Invisible Brand

Lucian Camp on... some of the nation’s most powerful brand relationships.

I’VE BEEN MORE OR LESS LOYAL to many brands over the years, but one in particular stands out.
It has commanded my complete loyalty for as long as I can remember, and it’s literally certain to go on doing so for as long as I live. Indeed, I’m not just a loyalist; I’m an advocate, singing the praises of the brand to anyone who will listen and doing my best to recruit other customers, especially from my own family, whenever I get the chance.And I’ll have absolutely nothing to do with any of this brand’s many competitors, none of which I’d touch with a bargepole.

And yet, by any normal criteria, the performance of this much-loved brand has often been little short of despicable. It’s extremely expensive, with many competitors that cost less than half as much. Its delivery is crushingly disappointing, failing for year after year to get anywhere within miles of my expectations. Its service quality is poor; it’s recently introduced a new online service that improves things somewhat, but previously you could spend the best part of a day on the phone trying to get through to the call centre. And it’s not even convenient; there’s at least one other brand of, objectively, much better quality that’s a great deal easier for me to engage with.
What is this brand to which I display this pathetic and evidently sadly-misplaced devotion? As you’ve probably guessed, it’s my football club. I have the misfortune to be a Tottenham Hotspur suppor ter, which has been something of a rocky road these last for ty years. Getting toWhite Har t Lane on a Saturday afternoon is a real shag. The tickets are insanely expensive – £110 for me and my nine-year-old son. Buying them over the phone was practically impossible, although the online service is better. The state of the facilities in the ground is still a disgrace. And, crucially, the team is rubbish, a combination of mismanagement and under-investment creating a situation in which the national rail network and the health service look like beacons of excellence.

Still, none of that really matters. A man’s relationship with his football team has been described as his only truly monogamous relationship.The fact that on every practical consideration I’d be better off supporting Arsenal is so completely, totally and utterly irrelevant that I’m angry with myself for even mentioning it.
Now, I know what you’re thinking.You’re thinking that a man’s relationship with his football team is also so completely, totally and utterly unlike his relationship with any other brand that there’s no point in thinking about it.

I’m not so sure. Of course I don’t seriously imagine that my pension provider could aspire to the same place in my heart as my beloved Spurs. But I think that there are a couple of points worth considering.
First, and most obviously, it’s very clear that when a brand connects with its target group at a high level, then the quality of the lower-level connections doesn’t matter very much. Sure, I’d be pleased if there were more catering options at White Hart Lane than overpriced mineral water and stale bagels, but improving the refreshments isn’t necessary to maintain my support. A chap’s relationship with his football club operates at pretty much the highest available level, namely the level of Common Purpose. Admittedly the common purpose in question – winning the Championship and/or the Champions’ League – looks as far away as it’s been since the early sixties, but it’s still there as a shared agenda that transcends the day-to-day interactions between the club and me.

This may be unusual, but it’s certainly not unheard of in the commercial world. For example, politically-correct or environmentally-conscious brands like Body Shop, the Co-operative Bank and Fairtrade manage to create a sense of common purpose among day-to-day actions like buying handcream or coffee or making cash withdrawals. It’s not quite the same as football, but the idea that the purpose of the relationship transcends the value exchange between brand and consumer is pretty similar.

My relationship with Spurs also exists at another high level, if not quite as high as common purpose. As one of 38,000 fans at home games, and another million or two armchair supporters, it gives me a very strong Sense of Belonging. This is a feeling most people enjoy, and in return for which, again, they’re happy to trade off some details of day-to-day delivery. A friend is a member of a club which serves disgusting food and wine. It doesn’t matter. My friend is happy and comfortable there – indeed, one of the things that bonds him with his fellow-members is the pleasure of regular and violent agreements about how ghastly the food and wine are.

I suspect that a similar dynamic was at work in my own home not so long ago, when my wife doggedly spent several hours logged on to egg.com trying to go through the catastrophically useless application procedure for the egg credit card.Time after time she would complete the 15-page form, only for it to fall over on the last screen and send her back to the beginning again. If it had been from her bank, which she hates, she would have been picketing head office by the tenth time. As it was, because she feels somehow at home with the egg thing, she plugged away until she succeeded on the 23rd attempt.
As well as the importance of Common Purpose and a Sense of Belonging, I can think of one other big lesson from the world of football, Start Young. I’m sure that one reason why my relationship with Spurs runs so deep is that it started so early – to be exact, in the Double Year when I was 6. Frankly, I don’t know how much research has been done on this, but my suspicion – as a father of 12- and 9-year-old children – is that the foundations for a lifetime of relationships with brands are pretty much dug by the age of 10. It’s not just a question of brands that engage directly with children, like McDonald’s, Nike and Disney. At 9, Oliver already understands that Ferraris are flash, fast and a bit naff, whereas Porsches are flash, fast and a bit German. And at 12, Chloe is well aware that Apple Macs are cooler and groovier than PCs, if, sadly, not quite as sensible. In fact, the reality is that of all the major categories of brands with which they’ll engage in the future, financial services brands stand out conspicuously by their absence.They’re simply not present in Oliver’s and Chloe’s lives. Of course they’re exposed to financial advertising and they walk past high street branches, but these things are irrelevant and invisible to them.
Oddly enough, it’s not difficult to imagine initiatives that would enable financial services providers to start killing all three of the birds I’ve mentioned – Common Purpose, Sense of Belonging and Start Young – with one stone. Say that a big bank launched a major, long-term sponsorship of children’s sport, with, for example, a 1% contribution on all credit card transactions. For parents worried about Couch Potato Syndrome, there’s common purpose; for dads huddled on the touchline with their Lloyds TSB umbrellas, there’s a sense of belonging; and for kids with their Lloyds TSB kitbags and half-time orange juice, there’s starting young.

Speaking as a dad, I don’t suppose I’d display quite the sort of irrational, desperate, unswerving loyalty to a scheme like this that I’ve displayed to Tottenham for the last forty years. But then again, I’d like to think that I wouldn’t be quite as cruelly disappointed and unrewarded either.