Gremlins 2: The New Batch

In Farquhar's article he talks about the brand gremlins and discusses what it is and how it affects the industry. Brand gremlins are people who are involved with a certain organization that doesn't really help them but instead diverts them on a tangent in regards to their goals. So organizations such as Sears Clothing, Woolworth, Conway are such examples or department organizations that have ran out of business or declared bankruptcy. However there are companies that have survived these brand gremlins such as Best Buy, Macys, Nordstrom, Saks 5th Avenue have all survived or have yet to experience these Brand Gremlins.
Just like in the movie, the Brand Gremlins ruin a company and can take it from a powerful company into a bankrupt one. Every now and then we hear these things happen and find out the person(s) responsible for these mishaps. Perhaps that this is a good thing for our society because with every death of a department, comes out a new one. Also, with new brands come out new Brand Gremlins....a new breed.

brand longevity

The little things count. Brand longevity is something that businesses and their marketing directors must work hard to maintain. It actually amazes me that brands can be updated and altered so that businesses stick around for years and years. How did Macy’s continue to thrive, while other department stores disappeared? Established companies update their brands and finesse the operations of their business to meet the expectations of their customers. Not only are brands updated, but these companies have also been successful in avoiding “brand gremlins.” Farquhar defines brand gremlins as “those people, processes and other entities that are out of alignment with the organization’s overall brand strategy.” Brands are expected by customers to have a certain level of quality, regardless of the brand type or the age of the brand. Customers expect good service and constant availability. The brand defines its own set of rules for operations and image as well, which are well defined and are used to market the company. Brand gremlins sneak into the everyday operations of the brand and although fixable, begin to eat away at the draw of the brand.

Alabama is for lovers

Place branding, like conventional branding, has its ridiculous moments. Such as the billboard in suburban Atlanta proclaiming "Alabama is for lovers." You don't have to be a yankee to find something a little odd in that statment. When I think of Alabama, I think of racism, the Civil Rights Movement, amazingly unintelligible Southern redneck accents, and so on. I certainly don't think to myself, "Where should I go on my honeymoon? I know!..." In the same way, I certainly don't associate Denmark with "cosiness, straightforward, design, bright, and oasis," (nor do I assume that all Danes make a habit of mixing nouns and adjectives in lists). Even if I did associate Denmark with all those things/descriptors, it wouldn't necessarily make me want to spend the couple thousand or so dollars it would cost to spend a week there as opposed to neutral, mountains, multi-lingual, bankers Switzerland.

Let's ponder crowded, one-child, red, Three Gorges, not-so-communist-anymore China for a second. Beijing will have the Olympics very soon. For the past couple of years the Beijing government has been enforcing a politeness campaign under the auspices of Beijing's Capital Ethics Development Office with the sole purpose of making Chinese citizens more Westernly polite in an attempt to impress all the visitors for the Games. In waging this $2.5 million campaign, the Chinese government is trying to do exactly what Blichfeldt claimed was impossible: to manage place brands by altering the behavior of the inhabitants of that place. While the success of the campaign was/is mixed at best, the very attempt to control people's lives to such an extent is interesting. (Not only did the government want people to alter their public lives - stop crowding busses, spitting, cursing, etc. - but also to tweak their private lives - no burping/farting/chewing-with-your-mouth-open at the table. As a nominally communist state, China can get away with such things, but elsewhere, Blichfeldt was correct in saying "locals are beyond the direct control of marketers" (Blichfeldt 398).

However, to me, the very necessity of (and the author's assumptions and implications inherent in) that statement are frightening. OF COURSE the locals are (should be) beyond the direct (or any) control of marketers. If they were, then the whole world would be DisneyLand, and we would all cease to be people; we would become characters in fuzzy suits, all living for the sole purpose of entertaining our "guests," never escaping that demeaning role until we ourself become "guests," willingly turning from slave to slave-master.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-02-08-china-manners_x.htm

Caution: Private Property

“…reasons law and geography have remained so uninterested in each other. By comparison, if these two fields have remained distant, architectural theory and the law have barely acknowledged each other’s existence.” (Lonsway 348)

Walt Disney was a genius. He has always been associated with animation and making children around the world happier and even bringing out the child in adults, but his business side often remains hidden. I know we have discussed this colossal monster that is the Disney Empire, but once again, I find myself amazed. 50 years ago, he was doing things that only now companies are beginning to do.

