Spring in Full Swing: Bond Villain & Branding May Day [Ice Cream Sundae]

Image Credit: Takashi .M

This newsletter was originally published via email on the 1st May 2016. You can also sign up to receive Ice Cream Sundae with the form on the right-hand side column or here (The newsletter format shifted from long to shorter form since).

Sometimes the date is helpful to avoid spending that much time wondering what I should be writing about. Easter was the last seasonal event I wrote about and I’m gladly going with the easy route here making this Sundae about May Day.

About help, I just found out the Mayday distress signal used mainly by aviators and mariners come from the French “m’aidez” Short for “venez m’aider” (Come and help me). A radio officer in London Croydon Airport invented the procedure in 1923. Much of the air traffic was between London and Paris at the time, so they wanted to make sure they came up with something everybody could easily understand. When used, the signal is to be repeated three times to make sure it isn’t mistaken for another similar sounding word.

May 1^st is a public holiday in many countries, including the UK. When I moved to London I remember asking colleagues what the May Day Bank Holiday was celebrating and none of them knew. The consensus seemed to be that I should be happy it’s a public holiday and enjoy it without asking so many questions.

One of my all time favourite operas, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, was performed for the very first time in Vienna on May 1^st 1786. 

The beautiful overture is an excellent excuse to provide a musical theme while you’re reading this. I’m listening to the whole opera while writing this.

May Day is an ancient spring festival celebrated in many European countries, rooted in pagan traditions. It apparently comes from Floralia, the Roman spring festival in honour of Flora, Goddess of flowers. In Latin, it was called “Ludi Florae” The Games of Flora. You probably know by now that I like games so that got my attention. The Roman festival celebrated flowers and fertility in a pleasure and fun seeking atmosphere. The Games were organised for the people of Rome, and remaining texts from that time tell us the entertainment in 68 AD featured a tightrope-walking elephant. In case you’re wondering what that looks like, here’s a video of an elephant walking a tightrope in a Thai zoo. I’m not sure what they have to do to train the elephant or if it’s a good thing for the animal altogether.

As mentioned, flowers are an important part of the celebrations. In France, it’s traditional to buy and gift a few strands of “muguet”, lily of the valley. Legend says giving the small white bell shaped flowers goes back to the 16^th century. French king Charles IX was visiting the South of France with his mother Catherine de Medici in 1560, their host Chevalier Louis de Girard de Maisonforte gave the young king the flowers from his garden for good luck. The king appreciated the gesture and decided to make it a recurring event. He would give ladies of the court lily of the valley every spring. The tradition quickly extended to the whole country and is alive and well to this day. There’s a folk song about it too.

A slightly mysterious recurring tradition of May Day celebrations is the Maypole erected in the centre of the festival.

Typically a wooden pole, sometimes decorated with greenery, flowers and ribbons tied to it. It is primarily found in Germanic countries, and people dance around the maypole during the spring festivities. We know the origins of the practice are old, dating from days of Germanic paganism of the Iron Age (Which includes Norse religions and more).

Unfortunately the exact significance of the maypole was lost on the way, even though the tradition remains. Folklorists continuously debate the meaning of the maypole. Some believe there is a relation with the Norse cosmological tree connecting the nine worlds, Yggdrasil. Others think it is a symbol of the world axis. Some ideas are also related to the pole as a phallic symbol and related to the idea of fertility associated with spring celebrations. Unsurprisingly people like Sigmund Freud supported these ideas.

As far as I know it is the rare seasonal holiday that doesn’t boast much by way of promotional marketing stuff. Some stores have sales going on but advertising symbols don’t immediately come to mind as they do for Easter or Christmas – speaking for myself in any case.

I wonder what the promotions or advertised products and services could look like for May Day.

Pizza Hut spring flower topping special? KFC Zinger spring chicken combo? How about a Durex branded maypole? That might be a step too far. To keep this on safer grounds, McDonalds could make up a May Day Menu featuring a spring onion burger.

