would have to use all their products a certain way. We made it so they would have to use their hoods, their rucksacks and so on, basically get the full use of their equipment. It was like a showcase, a dress rehearsal. And by the time they got to the bottom they were totally exhausted, yet sold and convinced on the product.”

“At the bottom of the mountain we arranged a helicopter to pick them all up and that was the only time we used the Nike logo. We put a Swoosh on the back of the helicopter pilots helmet.”

Brands often make the mistake of believing it is the consumer who must behave in a certain way. They believe it is a case of reminding people they exist via a short-term marketing campaign. In the case of many brands, it’s more about getting back to their core substance and what gives them authority. In the case of ACG, Fresh sought to change perceptions through behaviour. Not through big spends or advertising or endorsements but by behaving in the right way.