I’ve been watching a bit of the Australian Open tennis, with the ever-present on-court signage of the major sponsors: KIA, a Chinese brand called 1573 (I looked it up, they make a bottle of liquor that - at 52% alcohol - will not help your crosscourt backhand), and Emirates. Neatly placed below the Emirates logo is their bland - excuse me - brand platform line: Fly Better.
As positionings go, they don’t come any more generic than that. It makes me laugh, but also wince, to imagine the wringer the agency went through in arriving at that. And not because it was hard to come up with! I’d be willing to wager that they came up with hundreds of lines before this one. Months of strategy went into it. Late nights, weekends. The agency would have put forward round after round of lines that were a little more ‘focused’ and ‘ownable’…but they ended up with something about as pointy as an A380.
The client probably frothed over the incredible flexibility of it. It can speak to any proof point! The CEO will love it! You can put it on a napkin, and it works! And I suppose it does ‘work’…but how hard?! I would argue it’s an absolute bludger.
Went it was finally sold in, I imagine the agency high-fives after the meeting were a little limp. A platform is finally sold in, but now you’ve got to deliver brand work to a slogan that - in an attempt to do everything -doesn’t do anything. You could be forgiven for forgoing a high-five, and opting for a generous glass of 1573.
