Trapped by success

I've had the chance, as a result of the hard work of my wife and the talent of her brother, to spend a bit of time on red carpets over the last few years.

They're strange places to be as a non-celebrity. You are, at once, a somebody and a nobody. Somebody for being there; nobody for not being somebody that everybody wants to be there. Thankfully, for the non-celebrity, they are perfectly forgiving places. OK so your hair might look a mess and your suit might be a bit more M&S than D&G, but nobody really cares about you. Provided you can snake your way through the people who matter and remember not to pick your nose anywhere that there's an A-lister between you and a camera, you're unlikely to cause yourself any lasting embarrassment.

For celebrities, I imagine the experience is somewhat different. For them the red carpet is an opportunity both to reaffirm how much everybody loves them, and to stop everybody loving them. A bad hair day, a bad suit, a bad angle, a careless word, an admiring glance at another celebrity's bottom or even the slightest reminder that you're a human being rather than an air-brushed image of preternatural perfection, and there could be big trouble. It's a velour-covered minefield.

This is the trouble with being so loved. There's so much to lose.

The same goes for brands. I'm increasingly fascinated - not to say a little irritated - by the way the marketing departments of the world's biggest brands seem to have one objective that trumps all others: don't screw anything up. Forget about the brilliant ideas, forget about doing something different, just don't try anything remotely risky - there's too much to lose.

Communications departments are the worst: their default position appears to be that nobody in their organisation should be saying anything to anyone under any circumstance. Communication, in other words, should not happen. If it absolutely must happen then whatever is being said must be so harmless, so utterly devoid of potency, that it ends up being a vacuous irrelevance. It seems to me that you could run a successful corporate communications department, by today's measure of success, simply by enforcing an irreversible policy obliging any external communication to flow through the department, and then shutting the department down. Job done.

But you can't really blame them. For a start the media - in all its forms (of which this blog, of course, is one) - is a voracious beast which pounces on the slightest opportunity to denounce, degrade or destroy for the sake of a story. But also, there really is too much to lose. A winning brand is something to which so much success is attributable, and yet so fragile at the same time, that it's perfectly understandable for a company's first instinct to be to protect it. Added to which, if brand creation feels like a mystical art which can be practiced only by the most evolved of corporate magicians, then brand protection is a to do list that anyone can master. If it ain't broke, just make sure nobody breaks it because fixing it could be a nightmare.

There aren't many consulting firms which fit into this category but there are some. This is not the place to name them; what's interesting, given that we spend a lot of time talking to a lot of consulting firms, is how differently they behave compared with their competitors. They tend to be the type of firms which benefit from clients' need to validate their own internal decision making (which, according to our research, represents about a sixth of the entire consulting market), an area in which their brand is of paramount importance. But, because it is, the over-riding impression you get is that they're scared; that their success has actually trapped them. They're the A-lister with the fixed smile, looking at the camera from the right angle, straining every sinew to be what people want them to be; to get through and be no less loved.  At a time when clients want consulting firms to be able to adapt, to consider different ways of working, even to challenge what is meant by consulting, that's not such a good place to be.

Put your efforts into brand building, by all means, but make sure you know what to do once your efforts succeed.