Hive Health

There was quite an interesting article in Campaign last week on Tesco. As I’m sure you are all aware it’s a brand that only a couple of years ago was a powerhouse in a number of sectors – it’s now facing tough times.  This demise is made all the more surprising (in my mind) as about 8 years ago it was being lauded as being a brand that could do no wrong, a brand that was conquering sectors that no other retailers, let alone a supermarket could touch. This wasn’t luck – the Tesco management was razor sharp – as indeed were the agency – The Red Brick Road – set up by a bunch of chaps from Lowes including Sir Frank Lowe – who were probably some of the best in the business. Needless to say they are now having to re-pitch….

Below I’ve included a few lines from various people that contributed to the article, which may be of interest. I’ve also included a few thoughts of my own, which may be less interesting:

-          ‘Perhaps in chasing the best prices, the character of the brand became uninteresting and generic. Maybe the line in the brief that stated ‘brand personality’ was left blank because they weren’t sure what to write.’

You would have thought in today’s economically depressed climate that price would still have been a major motivator. Actually it seems from other stuff I have read that people are getting sick of always searching for bargains. Whatever – it’s well documented that you can’t build a brand on price alone – because people like Lidl will come along and very quickly take-over. Clearly price allows no emotional connection with a target audience – it’s purely a rational relationship – once that goes there’s little else to connect you to the brand. Also – it’s interesting that people are referring to price and not the close relation – value – just a subtle difference that would have made (perhaps) a massive difference.

-          ‘Tesco has not looked after its core UK proposition’.

Years of neglect have now caught up with it. I think I’ve discussed this with a few of you – but as soon as you start getting tactical with a brand it’s really easy to lose sight of the bigger picture – perfect example this – all about price, nothing on a deeper connection.

-          ‘The answer ‘ easy – keep it simple’.

Mmm – me thinks that if the Red Brick Road suggested that to Tesco they may be slung out on their arses – but I do like the sentiment behind this. It’s all gone Pete Tong and some bright spark suggests simplicity – but I do think it’s probably bang on. Don’t over complicate the problem – it’s more about re-establishing an emotional connection (in my mind) – but if I were the planning punter or creative jonnie I would love the comfort that these words would no doubt bring – after all it’s not rocket science….

In a long article published late last year in Slate magazine , Daniel Engber posed some questions that the pharmaceutical industry should be paying attention to. His article, ‘The Mouse Trap’, begins with an observation made by the neuroscientist Mark Mattson in 2007, when he ‘“began to realize that the ‘control’ animals used for research throughout the world are couch potatoes.”’ Mattson went on to co-author an analysis of the problem for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finding that lab mice are ‘insulin-resistant, hypertensive, and short-lived.’

This has happened because ad libitum feeding and zero exercise are standard conditions in the rodent-breeding factories that provide scientists with mice (a $1.1 billion dollar industry). But why does it matter? It matters because, as Engber writes, ‘the inbred, factory-farmed rodents in use today – raised by the millions in germ-free barrier rooms, overfed and understimulated and in some cases pumped through with antibiotics – may be placing unseen constraints on what we know and learn.’

The problem is, so invested are researchers in the mouse that no one wants to acknowledge the possibility that there’s a problem. But if there is a problem with mice, there’s a problem with drug development: scientists chew through 88 million mice a year in experiments and drug testing, and since 1965 the number of papers involving mice and rats has more than quadrupled. According to Engber ‘we’ve arrived at something like a monoculture in biomedicine,’ the main reasons being cheapness, docility, and the mouse’s amenability to ‘the most advanced tools of genetic engineering.’

In late 2010 Francis Collins, director of America’s National Institutes of Health, established a new agency to analyse what he called the ‘pipeline problem’ in biomedicine. The problem is that ‘innovation has slowed to a trickle. It takes more than a decade, and some $800 million, to produce a viable, new drug; among the compounds considered for testing, only 1 in 10,000 come to fruition.’ Could this perhaps be because ‘rats and mice were never so good at curing disease as they were at making data for its own sake’? Of the thousands of mouse studies for tuberculosis, ‘not one has been used to pick a new drug regimen that succeeded in clinical trials.’

The geneticist and statistician Michael Festing, one of the world’s experts on inbred lab mice, notes that ‘“the more research you do on something, the more valuable it becomes.”’ ‘A format war hides in the history of biomedicine,’ Engber writes, describing how not just one species but one particular strain, the Black-6, has become the most widely used organism in drug research. The problem is, since 1999 it’s been accepted that, for one, different mice have different responses to pain (prior to that the consensus was that every kind of mouse was essentially the same). And mice have different pain responses to other rodent species. And rodent species have different pain responses humans.

Experimental science does recognise certain fields where specific animals prove useful: for example armadillos in leprosy, prairie voles for autism, finches for language acquisition, but these models ‘live only at the margins of biomedicine…For most questions [the mouse is] a skeleton key that’s tried at every one of Nature’s doors.’ This despite the fact that, in the case of cancer, mice are prone to lymphomas and sarcomas as opposed to the carcinomas which are much more common in humans. Mouse tumours are much less varied than those seen in any hospital oncology department. They serve up ‘a bland and homogenized product, a fast-food version of the disease’. According to Robert Weinberg, the MIT biologist who discovered the first human oncogene and tumour suppressor gene, mice are ‘“the rate-limiting step in cancer research”’, and drug companies are ‘“wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on animal research that has little predictive value.’”

Engber’s article, which portrays both the problems with the mouse model and the ‘institutional inertia’ that prevent those problems from being formally acknowledged by the very people who would benefit most from their resolution, is essential reading.