These may or may not sound like fun. If I were to devise a marketing and brand strategy, I would start by identifying and specifying the challenge to solve or opportunity to take advantage of. Until this is clearly established there is no particular frame of reference to evaluate whether spending your marketing budget on sponsoring a series of May Day village fetes may or may not be a better idea than organising a competition for a lucky customer to win a dream summer holiday.

In a similar fashion to the kind of freedom the School of Communications Arts 2.0 students I’ve been recently mentoring have, May Day is an open brief here so I can make up whatever I want as long as it sounds plausible.

I could choose a specific brand and think about the marketing activities they could run at this time of year. As strange as it may sound, in this case it sounds like more fun to imagine for a moment I’m in charge of the brand called May Day. My next steps would be to ask many questions, such as: What are the values and attributes of this brand? What does May Day represent for people?

I was also reminded May Day is a James Bond villain’s henchwoman in A View to a Kill, the 1985 film starring Roger Moore, Christopher Walken as the villain Max Zorin who wants to destroy the Silicon Valley. Grace Jones plays May Day, Zorin’s lover and chief henchwoman, apparently ridiculous strong. While an interesting anecdote, it’s unlikely to be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of May Day as a brand. We can probably safely remove it from the equation.

As stated earlier on, May Day is about springtime. It’s about the revival of life after sleepy winter. It’s about days getting longer, the sun getting slightly warmer, bright colours, flowers and fertility. I could keep writing more concepts and in a professional setting I probably would because there is interesting meaning to consider tied to all these ideas. This is an enjoyable part of my job that brings us into the territory of semiotics, that is the study of meaning-making, sign processes and meaningful communication.

The main message of May Day as a brand could be something like: “spring in full swing.”

The mood is merry, chipper.

The function is to celebrate life.

The action involves dancing.

The effect is infectious fun.

The result is fertility, the creation of new life.

If we were designing a logo and branded materials, we’d likely choose green as a dominant colour.

This would be the start of defining the May Day brand. If we pursued this into strategic territories, we might consider the place of that event in the yearly calendar and how it differs or resembles other holidays like Christmas or Halloween. This is only one of the many aspects we could research to further develop this as a brand strategy.

While I’ve occasionally heard people tell me this kind of branding exercise is a lot of hot air (and admittedly in some cases I agree with them), when taken seriously and done well the brand strategy can and should form a strong foundation for any business. This can meaningfully inform all the business activities from product design, distribution, human resources, internal communications, marketing communications or customer service.

Possibly and ironically jarring with all this branding and marketing jargon, May 1^st is also the International Worker’s Day.

It’s a celebration of working classes and labourers promoted by international labour movements, socialists, communists and anarchists. The date was chosen in 1889 by newly formed Second International in Paris.

The date was chosen to commemorate the Haymarket Affair, the aftermath of a bombing that took place during a labour demonstration on May 4^th 1886 in Chicago. What started as a peaceful rally of workers striking and demanding eight-hour working days turned ugly when someone threw a dynamite bomb at the police. Seven officers and at least four civilians were killed, and many more wounded. May Day has become focal point for demonstrations by various worker’s unions, socialist, communist and anarchist groups.

When I lived in Perpignan last year, the building of the largest union in France, la CGT (General Confederation of Labour), happened to be across the small street from my room. That’s why on May 1^st last year loud recording & chanting of The Internationale by a group of unionists suddenly woke me up. That was followed by several speeches reminding me of all the progress acquired by workers over the years, from eight-hour long working days to paid holidays, as well as what was left to struggle about in their view. Speeches were interspersed with partisan and revolutionary song favourites like Motivés, Bella Ciao or La Cucaracha.

This is a whole different direction you could easily go in for a May Day brand strategy, worker’s have been associating meaning to the day for over a century and some parts of the world brand idea associations with worker’s rights and struggles are perhaps stronger than ideas of spring time and fertility.

There is rarely only one best answer to developing a brand strategy. In the meantime, whether you associate today with spring or with worker’s rights, have a fantastic Sunday however you celebrate it.

If you’d like to check out more Ice Cream content, I’ve published a fun conversation with Alexis Kennedy and Cash DeCuir from FailBetter Games who design and develop a fabulous online subterranean Victorian Gothic narrative game called Fallen London. The game is available for free online and now on iPhone application as well if you want to check it out.