He really pushed new ideas that had huge architectural implications. His idea of creating a buffer zone of purchased land around the entertainment center was a great way to avoid “suburban sprawl butting right up against the edge of the entertainment destination. It makes Disneyworld a true getaway. Not to mention, the many ways Disney got around private ownership technicalities while also avoiding issues with legalities in the state of Florida were very clever. I don’t think any company up until Santana Row has really pushed the ideas represented in Disneyworld as well as Walt Disney did. How clever to obtain full control while giving the appearance that the control is in the hands of others. When Disney set up a community which required a voting population, it seemed like a fair democratic system, when in all reality the only voters were Disney employees. Disney took Mob Tactics and instead of using a restaurant as a front, he used a big playground.

The entirety that is Disney also does such a fantastic job at implementing Lonsway’s next point. They put up a façade of public while truly they are entirely private. When I read Lonsway’s writings about this issue of Public and Private I thought about the “Privately Owned Public Spaces” Project in NYC. Through this system private companies looking to build on a specific site are able to get around certain building restrictions if they claim to offer a P.O.P.S. For example, if a Day’s Inn wanted to construct a hotel, they could get around set-back restrictions if they offered a percentage of the site up as a public space with 24-7 access. Often however, these spaces go under-managed and are not open 24-7. The companies use them as a front to appear like they are providing for the city while they are not.

“Extrapolated, this argument suggests that no matter how ‘accurately’ a private venture is symbolized as a public one, its private status is incontrovertible, based ultimately on the private contract of property ownership.” (Lonsway 351) Under this concept, even if something looks public, or as much as it may even perform like an actual public space, it is private when it comes to legalities. So, then I postulate, if someone were in a P.O.P.S. in NYC and was injured, could they then sue the owner of the property for lack of upkeep on equipment? Or as a counterclaim to that argument, could the private company in reverse then sue the individual for trespassing on private property?

Ultimately, I feel like spaces such as these P.O.P.S. or company towns like the one in the Marsh case, even if they appear public, need to have asterisks under the welcome sign that say “This town is privately owned by the Blank corporation and thereby private property.” Yes, it is ridiculous, but in today’s sue-happy society you, as both an individual and a corporation, need to cover your bases. In a society where individuals need a note on a cup of coffee saying “Caution: Contents HOT!” we obviously need new signs saying “Caution: Private Property!”

Disney Diluted

In cases where brand is intimately linked to place, to what degree is it possible for a brand gremlin to undermine the sanctity of a themed landscape? In the case of Disney, there was initially a clear (although likely unintentional) intrusion from outside its walls – the success of Disney led to intense development of the surrounding area, and in turn forced Disney to acquire for itself what land that it otherwise could not control. Purchasing this land for use as a buffer zone makes sense in that it helps to contain fantasy solely within its borders, but was 110km2 really necessary to accomplish this? Although my knowledge on the subject is extremely limited, I would argue that, although the purchase of 110km2 of surrounding land does indeed protect the realm of fantasy from distillation by outside forces, a more problematic scenario presents itself as a distillation in the opposite direction - what happens when surrounding hotels and restaurants begin to “Disneyify” their services; not to the point of total immersion, but to try to assimilate themselves into the realm of fantasy on the most basic level? Ultimately, Disney’s purchase of the surrounding land suggests that a themed environment must be fully immersive and isolated to prove successful; the undermining of Disney’s borders by the extension of a pseudo-Disney environment causes one to question the validity of the “real” staged environment.