The career-limiting Christmas wine list

Right outside our office window over the past year, we've witnessed construction workers walking along a crane gantry in quite high winds - a high-risk occupation by any measure. But I was tempted to swap places last week when by far the most daunting task of the year hit my office desk - selection of the Christmas party wine list.

This is an extremely career-limiting task. Roughly 50 palettes head down to a Southbank restaurant for the annual bonhomie that is the feature of the end of year Christmas party. And because we're in the process of merging, I've suddenly inherited a few additional palettes - with opinions! 

So the pressure is on - balancing the lolly water palettes of the Sauvignon Blanc set, with the 'sophisticated' tastes of the Pinot group and the raw Aussie bluster of the big bold Shiraz bloc. Add to this a 'salary cap' of $50 a bottle in a place where the cheapest drop is $45 a bottle and you are in very challenging territory.

These days, the task is not made easier by the proliferation of wine labels. I don't know what it is with the wine industry, but new 'brands' seem to pop up like daisies during the year. Gone are the days when the choice was basically Ben Ean Moselle or Asti Spumante for the more discerning (sorry, that was university days).

So why does this task fall to me? Yes, I'm responsible for brand in our organisation, but that doesn't mean to say I should be across every new label appearing in Dan Murphy's or Vintage Cellars. No. There is something far more fundamental.

You see, I'm relatively old, perceived as in the twilight of career by everyone except the Federal Government who believe I should work until they carry me out feet first to save the drain on the public purse. The logic is, therefore, that if I stuff up the Christmas wine selection, I have least to lose - less career years lost, diminishing prospects of promotion not too severely impaired.

There's also the view that caginess born of long experience will ensure I read the Gold medals on the bottles properly to ensure that the accumulated awards are from the Adelaide or Sydney wine shows, rather than the Bullamakanka Ladies Local Produce Awards. 

I have picked five wines for this year's luncheon, of which I will have to consume a reasonable quantity as I anxiously scan the dials of colleagues partaking of the first drops for signs of approval or disdain. 

For the record, I've picked the following varieties: a Prosecco (because the boss likes it), a WA Sauvignon Blanc Semillon (I had to add something to the SB to manage reputational risk), Pinot Gris (NZ) for the Pinot set, a Pinot Noir (the Pinot group is influential) and a McLaren Vale Shiraz (my favourite region for this variety because I bloody deserve it).

The Christmas wine list - not a job for the faint hearted!

Just another bum on a seat

Tonight I'm doing something that, as a football tragic, I'd normally never do unless Liverpool were visiting - attending one of those pointless 'friendlies' between a half-decent overseas club team and a local team struggling to score.

Yep. I'm about to watch LA Galaxy play Melbourne Victory. More correctly, I'm expecting to watch David Beckham play Harry Kewell. With due respect to others in those teams, that is how my teenage daughter describes the event.

She finds football boring, preferring the local free scoring goal fest that is AFL. But the Becks brand (not the beer, you idiot!) has worked its magic and we're going to experience 'His Presence' rather than attending with any hope of seeing an exciting contest.

Reports are that over 35,000 tickets have been sold for this event, I estimate about 25,000 more than if LA Galaxy were playing Melbourne Victory. Oh hang on! That's what we're going to see. Almost forgot.

So at $60 a throw, the Becks brand has added about 25,000 bums on seats and $1 million big ones to the gate. And wait a minute - it's live on Foxtel. Bit of an overstatement. 'Live' is not how I'd describe my expectations for the game. So Uncle Rupert and Telstra have also subscribed to the Becks phenomenon to boost the coffers of Football Federation Australia.

Of course, this is all small potatoes to Becks. At 36, he's made hundreds of times more than tonight's gate takings and this is probably his last game for LA Galaxy before he heads to Europe to convince some aspiring team that he can still flog more merchandise by merely appearing on the subs bench.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not slating Becks. I'm just jealous that brand BrooksieG is trailing somewhat in the financial rewards stakes. I played football years ago, but usually bent the ball out of play or wide of the goal rather than bending it like Beckham. There are few enterprises other than the trainers of Golden Retrievers who'll sponsor that sort of talent.

What's probably more concerning about the Becks phenomenon is, for my daughter. the allure is more about pecs like Becks rather than football skill. It's a worrying time.

Great news! I'm now drinking in the national interest!

