This post was born from the frustration of an unsuccessful shopping trip. I wanted Altoids. I checked the local supermarkets - Sainsbury's, Tesco, Asda. None of them had it. My local independent pharmacy used to carry a few tins, but alas, no longer. As I made peace with poor substitutes like Fox's Glacier mints and Starbuck's After Coffee Mints, I reflected on the irony that such a quirky, idiosyncratically British brand was so popular in America - it was not unusual to see colleagues carrying Altoids tins from meeting to meeting back when I worked in the US - but was unknown in Britain. Perhaps that reflects British identity, which, like India's unity, is more apparent from without than from within.
However, after a little Google powered research, I was left reflecting not on the subtle ironies of Britishness, but on the brutal nihilism of business. Altoids are no longer British. The red and white tins no longer proudly say Made in Great Britain. The factory in Bridgend, Wales, which used to supply the entire world with the curiously strong peppermint has been mothballed. Production has been moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, so that the product is made closer to its biggest markets, which are in America.
I am generally a fan of globalized, optimized supply chains, but this is ridiculous. It is like moving the Jack Daniel's distillery from Tennessee to Nanjing province so that the whiskey is made close to Shanghai, the world's largest market. It isn't Jack's if it isn't from Tennessee.
The advertising is no longer edgy or self-mocking. The official web site claims that: "Altoids honours the authentic - people who stay true to themselves no matter what. Those who are confident, honest and unwavering. Those who are CURIOUSLY STRONG."
Like, for instance, Altoids honours people who contribute to a blog about beautiful coffee. "For most people, coffee's just a morning beverage. But to the contributors of this blog, it's high art. Dedicated to looking past coffee's buzz, they find a subtlety that other's simply miss. Filled with striking imagery from the world's best latte artists, this cup of Joe is almost too beautiful to drink"
Altoids also honours Cameron Adams, who writes a blog called The Chattanoogan: "highlighting street style in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Cameron Adams' blog focuses on the well-hidden gems of a small town. Why, you might ask? The innocence and spontaneity of the images that capture the residents' local flavor seems to answer, why not?"
Why not, indeed. But does shrinkage ever occur?
I had to find out how this train wreck happened. How did The Man destroy Altoids' spirit by turning it into a motherhood and apple-pie candy from Chattanooga, Tennessee? It turns out that capitalism didn't just destroy Altoids, it also made it the icon it once was. Altoids' golden age came after it was acquired by Kraft, following a series of takeovers and leveraged buy outs.
Altoids were invented in the late 1700s, and were promoted for over a century as a "stomach calmative". The brand was owned first by Smith and Company of London, which became a part of Callard & Bowser-Suchard, which became a part of Beatrice Foods, which was bought and broken up by KKR, when Altoids was sold to Terry's of York, which was then acquired by Kraft General Foods of Chicago in 1993.
At this time, Altoids was a tiny brand, but with a devoted word-of-mouth following among the heavy-smoking, coffee-guzzling Seattle club set. A Kraft marketing manager called Mark Sugden, working with Leo Burnett Chicago, the agency which created the Marlboro Man, "got" this Seattle set's devotion, did not get a big advertising budget, and came up with a campaign that was consistent with what the brand already stood for. "We were talking to a cynical, smart, cutting-edge audience, and nothing mediocre was going to sell," says Burnett Creative Director Steffan Postaer. What sold were advertising posters that looked like this:
Market share rocketed from too small to measure to 10% in 1997, or $40 million. Something good had happened. A curiously strong breath of fun from old Blighty had blown into the lives of millions of people.
I guess the trouble with capitalism is that it doesn't know when to say "enough". Common sense says that a brand can't retain its quirky, smart, foreign, cynical, funny, laconic, iconoclastic soul if it gets very much bigger than 10% of the market. But woe betide the poor brand manager who might naively suggest this. Many new variants were launched, budgets were found for TV advertising. I wasn't able to find out how successful this SKU proliferation was; but in due course Kraft sold Altoids on (along with Lifesavers) to Wrigley for $1.4 billion amidst talk of revenue "headwinds" in 2005.