If you’ve enjoyed reading this newsletter and know a friend who will too, please forward it on to them.

Till’ next week!

Best,
Willem

Sex, Dopamine & Roller Coaster Rides [Ice Cream Sundae]

Image Credit: Doug Letterman

This newsletter was first published via email on 24th April 2016. You can also sign up to receive Ice Cream Sundae by filling the form on the right-hand column or here (since then the newsletter format changed from long to shorter form).

Spring is taking its time to show up here in London, the weather has been relatively chilly, alternating cloudy drizzle and sunshine for the past few days. Fortunately I don’t mind the weather, I’m happy to be back in London.

I’m still looking for a new freelance project to work on, and keeping my eyes out for full time roles in case something interesting comes up. In the meantime I started mentoring at the School of Communications Arts 2.0, a fantastic opportunity to work on exciting creative briefs with students. In addition to writing the weekly newsletter I’m slowly working to build a library of drafts for future editions as well. The podcast takes time too: scheduling and recording interviews, editing existing episodes and publishing weekly. Throw in some time to catch up with friends, do a few interesting things around London and my week is pretty full.

Sometimes I wonder how long I’ll be able to sustain writing these weekly essays with everything else, but so far so good. I’m contemplating the idea of seasons, like for TV series. I might take a break over the summer for a few weeks. This is the 30^th Sundae; 30 weeks in a row, rain or shine. I’ll give myself a pat on the back for that. There, done.

Last week’s Sundae was pretty serious (for me at least), so this week I’m revisiting another one of my informal thematic series, those of you who subscribed a while ago might remember I wrote about theme parks in a series I called “A few of my favourite things”. Cue tunes from the Sound of Music. You can think of this new one as a companion piece. Last time I wrote about theme and amusement parks in general, now I’ll dive more specifically about some of these parks most important rides: roller coasters.

In France and much of continental Europe, they’re called Russian Mountains (“Montagnes Russes”) because that’s where the idea originally comes from.

“A good roller coaster is better than sex.”

~Michael Quinn, Letters to the Editor, Oui Magazine, January 1978

Depending on sources, the first Russian Mountains seem to have been built in the 17^th century. It was a winter entertainment activity, essentially giant adult sized ice slides. They would build two facing timber towers, generally around 21 to 24 metres high (70-80 feet) but the highest on record was 60 metres (200 feet)! They’d ice 60 metres long (200 feet) slope on a 50-degree incline supported by wooden beams. Riders would sit on small sleds, most often just a block of ice with a rope to hold on to. They would come to a halt thanks to sand spread at the end of the slope, and then they could climb the stairs of the opposing tower for another go.

Catherine The Great liked these so much she asked for a summer version to be designed and built at her private residence. Instead of ice and sleds, it had rudimentary wheeled carts on grooved tracks. In the early 19^th century, the French took the idea of the Russian Mountains and improved on them. They developed many improvements of early roller coasters, including the first loop in 1846.

As mentioned in an earlier Sundae about childhood fears, I was really afraid of roller coasters when I was younger. Now I love them. I started researching the hormonal mechanics of fear, pleasure and thrill seeking, though I’m probably only touching the surface for now.

I love this anonymous quote from a roller coaster designer:

“My job is basically to get as close to making people poop their pants as possible, then have them step off in ecstasy and want to go again.”

I can’t remember for sure the first roller coaster I went on and enjoyed. I think it was at Parc Asterix near Paris, known for a few good thrill rides, in particular Goudurix, a steel coaster open since the beginning of the theme park in 1989. It held the European record for the greatest number of inversions until 1995: 7. It’s known among enthusiasts as a rough and uncomfortable ride. I still loved it. I loved the traditional wooden coaster they built a few years later even more, Tonnerre de Zeus. Space Mountain in Disneyland Paris was also one of my favourites for a long time. As opposed to the traditional ride in America, this one featured a launched train rather than a lift, so you start the ride going really fast, and inversions.

