1: Status quo
Change doesn't care whether you like it or not. It happens without your permission.
The love letter to my superhero
In December 2012 I sat down to write a love letter to my first pure love, my first hero. For years I had tried to influence the recipient. To help her realise her potential. To unleash the latent potential she was possessing. To help her let go of the legacy, the misplaced expectations, the unhelpful remnants passed down to her from her parents (particularly her father, the patriarch) so she could step into her own and release her own unique creativity. From a distance, I had watched the recipient, whom I love, suffer in silence. Now was the time to write all my thoughts and strategies down. The indicators strengthened my belief that the recipient would be finally ready to read, reflect, and act upon my letter.
The recipient, the first woman I ever truly loved, was my mother Birgitta. She is an energetic and elegant woman. She is full of life and exudes strength and determination. As one of my friends says, when she enters the room, her presence transforms the atmosphere to the point of near-intimidation. Mostly positively. Since 2003, she had been struggling, more or less overtly, but retained a proud veneer. She remained a woman who stoically believed in the Lutheran ethic of hard work, and that rewards follow that hard work, but she was starting to notice something odd. That logic no longer held true. The harder she worked, the more elusive the results became. And the harder she worked at following in the footsteps of her father, and his father before him, the more invested she became in her identity as a struggling, but hard-working woman.
My love letter to my mother first took the form of my Global Executive MBA thesis, and its main focus was whether the fortunes of a then cash-leaking bricks-and-mortar shop and mispositioned brand could be turned around and elevated — and, if so, how? But my work on this love letter began long before I sat down to write it. In May 2012, on a walk together with her springer spaniel Cicero, in a pine forest forty-five minutes outside of Stockholm, I asked my mother whether she wanted to become partners in the future. Whether she wanted my help to turn things around.
I wanted to help my mum leave a legacy and be able to retire with pride. Mum had taken on significant personal and financial risk when she bought out her two sisters between 2006 and 2007, after reporting to them as board members and shareholders between 2003 and 2006. In the family, we call Mum ‘Cinderella', because she is the youngest sibling, and is the only sibling to have worked professionally in the family business. And she has reaped no free lunches from it. Other than time spent in the US as an exchange student in the late 1960s, and when she met my dad in Stockholm in the late 1970s — her Prince Lars-Olof Charming — and three years spent in Australia, my mother's life has reflected typical family business stuff.
My mum spent three years absent from the business between 1997 and 2000 while we lived in Canberra, Australia, and my father completed his post as Swedish defence attaché to Canberra. During this time, my cousin Lucie covered for Mum in the business. From 2000, Mum slowly took over the reins of the business as the health of her father, Per, deteriorated until his passing away in 2003. From 2003 to 2006, my mum and her two sisters owned an equal number of shares in the company, with my grandmother, Ingrid, the majority shareholder after her inheritance from her husband, Per. During this time my mother was the managing director, and reported on the increasingly poor figures to her sisters and her mother. When my grandma Ingrid, bless her soul, passed away in 2006, the tone between the three sisters gradually deteriorated, and Mum bought out her two sisters in a process that was begun in around 2006 and completed by 2008 (see figure 1.1 for more more detail). The buy-out included Georg Sörman (Georg Sörman Pty Ltd), which covered the retail business of two shops — one on the island of Kungsholmen and one in Gamla Stan (Old Town), Stockholm.
Figure 1.1: Georg Sörman family lineage and Cinderella's challenge
Since the buyout of her two sisters, an historical déjà vu of my grandfather Per's emotionally disastrous buyout of his two siblings in the late 1960s, Mum's relationship with her two sisters is virtually non-existent, and tense at best. So I also wanted to prevent a similar situation repeating itself for a third time, because I am very close to my brother, Gustaf, and want(ed) to keep it that way. And I wanted to reconnect with my parents and create something enduring together, while they still had the energy and health to do it.
So basically, I wanted to help Mum show up her sisters, who she felt cheated by, by reinventing the family business brand and rebuilding it successfully. To help her reinstate her sense of self-worth. And to stop the vicious cycle of Mum managing the business on artificial ventilation, without changing the fundamentals that were causing the bleeding.
And, on our walk in the woods outside Stockholm, this wonderful superwoman, the first woman I ever truly loved — my mum — said that she would be honoured if I put my mind to the reinvention of her third-generation family business, Georg Sörman — Stockholm's oldest menswear shop. My futurephile mind went to work. And it hasn't stopped since.
Text and textiles; ideas and fabrics
Mum's ordinary world is one of textiles, fabrics and provenance. Hard work is something physical, not philosophical, theoretical or text-based. Yet, curiously, text and textiles have a closely interweaved history — literally and metaphorically. Both originate from the same Latin root, texere, which means to weave together — not so incidentally it turns out. While text, like a book, can weave together narrative, story, concept, thoughts, musings, romance or even a strategic direction, so textiles and the fashioning of textiles weave together different strands of thought. As you are reading this you can probably already see the intermeshing that is going on in this text. That text and textiles, in mystical ways, belong together. And that metaphors of textiles are found like a thread spun through the fabrics of life. (As in the last sentence, and as in the jumper shown in figure 1.2.)