Wrigley closed the plant in Bridgend and increased capacity utilization at an existing plant in Chattanooga. The humour in the advertising drifted from under-stated to over-the-top, from Sir Humphrey Appleby-funny to Borat-funny. Somewhere along the way, the brand name became associated with enhanced blow jobs.
Mars acquired all of Wrigley for $23 billion in 2008. Altoids was obviously not the main point of the buyout. The current Pottery Barn-esque creative platform, wholesome authenticity, looks more like damage control than an effort to build a brand around either the British legacy or the dedication of the Seattle club cultists.
Maybe, though, there is something deeply British about this story, about inventing something that then goes abroad and takes on a completely different character. Like cricket. Or the English language. Or democracy, or capitalism, or scientific method. Altoids is in good company. Maybe I can explain all this to my local pharmacist to get him to import some quirky Britishness from Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Sunday, 26 September 2010
Saturday, 18 September 2010
Rudo y Cursi y Asif y Amir
Rudo y Cursi is a Mexican film about football, made by the same team as classics like Y tu mama tambien and Amores Perros. My wife and I watched it about a year ago, on an impulse, largely because it had Gael Garcia Bernal. We had the movie theater entirely to ourselves through a Monday 7:00 screening, which was a little odd initially, but that gave us complete freedom to laugh out loud at the many hilarious moments on this rollicking ride.
It came to mind because of the sordid story now unfolding about Pakistani cricket players and their "spot-fixing" (this doesn't give away any more of the movie's plot than the official trailer). How disgusting! Really, how could they? And it hurts just that little bit more because the Pakis look like us. Are we South Asians, and our game, cricket, somehow naturally corrupt?
Rationally, I know that is nonsense. Match fixing has been a problem in many cultures and many sports for generations, yet sport has continued to thrive. Cricket in the time of WG Grace, the baseball world series in 1919, football, tennis, snooker, boxing and sumo wrestling have all been under the cloud at various times.
But my heart still sees the fall of Asif and Amir, of Azharuddin, Ajay Jadeja and Hansie Cronje in vivid technicolour, a vividness that I am unable summon for Nikolai Davydenko, despite being a tennis fan. That is where Rudo y Cursi comes in. It is textured, lively, authentic, funny, good-looking retelling of a familiar tale of simple beginnings, meteoric ascent, the intoxication of the high life, temptation and a tragic fall from grace. The language, music, sport, landscapes, rituals and styles feel unfamiliar, the emotions feel authentic and are entirely familiar.
What to do? We are like that wonley. But we are not alone.
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
The Unbearable Lightness of Scones
"There was nothing wrong, he reminded himself, in appreciating a bourgeois paradise when every other sort of paradise on offer had proved to be exactly the opposide of what paradise should be."
These wonderful words were spoken by art gallery owner Matthew Duncan of Edinburgh, the kind hearted but unremarkable son of a rich father, in The Unbearable Lightness of Scones. Haven't quite put my finger on it yet, but this sentiment is a big part of the reason why Alexander McCall Smith now occupies such an exalted place on my bookshelf, not too far away from PG Wodehouse.
Saturday, 11 September 2010
Avatar: The Worship of Vishnu
Watch Avatar. It’s a great film. If you have watched Avatar as entertainment, I urge you to watch it again, now with a piety in your heart, in the spirit of bhakti, for this is no ordinary Hollywood blockbuster, it is the tale of a blue-skinned hero, animated by a celestial spirit, who was born to save god’s righteous people, and leads them to glorious victory over evil.
Our blue-skinned hero’s people are noble and devout. Yet, our hero arrives among them in troubled times. Many doubt him. Unfazed by the doubters, our glorious hero slays demons, charms the tribal elders, frolics in a scented grove with a beauteous maiden, does battle to save his father’s soul, and rides the skies on a sacred eagle. He is accepted as one of the chosen people, is appointed commander-in-chief, and leads his tribe into an apocalyptic battle that pits right against wrong, good against evil. He leads with courage and cunning in this battle, wins a decisive victory, and restores the natural order of the universe.
