It was very refreshing to hear the death knell of the brand last night at Iain Curruthers’ book launch, Great Brand Stories: Dyson. Iain had chosen his venue wisely - we were surrounded by the creative output of the psychotherapeutic department at the Regents Park Conference Center - and there were a pleasing number of people from Dyson’s team present for Iain’s independent investigation of their brand.
His talk, and ideas seemed more appropriate to stimulate a lively discussion rather than a book launch and I was itching to discuss his ideas further, although unfortunately we weren’t given the opportunity. It just felt so honest and refreshing to hear and read that despite the marketeers James Dyson remained true to his cause and his ethos. He wanted to know how things worked and wanted his marketing efforts to reflect this and not some vacuous marketing ‘position’. Iain rounded things off by asking ‘When someone spends two hundred pounds on a Dyson how much of that are they paying for the Dyson and how much are they happy to pay for the story of the great British inventor.’
Well according to the Dyson marketeers in the room the Americans are lapping up the concept of the latter. Although apparently Mr Dyson is resisting their attempts to make him wear glasses and a white coat. You can buy the book here from Amazon and read all about the final throws of brand at Iain’s new web site www.encounterbusiness.com. It’s another fully content managed web site built by Asymmetry, this time based on the fabulous wordpress blogging platform.
After the book launch it was off to Unique Digital’s pub, yes that’s right, Unique’s management team own a pub! I must thank the Unique management team for collecting all the faces new and old together at The Albion for a great party.