Figure 1.2: Inis Meáin jumper from Georg Sörman, Stockholm
This is perhaps why a research project at the University of Glasgow is focused on creating a big data visualisation of thirteen centuries of startling cognitive connections between metaphors and different strands of thinking. Metaphor, it turns out, governs how we think about our lives — the past, the present and the future. The first online Metaphor Map from the University of Glasgow showcases more than 14 000 metaphorical connections, based on four million lexical data points, going back to AD 700, based on a mapping of the Historical Thesaurus of English, which spans thirteen centuries. According to Dr Wendy Anderson, the findings of the project include that ‘metaphor is pervasive in language and is also a major mechanism of meaning-change'. The ensuing map also revealed the strong connection between textiles and text, such as the description of social networks in textile terms like ‘weaving and spinning'; another example is something being defined as ‘tweedy' if it is rustic, or ‘chintzy' if petit-bourgeois. In a modern context, it is perhaps not surprising then that textiles are ever-present, and that textiles are a foundation for our conceptual ability to craft complicated structures and systems — like binary digital technology, for example, which sprung out of the punch card for the Jacquard loom. The idea of a ‘thread' is often used to indicate the following of a plan, moving in a particular direction, or embracing a vision for the future.
Text and textiles, of course, also coincide in that fundamental human activity of story-telling. Consider this old proverb in the context of storytelling, for example: ‘Thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns'. In this example, a thought is bestowed with the characteristics of a single thread, and the raconteur (storyteller) is bestowed with the characteristics of a professional spinner of yarns, who spins together disparate threads to make a whole. In other words, a storyteller is someone who takes individual thoughts and combines them into a comprehensive story. In this instance, the inherent idea is of storytelling as weaving, and of thoughts as the story's constituent parts. It's so hard to avoid these linguistic patterns. Please bear with me. It is textiles that have created the ‘ordinary world' my mother was so used to; they represent the ‘status quo' she has been working so hard to maintain. But textiles and their textures run deep for all of us.
Let us consider for a while why that is the case. Textiles are filled with meaning. We have already seen in the Introduction the religious connotations of the ‘Seamless Robe of Jesus'. As it turns out, textiles and fibres run through our human consciousness on several levels. In fact, if we view textiles through the lens of Maslow's needs hierarchy (as Beverly Gordon from the University of Wisconsin does in her 2010 article ‘The fiber of our lives: A conceptual framework for looking at textiles' meanings', published by the Textile Society of America), textiles play a role with regard to each of the steps on his hierarchy: self-actualisation, esteem, love/belonging, safety and physiological. (figure 1.3, overleaf, shows Maslow's hierarchy of needs.) We understand our reality in reference to textiles — we may speak, for example, of the ‘fabric of our lives', ‘life hanging on by a thread', ‘strands of DNA', and ‘moral fibre'. We have already explored how central textiles are to the fundamental human tradition of storytelling, and threads are often used to denote a pathway forward — think of the linkage between Theseus finding his way out of the labyrinth and today's WhatsApp threads. Textiles also feature through life's journeys and milestones, and are thus imbued with considerable meaning cross-culturally.
Figure 1.3: Maslow's hierarchy of needs
The following sections look at the ways textiles fulfil and work within Maslow's needs hierarchy, and how they have become so central to my mum's identity.
Physiological
Textiles play a key role in providing shelter, and ensuring our survival. Growing up in Sweden — so short summers with long winters — in a textile family I soon learnt the common adage that ‘there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes' (which sounds even better in Swedish: ‘det finns inget dåligt väder, bara dåliga kläder'). In other words, make sure you cover up to withstand the elements, boy. See figures 1.4 and 1.5 for some clear indications of the ways my family have always used textiles to withstand the elements — in this case, while hunting (sartorially, of course).
Figure 1.4: a Sörman hunting trip; my grandfather Per (second from left) and great-grandfather Georg (centre)
Figure 1.5: sartorial textiles to withstand the elements (and help capture food)
Textiles have been traditionally used to capture food (nets), to build tents, and to carry food and water, and they continue to be used in this way to the present day. Natural and more modern, technical fibres (like those used by my favourite ski clothes brand Norrøna) have enabled native and non-native Swedes to navigate temperatures of up to negative 50°C, and to sail the cold Baltic sea in their search for food.
Safety
When I fractured my shinbone on the French Mediterranean coast during the summer of 2015, the immediate treatment was elevation, cooling, and bandages made out of textiles. Police and military wear bulletproof vests. Doctors and nurses wear sanitary ‘scrubs' in operating theatres, and sew us up with thread post-surgery. When I went parasailing in Queenstown in 2014, the parasail got me down safely. We use safety nets literally in acrobatics, and metaphorically in welfare states. And indoors, textiles like carpets can be used to insulate and provide us with a feeling of safety. From the moment we are born, textiles and blankets are used to provide us with a sense of protection. And this continues throughout all life stages.