You’ve heard this story before, you will hear this story again. In James Cameron's telling of this story, the blue-skinned avatar is called jakesully, the animating spirit is Jake Sully, the righteous tribe are the Na'vi of Pandora, the slain demon is a Thantor, the beauteous maiden is Neytiri, the father figure is Dr Grace Augustine, the sacred eagle is a Toruk, and the evil forces defeated in the apocalyptic battle are the US Marines. In previous tellings of this story, the blue-skinned avatar is called Rama, the animating spirit is Vishnu, the righteous tribe are the Raghuvanshi of Aryavrata, the slain demon is Taataka, the beauteous maiden is Sita (or perhaps Radha is better cast?), the father figure is Dasharatha, the sacred eagle is Garuda, and the evil forces defeated in battle are Ravana's rakshasas.
Other Vaishnavite inspirations are less obvious. Are the floating mountains which protect Pandora's sacred forests inspired by Govardhan? Is the carriage of the Na'vi people, who walk tall and lithe, and swish their tails with pride, inspired by the vanaras of Kishkinda?
Google tells me that these parallels haven't gone unnoticed. Some cranks were offended. Many Hindus, including me, enjoy these resonances. A film maker called Sudipto Chattopadhyay likened Jake Sully to Kalki, the long awaited tenth avatar of Vishnu. One of the beautiful things about Kalki is that every tribe, every culture can locate their own messiah in that placeholder.
The story that you have heard before, that you will hear again, is what Joseph Campbell called the monomyth, the single narrative that underlies all the great stories ever told, the Odyssey, the Norse myths, the stories of Rama, and Gautam Buddha and Jesus. Contemporary mythology - Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Star Wars and now Avatar - follows the same narrative structure, sometimes instinctively, sometimes intentionally.
Re-telling the monomyth becomes interesting because of rich detail which Avatar has in plenty, like, the complete Maori-based Na'vi language invented for the film, or the coral reef inspired jungle-scapes of Pandora. These stories aren’t about surprise endings. They gain meaning, resonance and emotional heft with repetition. The story of Rama is retold every Dussera. The story of Krishna is retold every Janmashtami. Perhaps the story of Jake Sully will be retold every April 22, on Earth Day, to honour the Na'vi's Gaian ethos? Perhaps we will be blessed with an Oscar winning sequel?
Labels:
film and fiction,
Humour,
india,
mythology
Saturday, 4 September 2010
Kannadasan and Krishna Consciousness in the Peak District
காட்டுக்கேது தோட்டக்காரன் இதுதான் என் கட்சி
kattukkethu thottakaran, ithuthan en katchi
These words are from a favourite old song by Kannadasan, one of Tamil cinema’s greatest and most celebrated poets. This translates roughly to: does the forest have a gardener? His side is the side I’m on.
As it turns out, the forest does have a gardener. His name is Les Morson. His side is the Hartington Sports Committee. My family and I discovered him, and the woods named in his honour, on a recent walk through the Peak District National Park.
Kannadasan’s lyrics were written for a character disowned by his family, trying to assert that he still is one of God’s people. In that context, the kattukku thottakaran, the forest gardener, probably refers to God. Krishna is vanmaali, literally forest gardener, in many Indian traditions.
It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that when Mr Les Morson starting planting trees to make a forest, he did not intend to discover his inner Krishna-avatar, even if that is in fact what he did. The Lord manifests himself in mysterious ways.
kattukkethu thottakaran, ithuthan en katchi
These words are from a favourite old song by Kannadasan, one of Tamil cinema’s greatest and most celebrated poets. This translates roughly to: does the forest have a gardener? His side is the side I’m on.
As it turns out, the forest does have a gardener. His name is Les Morson. His side is the Hartington Sports Committee. My family and I discovered him, and the woods named in his honour, on a recent walk through the Peak District National Park.
Kannadasan’s lyrics were written for a character disowned by his family, trying to assert that he still is one of God’s people. In that context, the kattukku thottakaran, the forest gardener, probably refers to God. Krishna is vanmaali, literally forest gardener, in many Indian traditions.
