Permission to enter?

What do brands have permission to do?  Of course there’s the functional.  KFC can sell chicken.  Some might even say only fried chicken.  So when I had pork chops in KFC in London many years ago, it was clear that some sharp GM had convinced head office that since both pigs and chickens were often neighbours on a farm, then it made sense for them to share space in KFC.  Or I imagine, he reasoned via his 70 page powerpoint pitch to the annual KFC planning meeting that since Brits love pork chops then it made sense for KFC to offer them.  The thing is that KFC does not have permission to sell pork.  It owns the chicken folder in the mind, not the pork one.

And b-mobile does not have permission to organise concerts.  They do not own that space in the mind. They own connect.  They own cool.  They own big.  They own patriotic.  They probably still own bad service.  They don’t own the position of concert organiser.  So in a sense, this will work in their favor when the brain starts storing any bad stuff from the Beyonce Concert experience.  Because the computer in our head stores stuff by category.   When the cell phone goes dead for one hour, that’s bad stuff.  When calls are dropped, that’s bad stuff.  When we get the wrong charges on our bill, that’s bad stuff.  All of that is a stab on b-mobile’s brand equity.  Dust and doubles and poor sound gets stored in a different file.  It gets stored in the concert/all inclusive/fete folder.  That doesn’t mean that b-mobile will be left without scars.

Brands should stick to their knitting.

There is absolutely no way I would go near a Beyonce Concert without Johnny Soong or Anthony Chow Lin On or both at my side.  And TSTT is close enough to the ground to know that.  I think the Fatima College Old Boys, a bunch of amateur, part-time fete organisers could have done a better job.  If you’ve been to the Fatima Fete you’ll know what I mean.  But I digress.  Beyonce is no fete for 3000 people who went to the school and therefore will forgive almost anything.  Beyonce is the premier league.

TSTT should have engaged a proven event organiser even before they engaged the acts.  Because that’s not their business.  It’s not their core competency.  A Beyonce Concert is neither sub-sea fibre optic engineering or customer service delivery for known subscribers.  It’s a whole different, complex, multi-layered bag of challenges that you only have one chance to get right.  Seth Godin, the new marketing guru goes so far as to not recommend doing big events. “The reasons? Well, they don’t work. They don’t work because big events leave little room for iteration, for trial and error, for earning rapport.”  says Seth.  No room for trial and error, Seth sure got that right.

TSTT’s role should have been conductor rather than fiddler, board rather than salesman.  And the team assembled for Ms. Knowles should have picked themselves based on achievement in the category.  People who would have already done their trial and error with flopped events and disasters of all kinds and who also would know how to do it right by now.  Instead b-mobile took a good thing and spoilt it.  Much like the handling of the sponsorship of the West Indies Team when Digicel took over from C&W.  And Digicel could be excused as they were relatively new to the region and were not even operating in some territories including T&T.  B-mobile has no excuse, they were born here.  Next time I hope they pick up the phone and call Tony.

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