High-end Swedish bed manufacturer Hästens (The Horse's) is famous for providing its customers with not only great sleep since 1852 but also a feeling of safety by using horsehair as one of the component parts of their artisan approach to bed manufacturing. Hästens manufacture their beds and mattresses by hand, using natural materials like cotton, horsehair, wool and flax, and manage to appeal to our inherited need for safety in sleep through their seamless storytelling and craftsmanship. And given the success of companies like Hästens, we can also see how textile manufacturing has provided shelter and safety, through income, for entrepreneurs in the textiles space.
Love/belonging
As a long-time fan of Stockholm's football club Djurgårdens IF, I have been indoctrinated with the colours and symbolism of that brand since birth. Whenever I attend a game at our new home — Tele2 Arena in Stockholm — I and my fellow Djurgården fans are greeted by the Ultra's navy and blue textile flags, or their use of the symbolic blue, yellow and red emblem. This idea of showcasing a sense of belonging through textiles is not novel. For centuries militaries have employed colour and textiles to get people to ‘rally behind the flag', and textile flags carry a lot of deep sentiment internationally — Americans, of course, pledge allegiance to their flag. In late 2015 and early 2016, New Zealand held two referenda on changing its flag to break with its colonial British past, and to better differentiate it in a modern context (incidentally they chose to stick with the status quo). When I was awarded my Global Executive MBA from the University of Sydney, the ceremony took place in academic gowns, and the tassel on the headpiece was ceremoniously moved 180 degrees as we were awarded our new social and academic status.
Equally, the production of textiles can be a bonding process, so when in 2014 I commissioned a handmade carpet from Agra in India to provide ‘the red carpet treatment' for my mum's haberdashery Georg Sörman, the vendor was adamant that only one of the local families could carry out this particular weave — together. And as an Anglophile brand, selling Scottish knits, the heritage of Scottish tartans is even part of Georg Sörman's visual identity, alluding to the sense of love and belonging inherent in the family tartans of Scotland. And, of course, I don't want to diminish the sexual and reproductive connotations of clothing, which modern brands like Agent Provocateur are utilising in their positioning.
Esteem
Textiles provide a sense of prestige and accomplishment — ordering a suit on Savile Row, for example, or having bespoke shirts made on Jermyn Street in London carries a lot of savoir faire. And while flipping the tassel on the graduate headpiece ensures belonging to a crew of cognoscenti alumni, equally my father ‘earned his stripes' in the Swedish military — as he stepped through the ranks, his uniform indicated that he, like a good scout, was progressing in accomplishment. The present-day suit draws from military uniforms in design, and you could be forgiven for thinking that people in the financial district in NYC are actually wearing uniforms (given their similarities).
Choosing to wear brands, perhaps oversized polo horses, on our chests may indicate social status or that we lead a particular lifestyle (or desire to), and may provide some wearers with a sense of self-esteem. Others want to be more subtle in their choices, so that only the sartorial literati understand the subtle elegance of the wearer's choices. The same polo horse brand, for example, is also using textiles in innovative, communicative ways through its smart, sports-garment genre, which digitises data from your blood, sweat and tears so that you can boost your self-esteem by constantly monitoring yourself intimately. And intimates and lingerie are, of course a key traditional component of wedding ceremonies and attire around the world, helping to create certain connections and mindsets. Or so I am told.
Self-actualisation
Textiles can also be an enabler of achieving one's full potential, including in creative activities. If you are seamstress, a fashion designer, or pattern maker, this speaks for itself. If you are an artisan or craftsman or craftswoman who is passing on the family's unique skills to the next generation, the polishing and continuous improvement of those skills is part and parcel of achieving one's full potential. My girlfriend, Nicole, is a fashion designer with a background at Yves Saint Laurent in Paris and created a global swimwear label — Ephemera — a few years ago. I know from our conversations how much she enjoys the process of imagining, creating, testing and designing — giving life to her ideas through textiles — and at the same time helping her customers transform and self-actualise each summer. To the great pleasure of the women who wear the brand, and their admirers, male and female, of course.
Along with the design aspects, the generative process of creating textiles or weaving them together is an intrinsically rewarding process, which is said to have mental and spiritual benefits. As Beverly Gordon also points out in her article, ‘engaging with the repetitive, rhythmic steps of sewing, knitting, weaving and similar techniques can create a sense of peace or calm' and ‘cloth-making creates the “relaxation response”, a measurable state where brain waves change and heart rate, muscle tension and blood pressure decrease and a feeling of serenity ensues'. I should be so lucky to have the delicate skills required to make textiles by hand. Kudos and respect to Nicole and seamstresses and weavers before her.