It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that when Mr Les Morson starting planting trees to make a forest, he did not intend to discover his inner Krishna-avatar, even if that is in fact what he did. The Lord manifests himself in mysterious ways.
Labels:
English culture,
film and fiction,
Hiking,
Humour,
india,
indian pop culture,
music,
Peak District
Thursday, 26 August 2010
The English: friendly or distant?
My daughters learn ballet. I take them to ballet class most Saturday mornings. While I’m waiting for class to finish, I sit around in a large hall drinking Nescafe along with dozens of other parents.
I see the same set of parents at ballet class every week. I obviously have something in common with the other parents, we live in the same neighbourhood and have children the same age. Yet, none of the English parents ever acknowledge me with a head nod or a smile. The people who do acknowlege and greet me are the other expats - American, French, Iraqi, Chinese, and of course other Indians.
Yet, the same English can also be very warm and connected.
For instance, yesterday my family went on a day hike in the Peak District. We had a wonderful time, walking through densely wooded dales and over grassy hills, spotting farm animals in the pastures and fossils in the limestone rockfaces. We passed many other groups of hikers through the day – other families, groups of middle-aged ladies, people walking dogs, courting couples, white-bearded gentlemen walking solo – they made our day even better by pausing to acknowledge us, and smile and greet us. They were all English.
So, are the English aloof and stand-offish, or are they warm and friendly?
I posed this question to an English friend of mine, a career politician married to a French-Canadian. His take was that context makes all the difference.
Ballet class in an affluent suburb is actually an anxious, competitive context. Subliminally or otherwise, parents are worrying about how well they are providing for their children, relatively speaking. They are sniffing out the other parents for minute differences in wealth, status and social class. Expats frustrate this process because foreigners are especially hard to sniff out and place on a social map. The fine radar which works so well among the English doesn’t work with foreigners; so foreigners remain distant and ambiguous. Status anxiety and ambiguity don’t make people feel friendly or inclusive.
By contrast, hiking is not competitive. Hiking the Peak District is no great physical achievement. Hikers check their status anxieties in at the gate as they enter a national park, and walk to celebrate the fabulous landscape. In a way, hikers share a secular religion: we have come together to worship glorious nature, a god far greater than any of us. The sense of believing in the same god, and of our personal insignificance before the greatness of that god... yes, that could make people feel warm and inclusive.
Makes sense. Plus, something a game theorist might call the risk of repeated interactions. A hiker greeting me in the peaks is fairly sure we are never going to see each other again. A parent who engages me in small talk at ballet might wind up having to chit chat with me every weekend, which would be terrible punishment for having committed a random act of kindness.
Here is how Kate Fox, an English anthropologist who wrote a very useful book called Watching the English, describes this risk:
It is common, and considered entirely normal, for English commuters to make their morning and evening train journeys with the same group of people for many years without ever exchanging a word.
A young woman, who I would describe as lively and gregarious, explained, “once you start greeting people like that – nodding, I mean – unless you’re very careful you might end up starting to say ‘good morning’ or something, and then you could end up actually having to talk to them.” The problem with speaking with another commuter was that if you did it once, you might be expected to do it again - and again, and again: having acknowledged the person’s existence, you could not go back to pretending that they did not exist, and you could end up having to exchange polite words with them every day. That’s right. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
I see the same set of parents at ballet class every week. I obviously have something in common with the other parents, we live in the same neighbourhood and have children the same age. Yet, none of the English parents ever acknowledge me with a head nod or a smile. The people who do acknowlege and greet me are the other expats - American, French, Iraqi, Chinese, and of course other Indians.
Yet, the same English can also be very warm and connected.
For instance, yesterday my family went on a day hike in the Peak District. We had a wonderful time, walking through densely wooded dales and over grassy hills, spotting farm animals in the pastures and fossils in the limestone rockfaces. We passed many other groups of hikers through the day – other families, groups of middle-aged ladies, people walking dogs, courting couples, white-bearded gentlemen walking solo – they made our day even better by pausing to acknowledge us, and smile and greet us. They were all English.
