Brand failure………

A report in The Dominion says that what more apt image could there be of our hopes than a giant plastic bag?

There’s usually one stuck in the branches of a tree opposite my place, as it happens, blasted in by the northerly, slowly shredding, looking grubby and dismal, but too far out of reach for anyone to free it from its twiggy jail.

To have parked our puffed-up plastic bag by the Eiffel Tower in Paris seems especially apt to me, then, and for it to be dumped on the Champs de Mars – or field of warfare – was the final touch of genius.

What were we thinking?

The prime minister officially opened the 25 metre inflatable thing – a giant rugby ball, we claim – less than a week ago.

We thought we’d be boasting of a world cup victory any day at the time; instead it’ll be covered in graffiti by the joyous French – or maybe punctured with a hat pin.

Rather than promoting ourselves, we’ve made a joke at our own expense.

“The All Black team is an iconic Kiwi brand,” Helen Clark intoned at its opening, and there you have two fashionable words that drive me nuts.

Everything is currently “iconic”. Footrot Flats, ferns, sheep poo, Ahmed Zaoui, tuis, Edmonds Baking Powder, Fred Dagg, The Topp Twins, hakas, Mt Taranaki, Marmite, Peter Jackson, tamarillos, Dame Kiri, pavlovas, Colin Meads, Colin McCahon, buzzy bees, the humble $2 million family bach. All share the honour of belonging to the lid of the chocolate box called home.

The word iconic, once associated with pious imagery, now turns everything it lands on into kitsch.

It’s as false as the hammy old actors who sell cheese in the TV ads, as the exaggerated loveliness of our landscape in The Lord of the Rings, as the feather that floats about the countryside to advertise the electricity we can’t afford in another long ad.

We’re not that pretty, and even when we are, the locals usually want none of it.

West Coasters won’t be happy till they’ve chopped down every last tree and snatched what resources they can out of the earth.

The rich have grabbed folksy old Central Otago for their rural pied-a-terre.

Overseas punters are snaffling up our great sheep stations, and building multi-million dollar retreats we’ll never be able to enter – except as cleaners.

And agricultural speculators want to cover the Canterbury plains in cowpats.

As for the All Blacks, how can they really be a “brand”, for God’s sake? They’re a group of men – of individuals – who play rugby. They’re people.

Brands don’t have off days, difficult marriages, sick kids, or hurt their knees; they don’t sweat and laugh and cry, and they don’t attract true loyalty and pride.

Brands are hype constructed by advertisers to make people buy stuff, but we surely don’t have to be sold our national team, in good times, or in bad.

The All Blacks existed long before commercial sponsors grabbed hold of them, and they will when the money men scamper off after the latest winners.

Spend all the millions you like – and advertisers will flock to help you – you can’t create unbeatable sportsmen. The idea is absurd.

What you can create are sportsmen who’ll do their best, and that’s all you can reasonably expect.

In 1999, when we also famously lost to the French, national pride also plummeted – and as it happens we were stuck with an embarrassment equal to the plastic bag in Paris.

Last time it was a 747 jet decorated with the image of the All Black front row – packing the wrong way round, curiously enough – arriving in the northern hemisphere even as we lost.

Then, as now, the aim was to attract tourism on the back of our national sport, but currently the “iconic” “100% Pure New Zealand” “brand”, designed to attract the eco-friendly anorak tourist trade, is in trouble with a Coromandel group which claims the Government’s own pest control policies, and use of 1080, make that proud boast false.

Happily, while that complaint festers, we have a new brand. Tourism New Zealand is currently selling us as “Forever Young”.

I think it’s cute.

Report by The Mole from The Dominion Post