In some traditional weaving communities, song and textiles are intricately intermeshed. In fact, singing in unison is often a critical component of the act of creation. As Ruth Clifford points out in her Travels in Textiles blog, ‘The loom acts as a sort of instrument, creating a rhythmic and repetitive accompaniment for the weaver to sing along to while involved in the repetitive, physical movement of weaving.' For example, before the advent of mass mechanical weaving in Scotland, Scottish women used to sing Gaelic songs in syncopation, improvised to the rhythm of the beat of ‘waulking the tweed' (as highlighted in the documentary Lomax the Songhunter). And as Victoria Mitchell, author of the 1997 article ‘Textiles, Text and Techne' illustrates, ‘through the senses, touch and utterance share common origins in the neural system and in the pattern of synaptic, electro-chemical connections between neurons.'
In other parts of the world, the act of creation and bonding takes on a spiritual dimension, with Deepak Mehta in Work, Ritual, Biography showing the interconnectedness between prayer and textiles among Muslim Ansaris, who recite religious prayers while weaving. Within these religious prayers, or du'as, are answers to questions that Adam asked Jabrail, when the first loom was introduced from heaven. ‘In uttering [the du'as] the weaver invokes the loom as memory … to weave is to pray, to pray is to weave'. Have I sold you on the idea of crafts as a cool way to self-actualise and live a spiritually connected life, yet?
However, textiles are also interweaved into the lives for those of us who are lucky enough to be spending time self-actualizing ourselves, and I hope to count myself as one of those lucky ones. I know textiles fill many of my own needs (as they did for the men in my family before me — as figures 1.3 and 1.4 show). As I look around myself writing these lines (an activity of self-actualisation or survival, depending on your viewpoint) I am leaning back into a cloth-covered wooden chair, two weaved sails are filtering the Bondi afternoon sun and wind, a patchwork carpet is giving the brushed cement on the outdoor balcony some contrasting warmth, a denim pillow is providing my lower back with some much-needed improvised ergonomic support, and four hand-bound design books are elevating the MacBook Air I'm working on. All while the day bed on the opposite end of the balcony is trying to seduce me into an afternoon siesta — which, as you can tell, I am resisting. Meanwhile, a pair of Tretorn canvas shoes are leaning on the redbrick wall toward the kitchen, while my feet are enjoying the suede straps of my Birkenstocks, and I am occasionally reminded of the mercerised cotton in my Derek Rose underwear; my legs and arms, clad in Imogene + Willie shorts from Nashville and a Maison Kitsune polo shirt, are meditating on these last days of the Indian summer in Sydney in 2016. Two Eton Shoreditch denim shirts are lazily fading in the sun, awaiting a visit to the downstairs laundry, and I am procrastinating on this seemingly less important duty. The book you are reading clearly takes precedence.
Textiles also enable me do what I do as a futurist. Ancient history, modern and futuristic application. With 240 international travel days on average for the past three years, I spend a lot of my time traversing the globe, hunting for the future in distant places. This ‘hunter-gatherer' lifestyle has a timeless quality, in the sense that my foraging for the future is enabled by textiles (see figure 1.6). My olive-green Filson garment bag, which I spoke about at TEDxSanJuanIsland in 2015, keeps my suits and clothes in check, and helps to straighten them up after commuting between Stockholm and Seattle on British Airways. The textile interiors of my Rimowa carry-on luggage keep my pocket squares from Amanda Christensen in shape, so that my futurist personal brand of the ‘guy who always wears a handkerchief' remains intact. When I travel, urban and rural, business and pleasure intermesh. In other words, my wardrobe needs to consist of a mix of natural fibres and technical garments that enable me to switch modes in an agile fashion.
Figure 1.6: future-foraging travels enabled by textiles
My father — ‘The Colonel' Lars-Olof, as our partners at Private White V.C. in England call this maestro at Georg Sörman — always told me to ‘dress for the occasion', which means a savoir faire for the international subtleties of dress, and ensuring an air of elegance no matter where you turn up. This idea of personal brand and using textiles in our quest for self-actualisation is seemingly a timeless notion. My dad calls it etiquette, and it is as timely as it is timeless — particularly for a futurist foraging for food for thought. Excuse the alliteration.
So textiles are important, helping us to fulfil all levels on Maslow's needs hierarchy. They have also fulfilled my mother's needs for most of her life, helping to create a world she loves and is hesitant to leave behind. My mum's world is one of physical fabrics, and it has deeply shaped her identity. She is a traditional men's haberdasher through and through. Textiles saturate her ordinary world. Moving beyond this ordinary, analogue world, into a world of extraordinary, digital possibilities, digital demons and dragons and threats, has always seemed anathema and unnecessary to her. However, the evil empire of digital disruption doesn't care about those mental boundaries — just as it didn't care for the mental boundaries set up by some of France's most established wine producers.
