Blog

Doing business in the Gobi, August 2013. Left to right: Diej (of Naadam Cashmere), an old man (on the bed), Bodio, Ishee, and (if memory serves) Dash’s daughter.

They say never work with children or animals.

But once I know the rules, I can’t help myself: I like to break them.

Back in 2011, I began work on a national export strategy for Mongolia’s exotic fibre sector.

This encompassed cashmere, of course, and also camel wool (from the two-humped type, the bactrian), and the hair that quickly became my favourite: yak, which is superior to cashmere in almost every way.

But there’s one big problem with yak: in most countries where it’s sourced, like Tibet, it comes only in brown, indeed in one or two shades of dark brown. Monotonous, and virtually un-dyeable, except maybe to black,

But Mongolia has a yak colour, which before I came to town, they used to call “grey.” For me, discovering this shade was like spotting Lana Turner perched on a stool at the soda fountain: I knew right away I had something special on my hands, something with star power.

First, I ran the numbers, and gleaned that 100 times as much cashmere fibre is collected each year in Mongolia as grey yak fibre. Never mind that figure merely represents a low demand for yak and a high demand for cashmere — I knew I could, as it were, spin a yarn around it.

Next, I coaxed the cooperation of one or two knitwear manufacturers in Ulaanbaatar who bought into my ideas.

We changed the name from “grey yak hair,” and fashioned a new pitch: “Mongolian platinum yak down: a hundred times rarer than cashmere.” Immediately, they put the price up 30%.

I thought — and still think — they should have, and could have, doubled or trebled the price. Just add some theatre, I told them: you know, keep the platinum garments under lock and key, a la Peruvian vicuña, in a glass case in a separate section of the store.

Treat it like the most exalted, precious material in the universe.

Initiate a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Today, my engagement with Mongolia and its exotic animals continues in fits and starts. Nothing is easy in Mongolia. Nothing is straightforward.

Case in point: the dinosaur, the Tyrannosaurus bataar, which got up and walked out of the Gobi a few years ago; up and moved to Florida, of all places. Decided to become an illegal immigrant and a mysterious skeletal snowbird after spending X million years in the frozen steppe.

I loved the tale, and though it was widely covered, I didn’t think anyone in the mainstream press had the right angle on it. So I felt I had to do the job myself. My editor at The Wall Street Journal paid me to write the story, but then spiked it — he’d hoped for more emphasis on how they were going to install the dinosaur in the former Lenin museum, but as far as I could work out, that was just a typical Mongol-style rumour; Mongolian officials say all kinds of things to the media.

As I said, nothing to do with Mongolia ever quite goes to plan.

Meanwhile, here’s my article, as commissioned in late 2013 by The Wall Street Journal.

Probably just promoting their band’s upcoming gig.

Being a branding expert in an age when everybody thinks they have a branding issue (and are usually right, at least in some respect) leads to some interesting conversations. And not just on airplanes.

By a lucky accident, a fortnight ago I was pulled into a meeting with a high-ranking British military officer who has been given the following task (I paraphrase): “To create a comprehensive organisation within the armed forces which can integrate and deliver the non-lethal and non-military effects necessary to change or maintain behaviours in foreign territories.”

In other words, a military department of persuasion: part psy-ops (black, grey and white), part media affairs, part reconstruction. (Of course these functions have long existed within the military, but in Britain as in many countries, I gather, they’re now being reorganised.)

I was introduced at the outset by the meeting’s organiser as a “brand strategist and creative strategist.” In the course of the discussion, I offered some suggestions regarding how to go about building a certain kind of organisational culture — one that borrows as much from creative agencies as from normal military divisions.

Overall, though, I did a lot more listening than talking, and I took away some useful concepts, including one in particular that I intend to field test in my own consulting operations.

Are you prepared to bring an idea to the finish?

Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth is the archetypal rock ‘n’ roll frontman. Super-bright and high-energy, he also happens to be extremely articulate about the creative process, and famously ass-kicking in his ability to get stuff done.

In this interview from last year, he gets to the heart of the distinction between creativity and execution. It resonated with me, and I wanted to share it:

We start way, way, way in advance, ’cause we are eminently art-centric, which is a really fancy way of saying we really do generate all the artwork, the graphics, etc.

We don’t hire out and have somebody design a bunch of album covers for us and then choose…. We start from scratch ourselves. Same thing with the merchandise — if you buy a T-shirt, that was designed, literally, in my living room. On and on… stage design, lighting rig, putting the show together — it takes about a year and a half, 18 months.