Pinged this via twitter this morning. Clearly I am already a massive fan of Chris Brown’s Look at me now original (mid life crisis?). This parody was put together by some cats at UNM medical school asking for funds to support their student led clinics. On visiting UNM I loved the ‘What’s it like at medical school’ film on their site which failed to run for me. Surely this has to be switched with the Look at me now version injecting a healthy dose of fun, accessibility and spirit into the campus?

We have a pretty standard call for us all to go and get infront of our audiences as much as possible, heeding Paul Smith’s call to action for all of us creatives “go out and see the whites of their eyes”. If you ever doubted medics are human, accessible, and just like you and me – have a look at this. My highlight is the “Girl I cant tell whether you’d be winking or got mild ptosis” line. Genius.

Here is the original if you are not as cool as me, and if you fancy Friday afternoon with your Air Jordan’s on.

For those that are of a certain dustiness. If you didn’t recognise the style and 90′s theme running through the video.Shame on you. It’s been styled to be retro 90s. ” ‘Look at Me Now‘ is kind of like my very first hip hop, rap video,” Chris  Brown smiled when he sat down with MTV on Friday. “I wanted to complete just like old school, not truly old school however, like, back-in-the-day style.” Back in the day, for the 21-year-old, meant reviving 1990s staples such as “big baggy clothes” and “a lot of art, graffiti.” “I attempted to blend all of those components into one and make it enjoyable and exciting.

90s = retro. I am off to buy a red porsche.

This week I have been in Eindhoven on a four day facilitation skills course that uses constructionism (more to follow) to help assess the ‘hidden’ intelligence in a room of attendees. We have been put through our paces at Seats2Meat Eindhoven an inspiringly entrepreneurial social enterprise. Seats2meet is Dutch and has a business model that relies on meeting room rental to cover the costs for the free availability  of the space/canteen/facilities for new businesses, social enterprises, and non-profit making organisations. These organisations sign up to a social charter that provides a framework for a community of likeminded people. It self policing, a hive of activity, and really positive in terms of atmosphere, and a sense of salience.  All this housed in an old Phillips light bulb factory. An otherwise declining light industrial building put to good use fueling the next wave of ideas.

What has struck me more than anything is the calibre of facilitators I have been sharing this week with. The time spent working one to one and in groups with my nine European colleagues has been incredibly useful. Arriving Sunday night and returning tomorrow we have started at 8ish and worked through til 10pm finishing up individual projects and applications of the techniques we have been learning.  Finishing at this time, I have had 20mins to clear my head on the walk back to the hotel tired with the pace, the full on nature of the technique and the sheer variety of learning methodology. 4 days with not one single powerpoint slide, has been deeply influential on us all. Proper skills training, using a variety of proper teaching methods and approaches.

My late evenings have been spent finding restaurants that are open at this time, settling in and ordering something that is going to match the day. Food that can inspire, challenge and be successfully different. Most of these restaurants have been proponents of fusion food a craze that continues in Holland for blending of two or more cuisines. Whether that be Spanish thrown together with Japanese, or last nights malay and french effort its been a mixed bag of tom yum foam, with pimenton prawns or a prawn cracker topped with olive oil snow. The highlight gave me an omelet with chilli sauce in the centre, a sort of thai egg wagon wheel. Luckily this sense fest was accompanied by 7 wines to taste*. It’s fair to say that my evenings have been filled wanting some identity and confidence back in the kitchens of my hosts.

Whilst not wishing to be confused for AA Gill. This local trend sounded a connection. My days have been filled with framing questions, grounding approaches and metaphors this one is too approximate an opportunity to pass over. It strikes me that I have been making a similar mistake in our strategic kitchen. I think I need to get considerably better in defining where I as a consultant starts, and where me as a facilitator ends. Across all the agencies I have worked in we have consistently clouded the two roles. As a consequence failing to do either job with the clarity of purpose required, the independence needed, or having missed out on our input mid session when we have been guiding the group. It’s fusion of competencies.

One requires guidance, framing questions and independence and the suspension of solution provision. The other value judgement, input and subjectivity. Both have huge value but the danger exists in the middle ground facilitating the answers to core questions where we feel we should also be part of the answer. As a consequence influencing and skewing the result. This lack of clarity is a concept that I have seen present in many if not all of the facilitators I have worked with over the years in healthcare, and as much so in myself.

I feel the solution is for more of us to be up-skilled and competent to a much higher level than the marketing communication industry requires us to be. Accompanying this to strive for a set of guiding approaches/set formats that allow us to work across each others accounts when independent facilitation is needed.  I think this should be pretty doable for I/us here at Hive. We have more leadership level people per unit business than anyone else. Our resource model insists on an hour glass in place of a pyramid shape with our senior members making up a healthy wodge of client focused talent. We have the resources to get us all to a beyond industry level of competence, the desire to develop standardised approaches for typical challenges and certainly the humility and track record in learn from other sectors.

The week has been a steep learning curve and provided me not only with a new vocabulary, but a new respect for my European colleagues in their professionalism and discipline. From technical skills, to focus and purity of role I hope to put much of this into practice at Hive. I shall be striving for some fission, and kicking fusion into touch.

*This was a week of training permitting some low level relaxation. It’s possible to drink 7 glasses of wine on your own in a restaurant by following the following guide;  You certainly need a tasting menu, and do start with a beer, and a copy of a good book ideally something featuring food, drink and servant girls. Ignore the wine list and suggest your restaurant match each course. Do bare in mind that these types of gaffs will insist on sending 3 little bites to amuse prior to one of your starters arriving.  Then hang up your taste buds, and travel the increasingly hazy world.