Reinvention and transformation is friction
Set among the rolling hills of Languedoc-Roussillon, my friends and colleagues Matt, Pete, Mark, and I toast each other at the Chateau Les Carrasses with a glass of rosé on another gorgeous May spring day overlooking the chateau's grounds, on which we are staying for a long weekend. The salty Mediterranean air is slowly warming up the terroir in the Sud de France region, where we are on the last leg of our immersive Global EMBA. My girlfriend, Nicole, jovially describes this final module of the University of Sydney Global Executive MBA near Perpignan as the ‘wine-tasting course'. And, yes, it does take some effort to convince her, as I imagine it will take to convince you, of the business merits of spending time in the sloping hills of the local vineyards consulting with the owners on turning around their heritage businesses. It's just a happy coincidence that they happen to be in the business of viniculture. And convenient if, like me, you enjoy the outputs of French viniculture. À ta santé!
Before we move on, indulge me by letting me give more depth on a cultural and contextual term which is of great significance to this chapter — the idea of ‘terroir'. Perhaps you've heard of it, particularly in its association with wine. According to the Oxford Dictionaries, terroir refers to the complete natural environment in which a particular wine is produced, including factors such as the soil, topography and climate. But terroir is more than this. The term also captures all the environmental factors that affect the growth and flavour of a crop, and how these environmental factors and characteristics come together to create an overall character for a region. According to the French, and indeed the French wine appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC) system, this character then flows through to the unique qualities of the grape grown. Importantly, as noted in The Oxford Companion to Wine, the extent of terroir's significance is greatly deliberated in the wine industry. And as we will see, the mythical idea of terroir can be both a blessing and curse.
But back to the Sud de France region, where we had flown into from London (where we had spent a preparatory week at the London School of Economics). We were on the final leg of our Global EMBA journey together and, as per the curriculum's design, we were in Europe to immerse ourselves in the dynamics of rejuvenating and turning around heritage brands, and ensuring their continued relevance in a modern world. What better industry to explore than the heavily tradition-laden world of wines? In a family business. In France. This was the perfect storm. At least if you, like me, have a passion for disrupting and challenging accepted wisdom and orthodoxy. The idea behind the design of the Global EMBA (in 2015 voted the number one EMBA in Australia by the Australian Financial Review BOSS magazine, despite my girlfriend's facetious criticism) is that the intimate cohort of executives and entrepreneurs in the course study the various stages of the business life cycle — from the start-up ecosystem in Bangalore at the Indian Institute of Management, to the management of growth in the high-tech sector in Silicon Valley at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, to finally immersing ourselves in the ‘fork in the road' dialogue that happens for mature businesses (to either transform or die) that we delved into at LSE followed by our intense period with the vignerons in Languedoc-Roussillon. Like Russell Crowe in the 2006 movie A Good Year by Ridley Scott, where the English protagonist Max Skinner inherits his uncle's wine estate in Provence, we would make this Anglo-French pilgrimage into an eccentric world of terroir, wine classification and appellation laws. In this context, one of the primary questions that I was obsessing about was how ideas of identity, location, heritage, provenance and tradition intermingle, and how their dynamic interplays with transformation, innovation and commercial success, and, ultimately, sustainability. What is the right balance between rear-view mirror and front windscreen, so to speak? And at what stage do these concepts become a mental fetter that hinders transformation?
These were all poignant questions on my mind, not just from a theoretical perspective, but also from a dually practical perspective. Firstly, my cohort team had been paired up with a sixth-generation Languedoc-Roussillon vigneron family and their new CEO, and were advising them on an innovative export strategy that we had to deliver to their board. Secondly, while travelling from Melbourne to London, I hosted three of my cohort colleagues on a detour to Stockholm, to get their insight into turning around the fortunes of my mother's mature menswear business, Georg Sörman. As it turns out, many of the challenges we encountered in France were echoed in Sweden. But before we get to this, let us dive into the questions on my mind when it comes to transformation, innovation, and rejuvenation. Let us scrutinise the old Latin saying ‘in vino veritas' (meaning ‘in wine, [there is] truth'), and let us do it in a context of a wine-growing region where speaking the truth, ironically, was not very abundant.
Mental fetters and identity imprisonment in Languedoc-Roussillon
A sense of place can be both a gift and a curse, and the location which sits at the core of provenance marketing can be a double-edged sword. Only champagne from Champagne can legally be called ‘champagne'. Chicken Bega doesn't quite have the same ring to it as Chicken parmigiana, and Yunnanese pork doesn't whet one's appetite the way apple-smoked Canadian bacon does. A region has either built a world-class reputation for a particular produce, brand equity in its provenance and trust in its sourcing practices, or it hasn't. And while champagne, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, and Canadian bacon have all been blessed with the seal of approval from global foodies, this protection and communication of provenance can both bolster and hamper the individual businesses within such regions. Businesses can be bolstered in the sense that they can tap into the brand equity of the region, but the regulation associated with the intellectual property of place can also hamper innovation and development. On the flipside, for Languedoc-Roussillon, the sense of confused identity and provenance in this lesser known wine-growing region of France offers both opportunity and challenges as local winegrowers seek to unshackle themselves from commoditised brand associations and enter the imaginations of global foodies, whose sense of French geography is limited at best.