Because any idea that you have is 85 phone calls.

Anybody can go, ‘I got an idea, it’s a stage that’s shaped like, uh, like a square on top of a circle.’ Great, my question never was, ‘were you able to dream up a stage design,’ my question is, ‘are you prepared to do the 87 phone calls that are about to follow now, to make sure it came out the way we decided.’

And then there’s another 80 phone calls that are gonna follow that because we have to figure out how to take the fuckin’ thing apart and put it in the trucks and buses. And, and, and.

So if you really want to generate the ideas from scratch and bring them all the way to the finish, you’re gonna have to learn a few other languages, and you’re gonna have to speak those over a lot of extra phone calls. And that’s usually the break point for most artists.”

Coda, on the need to keep your creative capabilities sharp: “I write lyrics routinely. It’s a perishable skill.” Full article here, but it’s mostly about a (supposedly) forthcoming Van Halen album.

Books I’ve written, contributed to, or helped with.

I’ve always been a writer, but it wasn’t until the mid ’90s that I acquired the taste for being published.

Most writers will confirm, I suspect, that there’s a unique satisfaction to seeing your words in print. There’s no comparable experience in the digital realm.

A half a career ago, when I was economist in Connecticut, I wrote for lots of newspapers. This was in the day when physical cuttings of the articles would be supplied by “clipping services” like Burrell’s, and in a file folder I still have all the pieces I wrote for National Review, The Washington Times, the New York Post, the Boston Herald, the Hartford Courant, Investors Business Daily, USA Today and of course The Wall Street Journal, to whom I’ve been contributing semi-regularly since 2001. Circa Y2K, I even wrote a weekly column for an entire year — 52 straight Thursday morning deadlines met — for a now-defunct investment website called money.net.

My unstated compact with my readers is this: if you read an article by me in the morning, and you go to a cocktail party that night, and a subject comes up related to my piece, you’ll have something interesting to contribute to the conversation, thanks to having read my piece.

Have I delivered on this consistently? Probably not, but I still think it’s a worthy objective.

NB: I’ll spare you my Greenspan-era harangues about monetary policy, etc. These articles listed below are some of my “greatest hits” from the last few years, exempting the few pieces I’ve had in Monocle, which although they’re sweet and have won me clients, are awfully short.

Some of these are behind pay walls or require you to buy a book. Email me and I’ll try to sort you out.

Branding articles and book chapters

“The city as a brand” — a chapter in The Brand Challenge (2014); email me or click here to buy the book
“The joys and sorrows of logos and slogans in place branding” — in Place Branding and Public Diplomacy (2013); click here for PDF, here for HTML
“The measurement challenge” — chapter in Destination Brands, 3rd edition (2011); email me
“Nation branding: yesterday, today and tomorrow” — chapter co-authored with Wally Olins in Destination Brands, 3rd edition (2011); email me
“Place branding: A view at arm’s length” — in Place Branding and Public Diplomacy (2010); This one’s kind of a classic, judging by how many requests I’ve gotten for it over the years, and it has inspired people like JT Singh, with whom I later formed the production company Thrilling Cities; email me

Branding and business books

Brand America 2nd edition (2010) — co-authored with Simon Anholt; email me or click here to buy
“Just Do It: An Open Letter to President Obama on Rejuvenating Brand America” — co-authored with Simon Anholt; Chapter 8 of Brand America 2nd edition (2010)  — email me
Velocity: The Seven New Laws for a World Gone Digital by Ajaz Ahmed and Stefan Olander — I was an adviser and editor on this, not the author; click here to buy
AKQA Ideas Volume 1 — I was the copywriter; click her to buy, though I warn you: I’ve seen it listed for as much as £1,000 (who knows if it actually traded for that much).

“Despite the fact that this book is published by an agency, the writers have succeeded in making it celebratory , without making it self-congratulatory. What makes it enjoyable to read is that at times it is witty and self-deprecating in equal measure. And while the content is interesting, insightful and original, the real beauty is in the design – it is striking and fresh, raising the stakes to another level. A merger of authoritative content and style, where new media melds with old.”

Art, design, culture, history, and anthropology articles for The Wall Street Journal

Sam Maloof
James Bond
Russian Gulag
Pitt Rivers
Easter Island
Cricket
Ian Fleming
Museum of Brands
Churchill Museum
Mandalay, Burma — email me
John Lennon in Cuba — email me