Different people have different reactions to fear and excitement, in particular our brains release more or less of the hormones generated by instinctive fight or flight reactions. Dopamine is probably the most important one, usually called the pleasure or reward hormone. While complex in a way I admit to barely understand, dopamine has also been a hot topic in the world of branding and marketing these past few years. I may have already mentioned Simon Sinek’s Start with Why talk and book where he talks about dopamine release, pleasure and reward.

Brands aspire to generate a positive emotional trigger among consumers going above and beyond the functional or rational purpose of the products or services they promote.

I’ve been listening to this interesting podcast episode about branding and marketing from the perspective of the Cracked comedic website team. Another great classic reference is Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout. The book treats with the idea of positioning a brand with meaning in the heads of people to the level of belonging to a collective unconscious.

What are the first words that come to mind when you read Coca-Cola? How about Volvo? And Nike? A brilliant visual example is the brand tags experiment, a simple idea showing how brands exist in people’s heads. It shows both some of the ideas the brand intentionally wants associated with them, like Coca-Cola and love, or Volvo and safety, and notions people have like an idea association between Nike and child labour. The site has 1.7 million tags so far, you can go and add a few more if ever you’re bored.

Back to roller coasters and thrill seeking in general. As I said, some people get more dopamine, adrenaline and endorphins from experiencing those kids of thrills. That’s why some people like them, others less so. And then one more ingredient is essential to end with a pleasurable experience: safety.

A truly safe environment is the key to really enjoy a scary roller coaster ride or a similar thrilling experience.

It’s a fine line between the safe environment giving us the confidence boost that follows the exciting or thrilling sensation of a roller coaster ride, and the ‘real’ experience of fear. Safety is the most important aspect of roller coaster design and where they naturally spend the most time. I feel reassured and apprehensive in about equal measures getting on board a roller coaster; the restraints make me feel like I’m in safe hands to enjoy the thrill of the ride.

Even for all the safety work that goes into roller coasters these days, there are still accidents, as the tragedy crash that happened last year at Alton Towers in the UK and cost two women their legs. Just this week they admitted the crash was due to human error and health and safety features. There is risk involved, but then again there’s risk involved in living any day, every day. According to this article you are way more likely to die or be injured while fishing than riding a roller coaster. In fact, if you’re in the UK somehow they calculated that your average chance of dying of any cause today is one in 41,667. Pretty gruesome, though luckily we don’t have to think about that all the time or else we would probably stop enjoying every pleasurable vice in life.

I recently learned from a friend that her parents first met on a roller coaster ride, and while researching for this Sundae I also learned there is a belief associated with some research in neuroscience stating you are more likely to be attached or attracted to someone if you meet them for the first time in a strongly emotional situation, fearful or happy. We associate the memory with the people we shared an experience with.

I rode the oldest roller coaster still operating: The Cyclone on Coney Island, New York with my brother and my little nephew back in 2003.

It was built in the early 20^th century, opening in 1927. It makes a ridiculous amount of noise, the old carts are rickety and only feature lap restraints. It was heaps of fun. I loved it! My little nephew was absolutely terrified at first and then started to enjoy the ride. As per the earlier quote, by the time it was over he wanted another go.

The last theme park I visited with friends was Universal Studios in Singapore a few years ago and it doesn’t have that much by way of roller coasters, though there are two racing ones based on a Battlestar Galactica theme that were good fun. I’d love to go back to a theme park soon. Summer is coming up, maybe a visit to Alton Towers, Port Aventura in Spain or maybe even somewhere in the US could be a fun idea. If you’re into the idea of joining me for this, please give me a shout!

I’m sure the opening quote about roller coasters being better than sex is debatable. Talking about sex, I published an interview with Cindy Gallop in my podcast this week if you’d like to check it out. She is a renowned public speaker in the branding and advertising industry and also has a business called “Make Love Not Porn” dedicated to promote and talk about sex in a different way than pornography represents it. We had a fascinating conversation, though of course I’m biased in recommending it.

If ever you have any feedback or questions for me about the newsletter or the podcast I’m always happy to hear from you and reply. Lastly, if you know a friend who likes roller coasters and might appreciate reading this, please forward it to them.

All the best, enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Cheers
Willem