The successes of provenance marketing are numerous, and you can understand the aspirations of a region like the Languedoc-Roussillon, as it enviously gazes across the border into movie character Max Skinner's Provence, and further afield to Burgundy and Bordeaux. These are regions blessed with history, famous landscape paintings, and a tradition for artisanal and local craft; importantly, they have made a name for themselves globally as great local French brands. While these areas have entertained the upmarket aspirations and status anxiety of consumers around the world for decades, if not centuries, the Languedoc-Roussillon region has not been able to create the same kind of brand equity. Historically, this was the region that focused on quantity, not quality — a reputation that was cemented during World War I when it supplied cheap and poor-quality wine for army use.
Such brand damage, no matter whether it is still apt 100 years later, has stained the region (excuse the wine pun). And Languedoc-Roussillon is seemingly desperate to recreate the successes of its neighbours, even if it is at the expense of reducing the use of its legal name, Languedoc-Roussillon, in favour of the more international-sounding ‘Sud de France'. In a gesture toward identity conflict, certain lobby groups wish to let go of the poor brand associations of the Languedoc-Roussillon as the major contributor to the French wine glut, in order to start afresh by tapping into what the world knows, or thinks it knows, about the south of France and the French Riviera. These types of lobby groups, supported by the region's elite business families like the Mas, Bertrands and Bonfils, realise that location and how it is communicated in business is absolutely critical for a sub-brand that belongs to the region and tries to navigate its way through the regulatory maze, created largely to protect the local growers from international competition.
The irony of this attachment to place, and the obsession with marketing it as a (if not the) key asset, is that consumer knowledge of place is limited. Having grown up Swedish but having spent a lot of my time in the Anglo-Saxon world, I am still aghast at how many times people associate chocolates, watches and Roger Federer with my home nation. There are ostensibly two times in the year when non-French natives might care about French geography — one, if they are planning a holiday in France, and two, during the Tour de France, when we are bombarded on television with the names of French villages, and maps of the various stages of the tour. Yet, the wine brands and dynasties insist on marketing place, terroir and AOP as their key assets — to a consumer who doesn't know where the Languedoc-Roussillon is, doesn't understand the amorphous term ‘terroir', and couldn't care less for French protectionism dressed up as unique provenance marketing. Whether the consumer is always right is another matter, of course, and one wishes perhaps that people were generally more interested in geography and the provenance of produce beyond the mainstream regions of the world that we all know about. And, of course, industry trends and consumer awareness, partly driven by the internet, digitisation and mobilisation of content, should all favour local storytelling. Foodie trends like ‘farm-to-table', locavorism (the global word of the year in 2007), artisanship, story food, reality TV food shows, source and traceability should all buoy tradition and the local. If done right. However, the French wine industry as a whole has been slow to respond to consumer appetites for information.
Added to this confusion about just how important place and provenance really is, perhaps based in part on the French conviction that they are well placed to educate the world about wines, is the fact that most consumers in the New World and in non-wine-producing markets predominantly base their wine choices on grape varietal, rather than on a deep-seated trust in the chemical properties of the soil in an unknown region somewhere between the Alps and the Pyrenees. Taken together, you have the perfect recipe for consumer lack of savoir faire. This is, of course, to the great chagrin of the French wine producer who loves his soil, and who cannot fathom why the world doesn't understand the value of his unique terroir. Too many business owners, constrained by terroir terrorism, think local, but try to awkwardly act global in an international market, without asking themselves what the value chain actually wants, and so market the thing they have been told is most unique — the local terroir. A grating seam between vantage points, seemingly.
Breaking with tradition
This focus on the local, eccentric and unique is perhaps not surprising in the Old World, and Old World wines. It showcases the tension and dynamic in their competition with the New World, which has been somewhat freer from the regulatory and traditional burdens of place. I mean, Argentina, Australia, California and New Zealand had to earn a reputation in a global wine economy — a respect for the provenance of Mendoza, the Barossa, Napa Valley or the Marlborough had to be developed. And this had to start on a country level. If these producers had used small-scale place and location as the starting point for marketing Australian wines in the US, for example, where the consumer knowledge of Australian geography was (and is) limited at best (and the wine consumer at large in the US would be considered unsophisticated at best by international wine snobs), they would most likely have struggled in their provenance marketing efforts.
