 |
Loved up and sold out'I love Head & Shoulders. I won't buy or use anything else. It's a Lovemark of mine.' By his own admission, the man who wrote this touching tribute to dandruff shampoo has very little hair. He believes, like the Beatles, that 'All You Need is Love'. He also wants us to know that he has homes in New York, St. Tropez and Auckland. His name is Kevin Roberts and he is CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi.
It's no secret that branding has become a bore. Once seen as the answer to everything, then attacked by No Logo activists as a modern malaise, the notion of the brand is now merely commonplace. If you are in marketing and communications, claiming to offer unique branding solutions is no longer much of a selling point. Saatchi & Saatchi's answer is the 'Lovemark' - nothing less, they claim, than 'the future beyond brands'. Of course, the Lovemark too is actually a brand, but it's a brand that supposedly transcends ordinary brands, a brand able to inspire 'loyalty beyond reason', a brand that creates an intimate emotional connection that its consumers just can't live without.
Now Roberts has written a book in which he expounds this not very hard to grasp idea at wearying length. Lovemarks (powerHouse books) is by turns wince-makingly sentimental, infuriatingly self-satisfied and intolerably patronising. Its design suggests that it might be aimed at six-year-olds. Almost every p
more: www.eyemagazine.com/critique.php?... (90)
bookmark: 
20/6/2004 | Viewed 7,284 time(s)
|
|