I'm not a great beer drinker - the absence of grapes in the mix deters me. Nonetheless, when I do partake of the amber, my favourite brew is Coopers. And now, thanks to offloading Fosters to South African brewer, SABMiller, yesterday for a cool $10 billion, when I drink Coopers, I'm drinking in the national interest - crusading to keep the last great Aussie beer brand in local hands.

As I jump in my chariot of choice and drive over to Dan Murphy's to collect a carton, I know the crusade will be a long one. Coopers only has 4% share of the national beer market. So it will be guerilla warfare, with a few diehard defenders of Aussie brands sniping with their credit cards at the overseas behemoths.

The great thing going for Coopers is you can consume more of it, because you don't need to eat with it. All the food's contained in the bottle, with that familiar sediment churning through it to nourish you as you drink. Someone told me that you can never get a hangover from drinking Coopers because it's naturally top fermented - no added chemicals to give you the headache. Even though I heard this about 30 years ago, I find it hard to read the ingredients information with the bottle in my mouth, so cannot verify the veracity of this claim.

Yes, it's a comforting thought knowing that the internationals haven't really developed a beer that you can eat chilled. Chilling is mainly confined to what the Europeans would call lager. Beer they drink warm. Any pom will tell you that Aussies are not beer drinkers. We're all lager drinkers. So we've sold the South Africans a dud - they've bought a lager company when they thought they were buying a beer brewer. Aussies have never been good at disclosure.

Are we sad that another icon Aussie brand is heading overseas to live? Has Fosters gone the way of the Speedo? Will beer in stubbies go the way of men in Stubbies. Remember Stubbies? Those shorty cotton shorts that gave everyone a peek-a-boo at some of Australia's greatest nut crops on building sites? Let's hope we exported the roadshow as well as the brand!

Seriously though, it seems we're good at creating brands, but not good at hanging onto them. Doing that is a bloody hard exercise when your domestic market would fit in a schooner and you've failed to really make decent inroads internationally.

A Fosters spin-off, Treasury Wines, is now attacking the Chinese market and called for Aussie winemakers to resist the temptation to pour cheap crap into China and to build the market based on quality and, therefore, sustainable margins. With some of the brands, like Penfolds, in the Treasury Wines cellar, it's no surprise they're encouraging this approach.

In any event, I now have a job to do. Christmas-New Year beer will be there to be eaten, not drunk. Coopers is it and my 2012 Coopers Crusade will begin. Let's drink to save a great Aussie brand.

Paving a path to the bleeding obvious

People much smarter than me tell me that the generation preceding my boomer group were 'Builders'. These were my parents' generation - people who remembered the deprivations of the Great Depression and the conflagration of World War II. So they were thrifty and did things themselves to save money. Compare this with the great outsourcing Gen X and you wonder how the boomers, who are stuck in the middle, go about things.

Well, I can tell you. For the past few months, I have been posted down on the Mornington Peninsula for days on end, doing it myself to save money. I recall keystroking through the pain barrier in August after the first four days of a marathon garden upgrade, which involves laying over 90 square metres of pavers. As I drank another glass of red to anaethetise the pain, I wondered how it would gel with Panadol Osteo.

Am I typical of the boomer generation - the generation that lived by The Who's iconic lyric 'Hope I die before I get old'? As I get older, living the lyric is getting tougher. Insane decisions about laying pavers, with all that precedes, symbolise the refusal to get old, to prove you still have what it takes.

But you don't. Let me tell you, after four days 'on the tools', I could no longer cut a piece of broccoli. The nerves and muscles charged with that task in my left hand would not allow me to push my fork into the broccoli. The nerves and muscles in my right hand would not permit me to open the screw top on the wine bottle, although somehow it happened - wine over broccoli trumps mind over matter any time.

My wife thinks I'm a nutter, which explains why we filled in separate census forms in August, but my 'Builder' generation parents cheered from the sidelines, even though they also suspect I might be a nutter.

The great thing is that being down there doing landscaping stuff put me back in touch with good Aussies. I just completed an excavating apprenticeship with a local guy called Rutz. Forked out nearly four big ones for the privilege, but education isn't cheap is it? Consulted with another dude, Tim, about putting poles in the ground for shade sails. He was formerly a corporate marketing bloke, but cast that aside, took a big pay cut to work for a builder for a couple of years before striking out on his own. You gotta like doing business with guys like that.