If, however, you went to market in a way that demystified wines, focused on fun labelling, zoomed out and associated the brand with the nation continent of Australia rather than a micro-climatic terroir, and went to market with a quirky point-of-sale focused campaign, you might do well. While this example from Australian wine brand Yellow Tail of a ‘blue ocean strategy' is an interesting case in point of splitting with the traditions and competitive dimensions accepted by an industry, the larger lesson is that it focuses empathetically on the consumer first and foremost, something the French wine industry would do well to adopt. (For more on blue ocean strategy, see the book of the same name by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim.) Having spent time in the south of France and working with our family business client, I understand that this is not always easy. The shackles of tradition, passing on a legacy, family heritage and fierce local, dynastic rivalries sometimes take precedence over commercial nous, and place cognitive barriers around what is possible. The AOP regulatory framework further stifles innovation, and becomes an easy mental prison and an excuse not to market wines in a more user-friendly fashion.
It is perhaps illustrative that the French equivalent of the Yellow Tail example is a reverse innovation effort to market Old-World wines to the New World — taking on the New World at its own game, as it were. The strategy used by Jean-Claude Mas Arrogant Frog in its Australian and US marketing could be considered a simple duplicate of Yellow Tail's American go-to-market strategy, and it has been hugely successful in Australia, with one million bottles sold each year. Jean-Claude Mas's stroke of insight came from the anti-French sentiment during the early 2000s when President Bush called the French ‘arrogant frogs', and he used this consumer insight into the minds of (some) Americans to brand a product line that could be accepted by the consumer, and interestingly also appealed to the Australian perception of the French. Importantly, this line of wines is branded significantly differently from the main family of Mas labels, helping to avoid brand confusion, and perhaps to avoid local French jealousies for his innovation in communicating the varietal and the brand identity, rather than the terroir and the appellation. This example is illustrative of the type of commercial success that is possible when you break with tradition, and empathise with a consumer who is bombarded with jargon, snobbery and micro-climate information, and who often doesn't even check out the back label, which the wine industry considers such a huge communication opportunity. At times, while we were consulting in France, we got a sense that many producers suffered a kind of artist's dilemma, where commercial success was akin to selling out, and many accepted ‘foreign currency' instead of cash. In other words, write ups, features in industry magazines, critical acclaim, local respect and tilling the soil were sometimes substitutes for commercial success and revenue. Lifestyle, tradition, keeping up appearances and terroir came in the way of innovation, consumer awareness, and channel marketing.
Yet, as mentioned, local should have all the attributes of successful marketing, if done right. But this is where provenance marketing, as I experienced in the Languedoc-Roussillon, fell short. Most wine brands in the region fail to meet the consumer halfway. They communicate in the same way as other Old-World wine producers, in the same order and sequence, and trust that the quality of their grape juice will be noticed by the consumer. Focus has been on telling a story in the analogue world on their bottles and labels, and using images of chateaus, and less on helping the consumer make sense of the context of the bottle on the shelf. The branding messages get lost in the level of abstraction, at which the message is pitched. While the consumer when choosing a bottle of wine might firstly consider varietal (such as ‘shiraz will go with my beef') and secondly price bracket (relative to the occasion) and thirdly general region, at the point of sale they rarely even consider the location or micro-climate. (See figure 1.7 to understand this friction between what the consumer wants and how the winemaker speaks.)
Figure 1.7: tradition as friction in the wine industry
The level of abstraction at which the Australian consumer, for instance, is operating is too high for the highly localised, terroir-focused wine producer who fails to capture any mindshare, given that the order they communicate in is totally inverted — that is, they focus firstly on the AOP, to indicate micro-climate terroir, secondly on the chateau location name and only thirdly on the blend of varietals determined by the appellation regulations. The consumer is lost. A better context or synced level of abstraction would be to get in line with consumer thinking, and provide valuable contexts at each level of abstraction to position the wine favourably in the minds of the consumer. This would be more seamless. For example, when advising our client on their export strategy in Australia we would suggest they focus first on the type of wine (shiraz, awesome for your Sunday BBQ), then on its price or ranking (included in a ‘Six of the Best' list or the top 1 per cent of our wines), then on the region (Sud de France). (See figure 1.8, overleaf.)
Figure 1.8: branding wine seamlessly
They could then link the region back to something Australians know (like Tour de France personalities) and finally incorporate digital/mobile storytelling and video so that the consumer can attain status by telling their mates about a great wine they found and share via their digital and analogue networks. All of a sudden, the brand makes the customer a hero, because they are now speaking the same wine language.
On reflection, it is a great shame that regulation, sophistication, production categorisation and tradition stand in the way of innovation, transformation and commercial success. Seemingly intelligent people are not always commercially savvy, and some people from this region are a case in point. If I ponder the future for the region, and others like it, I imagine that the agricultural land might find a different use from wine growing in the future. Wine is a luxury, and on a global scale we have a wine glut but still see many food shortages, and with two billion more people entering the global food market over the next thirty-five years, traditions and lifestyles will increasingly come under pressure, and there will be new demands on the productivity of the terroir. Despite government protectionism, it is unlikely that many of the producers we came across will be able to tell the stories of their terroir in ten, twenty or thirty years, unless they transform, become less tradition-bound, change how they communicate and brand their produce in a way that captures the hearts and minds of a local, regional, national and international market.