So, are the English aloof and stand-offish, or are they warm and friendly?
I posed this question to an English friend of mine, a career politician married to a French-Canadian. His take was that context makes all the difference.
Ballet class in an affluent suburb is actually an anxious, competitive context. Subliminally or otherwise, parents are worrying about how well they are providing for their children, relatively speaking. They are sniffing out the other parents for minute differences in wealth, status and social class. Expats frustrate this process because foreigners are especially hard to sniff out and place on a social map. The fine radar which works so well among the English doesn’t work with foreigners; so foreigners remain distant and ambiguous. Status anxiety and ambiguity don’t make people feel friendly or inclusive.
By contrast, hiking is not competitive. Hiking the Peak District is no great physical achievement. Hikers check their status anxieties in at the gate as they enter a national park, and walk to celebrate the fabulous landscape. In a way, hikers share a secular religion: we have come together to worship glorious nature, a god far greater than any of us. The sense of believing in the same god, and of our personal insignificance before the greatness of that god... yes, that could make people feel warm and inclusive.
Makes sense. Plus, something a game theorist might call the risk of repeated interactions. A hiker greeting me in the peaks is fairly sure we are never going to see each other again. A parent who engages me in small talk at ballet might wind up having to chit chat with me every weekend, which would be terrible punishment for having committed a random act of kindness.
Here is how Kate Fox, an English anthropologist who wrote a very useful book called Watching the English, describes this risk:
It is common, and considered entirely normal, for English commuters to make their morning and evening train journeys with the same group of people for many years without ever exchanging a word.
A young woman, who I would describe as lively and gregarious, explained, “once you start greeting people like that – nodding, I mean – unless you’re very careful you might end up starting to say ‘good morning’ or something, and then you could end up actually having to talk to them.” The problem with speaking with another commuter was that if you did it once, you might be expected to do it again - and again, and again: having acknowledged the person’s existence, you could not go back to pretending that they did not exist, and you could end up having to exchange polite words with them every day. That’s right. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
Labels:
English culture,
Hiking,
Peak District,
social class
Friday, 16 July 2010
Big-point players in tennis: NOT a myth
There really are big-point players in tennis. Just found a couple of statistical references to support this claim.
Watching this year’s Wimbledon, Rafael Nadal always looked in charge of his semi final against Andy Murray. Yet, there was a time late in the third set, with Murray down 0-2 on his way to a 0-3 whipping, when Murray had actually won more points than Nadal. Rafa was winning the points that mattered.
Similar claims in other sports have turned out to be false. For instance, baseball long believed in “clutch hitters”, batters who perform especially well in important situations. However, Bill James, the spiritual father of sports statistics, showed that this was simply not supported by the data. Similarly, fans long believed that basketball players have “hot hands”, when they are “in the zone” and sink every attempt. Statistical analysis showed that “hot hands” were fully explained by chance. Is tennis really different?
One reason for believeing tennis is different is comes from this (superb) New Yorker article on the state of the doubles game. The relevant sections say:
The doubles tour might no longer exist, if not for Etienne de Villiers, the chairman of the men’s tour at the time. De Villiers had previously worked at Walt Disney International, so he understood the need for better marketing. The doubles tour could survive, he said, but only if the players agreed to some compromises. The game would be streamlined. Most matches would be kept to two sets, with a “match tie break” in place of the third set. If a game went to 40-40 the next point would decide it, there would be no more endless ads and dueces. (Grand slams would stick with the traditional scoring).
The new format has few fans among the players. Martina Navratilova says it is a “bullshit excuse”. Leander Paes calls it as “Russian roulette”, and Luke Jensen dismisses it as “tennis in a microwave”. Jensen believes that the shorter format favours weaker teams, “Anyone can win one set”.
Oddly enough, though, the statistics don’t bear this out. Not long after the changes were made, Wayne asked Carl Morris, a mathematician at Harvard, to calculate their effect on a team’s chances. In shorter matches, Morris concluded, the likelihood of an upset could increase by as much as five percentage points. And yet, when the ATP later reviewed the tour’s statistics, it found that the best players had improved their records. The new format offered “no second chances”, as Bob Bryan put it, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “The one thing we didn’t figure in is that the better teams are clutch” Wayne says. “On those big points, they come through”.