I think the Builders generation had something. Have a crack and see what you can do. While I took leave to landscape in frontier land, back at work they were cranking out a message about the stock market schemozzle, trying to deliver confidence and certainty amid irrational investment markets.

But down there driving a Dingo digger for two days made me impervious to stock market shenanigans. There, I could sink money into something and see the outcome. Yep. Rutz didn't come cheap, but his advice didn't carry a disclaimer and everything was crystal clear.

When it all comes down to it, the generational thing is bollocks. All anyone wants is clarity and direction. We all want authenticity and outcomes. The biggest source of failure in brand and marketing is failing to satisfy these basic customer needs.

New evidence - Audi is a 'chick magnet'

As a 50-plus male, I intuitively knew that driving an Audi made me more attractive to women, but until this year I could not produce any tangible evidence of it. Yesterday evening, I completed the jigsaw as, for the second time in seven months, an attractive young woman ran into the back of my Audi.

It was about the same time of day, driving home from work. In both instances, I was stationery at a set of traffic lights. Imagine my delight at being able to jump out of my car again on the way home and have a valid excuse to capture the mobile phone number of a woman half my age! Try it any other time and the result would lie somewhere between a slap in the face and jail.

It's a methodology I wish I'd thought of about 25 years ago, but the problem is that there were no mobile phones then, I was driving company-provided Fords and half my age would have been about 14, but you get my drift.

Perhaps it never happened because even 'chicks' in my era were unattracted to Fords, or people driving them. The blue Ford oval didn't have the hypnotic effect on them that the four linked circles of the Audi logo clearly do as they approach them at intersections.

Last night as I perused and considered the cost and inconvenience of my car being a resurgent chick magnet, I felt relieved that, even though the young woman concerned had revealed her insurer, she hadn't asked for mine. Australian Pensioners Insurance (APIA) is not the brand name you want to parade out there when you're trying to impress a 20-something woman.

Yes, at every point in life, you encounter the power of brands. On the one hand those you're proud to be associated with, on the other brands that actually match your profile but reflect terrible truths about you that are best left unspoken.

As for the documented evidence of the allure of the Audi brand for young women, it's all at APIA, where all ageing dudes secretly accept the discounts for being senior members of the community. Perhaps APIA will start tightening underwriting requirements soon, insisting that older folks reduce their risk by associating with less sexy brands.

America's new copy writing sweatshops

If you're a writer and you're knocking together 5-Star online endorsements for products and services for $5 a pop, then you're totally out of your mind. And if you're hiring writers to do this sort of stuff, then your brand is seriously in need of a makeover, or soon will be.

What got me started on this rant was an article I read today reporting that some companies in the US were hiring writers to write favourable 'reviews' for five bucks each. After reading this blog, some may not identify me as a writer, but nonetheless I stick doggedly to the proposition that it is a professional category with which I have some affinity.

Even back in the good old days of freelance journalism circa 1980s, a decent journo could pull something like $150 a thousand words from even the stingiest magazine publisher, so $5 for an endorsement wreaks of serious under-payment, even if house prices in the US have collapsed and the Tea Party refuses to spend any more. Come to think of it, perhaps the brand needing the cheap endorsements is the Tea Party - if not endorsements, then perhaps endorphins, but I digress.

You see, the thing with these $5 mercenaries is that they're providing three things - words (presumably coherently crafted), a personal endorsement and, as a by-product, great risk of trashing their personal brand in the process. Willing to put all that skill and reputation on the line for $5? I'm certainly not!

For their clients, there is the small matter of brand authenticity, widely regarded as the currency of social media. What happens when they're found out, as they surely will be? Already, companies like Amazon are commissioning sharp software dudes to develop algorithms to identify and weed out fake endorsements. It will be interesting to see if, in the process, they publish the names of the businesses who have chipped in their $100 for 20 or so "recommendations".

Their only hope is that unsuspecting customers driven to these businesses by the rave reviews have an extremely positive brand experience when they make contact. Because if customers are savvy enough to source third party recommendations online, they're certainly smart enough to go back online and express their contrary view if the experience does not live up to the promise.

There are plenty of websites dedicated to publishing consumer reviews. Perhaps we're about to see a flourishing business based on reviewing the reviewers! Oh dear ... who are we to believe? My head's starting to hurt.