Spilling wine on a textiles brand
From my own point of view I took away several lessons from this experience in Languedoc-Roussillon that have general application beyond the wine industry:
- The value of outside advice in family business: At our family business wine client, the non-family member CEO played a crucial part in professionalising and commercialising this sixth-generation family business. As CEO, he added an objective lens, and while still having to play politics and pull strings carefully, his nous for marketing and branding, and his international mindset was a strong asset for a family company, especially where none of the sons or the patriarch spoke English. In my own business (Thinque) I am trying to engage with external sources of influence, like the EMBA cohort, on a consistent basis, to invite challenge, ideas and new angles. In my associated family business (Georg Sörman Menswear in Stockholm) I realised external input from designers, management consultants, objective accountants, and extreme consumers and non-consumers, would be increasingly important in terms of how we rejuvenated this mature business and re-established its relevance in a disrupted retail environment.
- Identity as baggage: In a family business context, as well as in a broader business context, identity and industry boundaries can significantly hamper your perspective on how you do business, and limit your innovation. If a wine producer, like our client, thinks of himself as a farmer who gets rewarded on bulk and volume, this will affect how he brands the produce. If a person working for the oil and gas industry considers their industry boundaries as only extending to oil and gas, they might not take the outside threat of renewable energy, in the broader industry context of ‘energy', seriously. Or if a bricks-and-mortar retailer considers their historical competitive advantage as being range, size and unique offerings for the ‘big and tall' segment, as in the case of Georg Sörman, rather than client empathy, which I believe to be its true differentiator, this will affect their business model. This is especially the case in an age where ‘long tail' economics holds that bricks-and-mortar stores should focus their efforts on the revenue-generating, profitable lines and sizes of clothing, while complementary digital services can more easily accommodate niche needs. From a personal point of view, whether I think of myself as a futurist, management consultant, or scenario planner will affect the kind of offerings I put in front of a client, and potentially limit my own scalability. Identity, how we think of ourselves, and the baggage that comes with that perspective, can severely limit our competitiveness. Thus, disrupting our own thinking on a consistent basis is crucial to ensure that we are open to new ideas and identities, shifting industry boundaries, and novel perspectives on what we should market and communicate about our competitive advantages. Identity is fluid, and we can always grow into a new suit as it were.
- Differentiation, not quality: While we as businesspeople frequently focus on doing things better, and improving quality, we sometimes forget that beyond a certain threshold, the customer may not care. As one industry pundit explains, ‘we appreciate with our eyes, not our palate'. The law of diminishing returns applies in this regard. Beyond a certain point in quality, the more effort we invest in the product characteristics, the less the return on effort from that investment. A better approach would be to brand and package the differentiating factors of the product, and ensure the consumer really feels like there is a value proposition they can identify with. In part of my business as a futurist and keynote speaker, I have often been told that the keynote speech has to be ‘world-class', and so my team and I always aspire to do our best to deliver on that brand promise. At the same time, the biggest investment for our clients is not in the keynote speaker at their conference, but rather taking their whole leadership team out of the business for several days, and flying them in globally for the conference. So we realised that the leadership team walking away from the session and doing even only one thing differently as a result of take-home value, is much more important than just listening to a polished story and quality presentation. This insight led us to a further focus on leave-behind value and a longer term impact arc, as opposed to just investing in better research, cooler slides, and polished presentation and thought leadership skills. For Georg Sörman Menswear in Stockholm, a need for differentiation would cause us to ask what this store can do that no analogue or digital competitors could do, and then package that. For example, for three generations of Sörmans, the store has looked after six to seven generations of Stockholm men. This expertise and enduring empathy cannot be replicated by a five-year-old digital disruptor, or even the other major menswear retailers in Stockholm. Or maybe it can?
The challenges and insights gained in the Languedoc-Roussillon deepened the conversation with my mum and, inspired by the mantra of ‘in vino veritas', eventually led Mum to a call to adventure and an attempt at reinvention. Mum's ordinary world was in jeopardy, and while she wasn't yet able to fully comprehend the shifting tides of the world around her, she realised at some level that her very textile identity was at stake, threatened out in the extraordinary world of global, tech-enabled commerce.
As a child, I grew up in a family obsessed with antiques, whereas I was always more interested in technology, mobile phones, cars and Nintendo games. Yet, our parents used to drag us along to look at Swedish castles, old, dusty tapestries, fancy antique auctions at Bukowskis in Stockholm (just browsing), museums and moth-eaten flea markets. Their favourite TV shows are Antique Roadshow and Downton Abbey. They have a reverence for tradition, legacy and remnants that is quirky and admirable in a world of constant change and disruption. And while that reverence is potentially respectful to their elders, it does cause a suspicion of the new. I imagine that an obsession with the historical must be somewhat soothing, because it is largely static. The future, however, is a dynamic place. And the future was incurring on the territory of the past, in the present moment for Georg Sörman and its leadership.