That said, this is a roundabout way of making a simple point. My friend Sriram Subramaniam suggested a comparison of % break points won with % other points won. One would expect Rafa to win more break points than Murray. Unfortunately, Google didn’t turn up this specific analysis. The closest thing to this analysis that a few mintues of Googling turned up is this paper by a Franc Klaassen of the University of Amsterdam.
He shows that there really are big points, and that seeded players play better on big points than unseeded players. He observes that seeded players facing a break point on their serve have the same win % as on other points, and that unseeded players have a lower win %, suggesting that it is more about weaker players choking than better players raising their game. He also shows that serving first in a set, or serving with new balls, has no impact. He doesn’t make any conclusions about champions like Rafa or Federer as opposed to the general pool of seeded players; his dataset is small, coming only from Wimbledon 92-95.
Calling for tennis’ Bill James to mine the vast amount of data generated by the ATP tour...
Watching this year’s Wimbledon, Rafael Nadal always looked in charge of his semi final against Andy Murray. Yet, there was a time late in the third set, with Murray down 0-2 on his way to a 0-3 whipping, when Murray had actually won more points than Nadal. Rafa was winning the points that mattered.
Similar claims in other sports have turned out to be false. For instance, baseball long believed in “clutch hitters”, batters who perform especially well in important situations. However, Bill James, the spiritual father of sports statistics, showed that this was simply not supported by the data. Similarly, fans long believed that basketball players have “hot hands”, when they are “in the zone” and sink every attempt. Statistical analysis showed that “hot hands” were fully explained by chance. Is tennis really different?
One reason for believeing tennis is different is comes from this (superb) New Yorker article on the state of the doubles game. The relevant sections say:
The doubles tour might no longer exist, if not for Etienne de Villiers, the chairman of the men’s tour at the time. De Villiers had previously worked at Walt Disney International, so he understood the need for better marketing. The doubles tour could survive, he said, but only if the players agreed to some compromises. The game would be streamlined. Most matches would be kept to two sets, with a “match tie break” in place of the third set. If a game went to 40-40 the next point would decide it, there would be no more endless ads and dueces. (Grand slams would stick with the traditional scoring).
The new format has few fans among the players. Martina Navratilova says it is a “bullshit excuse”. Leander Paes calls it as “Russian roulette”, and Luke Jensen dismisses it as “tennis in a microwave”. Jensen believes that the shorter format favours weaker teams, “Anyone can win one set”.
Oddly enough, though, the statistics don’t bear this out. Not long after the changes were made, Wayne asked Carl Morris, a mathematician at Harvard, to calculate their effect on a team’s chances. In shorter matches, Morris concluded, the likelihood of an upset could increase by as much as five percentage points. And yet, when the ATP later reviewed the tour’s statistics, it found that the best players had improved their records. The new format offered “no second chances”, as Bob Bryan put it, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “The one thing we didn’t figure in is that the better teams are clutch” Wayne says. “On those big points, they come through”.
That said, this is a roundabout way of making a simple point. My friend Sriram Subramaniam suggested a comparison of % break points won with % other points won. One would expect Rafa to win more break points than Murray. Unfortunately, Google didn’t turn up this specific analysis. The closest thing to this analysis that a few mintues of Googling turned up is this paper by a Franc Klaassen of the University of Amsterdam.
He shows that there really are big points, and that seeded players play better on big points than unseeded players. He observes that seeded players facing a break point on their serve have the same win % as on other points, and that unseeded players have a lower win %, suggesting that it is more about weaker players choking than better players raising their game. He also shows that serving first in a set, or serving with new balls, has no impact. He doesn’t make any conclusions about champions like Rafa or Federer as opposed to the general pool of seeded players; his dataset is small, coming only from Wimbledon 92-95.
Calling for tennis’ Bill James to mine the vast amount of data generated by the ATP tour...
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