Being First, Jaguar reBrand, Startup For Mother Earth, & Pirate Snacks.

Lochhead🏴‍☠️

Nov 21, 2024

🏴‍☠️

Thanks for reading.

Welcome to The Different Newsletter.

Musings for entrepreneurs, marketing leaders, and creators with a different mind.

From Christopher Lochhead, coAuthor of Play Bigger & Category Pirates.

First To Ship A Product Vs. First To Category Design A Market

When 💩ing on category design people often roll out the:

✔️“Apple didn’t create the smartphone”
✔️”Facebook didn’t invent social media”

argument.

People who say this conflate being first to ship a product.
With category designing a market.

They think, deliver your awesometastic new carbidigulator to the world and poof 📈.

Great success.

If that was true.
Xerox would be Apple.
(Xerox created the GUI & mouse)

Being first to ship a product.
Makes you first to ship a product.

Xerox did not category design markets for their innovations.
(Apple did.)

Xerox market cap today: $1 billion.
Apple market cap today: $3.4 trillion.

People who ship products, ship products.
People who ship products and category design markets, create different futures.
🏴‍☠️

Category Design: From “Insane” To The Headline

When we published our first book on (Play Bigger) in 2016, our dream was to open source category design.

To give startup founders, marketers, innovators and creators a new superpower.

The ability to create, not just the ideas, products, companies and brands of future, but the markets of the future.

At the time many “smart” people in Silicon Valley said category design was insane.

(Why would you raise millions to go after a zero billion dollar category?)

Ten years ago when writing an article on category design, an editor at Fortune and I got into an argument.

She explained to me, no one knew what a category was.

She changed category to “sector”.

SECTOR!

That was the last thing I ever wrote for those donkeys.

(We went on to write 14 #1 best sellers on category design. 😎 )

Five years ago, when you told a reporter you were creating a new category.

They laughed.

Now, they put it in the headline.

🏴‍☠️

Can A Startup Harness Capitalism For Mother Earth?

That’s the question Andrew Gilmour & the startup team at LACONIC Global asked.

It turns out.

YES.

Last week saw the biggest news in history for saving rainforest.

Bolivia just closed a $5 billion deal with Laconic to protect and monetize their rainforests.

It is the biggest transaction in carbon credit in history.

This one deal with Bolivia is larger than all of the carbon market last year.

A tipping point for carbon credit trading and the new carbon securitization category.

Bolivia is home to significant rain forests.

Approximately 60 million hectares of forest, which constitutes over 52.7% of the country's total land.

People only value, what they value.

Thanks to Laconic, Bolivia can now make more money saving rainforests Vs. cutting them down.

11% of the size of Bolivia’s GDP more money to be exact.

(Read that three times.)

Laconic’s carbon securitization platform creates the conditions required to make carbon credits tradable. For the first time

Just like you would trade Microsoft stock.

Never been done.
Big new AI/FinTec category.
Using AI to enable a whole new financial market.

(Like the creation of the stock market itself in Amsterdam in 1602)

I am proud to be an investor and advisor to Andrew, Brant Pinvidic and the whole Laconic team.

They are living proof.

Pirates, dreamers, and innovators can make a massive difference in the world, and create massive economic value.

At the same time.

🏴‍☠️

Why do you want to change an iconic logo created in 1945?

That would have been a great question for Jaguar CEO Adrian Mardell to ask.

But.

Before we get to Jaguar’s recent brand unforced self-inflicted fuck job….let’s chase a zebra down a rabbit hole for a second.

General Electric introduced their "we bring good things to life" tagline in 1981.

By 2003, GE had one of the most powerful brands in the world.

And.

GE was the most valuable company in the world.

Worth (an impressive at the time) $311 billion.

Then they got a new CEO and CMO.

So. For no clear reason.

They changed it.

Rebranded.

Made what GE stands for meaningless.

And forgettable.

(“Imagination at work”)

Today GE is worth $191 billion.

From 1st to 58th in the S&P 500.

Down (negative) 38%.

The S&P 500 increased 438.29% from 2003.

Think.

Since 2003 the S&P is up 437.68%

If the GE board sold the company in 2003, invested the $300 billion in the S&P 500, they would have made approximately $1.611 trillion for shareholders.

How bad does an executive team (and board) need to be, to drive down their stock by 38% over the same time the stock market is up over 400%.

Now, is all of this because GE rebranded and adopted a new tag line?

Of course not.

But.

An arts & crafts driven rebrand (with no clear category leading purpose) is a blinking red light that a company is in, or is about to be in, real trouble.

Making all of this worse.

Marketing as an industry has its head so far up its ass, they give awards to market cap assassins.

The number one job of management is to increase the value of the company over time

Beth Comstock the CMO of GE who threw out the old brand and ushered in the one of the largest value destructions in business, is one of the most decorated CMOs in history.

(Read that three times.)

Comstock won:

Advertising Club's "Industry Legend" Award: In 2017, Comstock was recognized by The Advertising Club of New York as one of the Advertising People of the Year and received the "Industry Legend" award for her outstanding contributions to advertising and marketing
Forbes' List of "The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women": Comstock was named to this prestigious list in both 2015 and 2016, highlighting her influence and leadership in the business world
Top 20 Most Influential Communicators: In September 2018, she was named among PRWeek's "Top 20 Most Influential Communicators," recognizing her impact in the field of communications
Richtopia's List of Most Influential Chief Marketing Officers: She was ranked eighth on this list in October 2016, which featured influential CMOs from various industries

Imagine how out-of-touch with the reality of running a business you have to be, to award the CMO of fallen star GE, these awards.

Now, Jaguar.

On a regular basis, I post:

Marketing that does not produce revenue, is called arts and crafts.

Every time, marketing people get upset.

Which proves the point.

You see many “creative” types in marketing are frustrated artists.

One day, while living in their parents basement they discover…“I’ll never earn a living as an artist.”

So they become a brand designer.

These are the worst marketing people of all.

Because they are very confused.

“[Jaguar] wasn’t always distinctive enough in the last decade,” CEO Adrian Mardell said at press briefing.

So rather than marketing their different.

And why that different matters. To customers.

Mr. Mardell played arts and crafts.

He change the logo to make it harder to read.

And did this.

While many are criticizing this ad for being woke, they miss the seminal point.

This marketing sucks, because it will not drive revenue.

It’s an ad with bad grammar, unhappy people in bright outfits about nothing.

This looks like the work of a self-indulgent, frustrated artist, turned marketing art director trying to win an award at the Cannes Festival of Artistic Marketing Bullshit.

And who knows, Adrian Mardell may win a ton of donkey marketing awards.

While his market cap pulls a GE.

Marketing that does not produce revenue, is called arts and crafts.

🏴‍☠️

Shalom my Pirate friend,

Christopher Lochhead

Data in this document was sourced/verified with Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, Bing, & Google.

This newsletter does not have an editor.

Think of it as a comedian riffing in public.

There are spalling and gramare mistxkes.

It’s a feature, not a bug.

I was recently de-platformed (with no warning and no reason given) by LinkedIn.

For (at least) the fourth time.

And they re-platformed after a few days.

Never told me why.

I’d be curious to hear from you…..

What do you think about social media censorship / free speech?

Pls leave your thoughts in the comments 👇🏻

Different by Christopher Lochhead 🏴‍☠️

Discussion about this post