Royal Juice

If you frequent brand strategy meetings and presentations or regularly engage with brand identity consultants it’s quite possible you’ll often hear terms like the ‘core idea’ or the ‘big idea’ bandied around. They’ll bang on about the ‘distilled essence’ of what you’re all about, and your brands ‘secret sauce’.

Sound familiar?

Of course we bang about it because it is one of the critical elements of any identity project and indeed the holy grail of the initial concept stages. Get it right early on and ideas flow effortlessly out of the genie bottle of inspiration, everything magically taking shape before your very eyes. Get it wrong and, well, nothing much happens.

So I was excited to read the other day about current man about town, or should I say Crown, Josh O’Connor and his recent experience on the velvet casting couch. If you’re not up to speed (and don’t worry I wasn’t until I started watching this series) he’s the inspired actor who brilliantly pulls off young Charles in the latest series of the Crown. Except, he nearly wasn’t.

Convinced he was only being stalked for the role on account of his impressive lugs, he resisted audition convinced that it was not a role of interest, or indeed one that suited him and his left wing politics. The Prince was just a rich bore, where was the challenge, where’s the juice? Finally giving in and agreeing to an audition (we all have to work, let’s face it) it was only when he read a scene where Charles compares himself to the central character in Saul Bellow’s novel Dangling Man, a book about a guy waiting to be drafted to go to war and actually wanting to go to war to give his life meaning, that the penny dropped. Charles’ life as heir to the throne required the immense effort of simply not dying. Everything he did was aimless and purposeless. And there lay the Juice he’d been searching for. Once he was able to distil the role down to that succinct point, suddenly he had a rich and fascinating angle upon which to build the character and develop scenes. From the desperate snub of attention on his tour of Australia and the torment and confusion of his retention of his mistress to his dark and uncomfortable relationship with his mother. The lost and sorrowful gazes out of the Rolls’s window, the bereft Eeyorish scowls, the head in permanently skewed demi-nod. You can see how O’Connor and the director will have been able to, in script/screenplay workshops, refer back plot and scene development and character detail to that central core element and let it steer and inform continually as they created a masterpiece in character study.

The point is that there is a reason designers toil away incessantly, researching, discarding, refining in search of that magic juice – it will be the fountain from which the integrity and imagination of a brand’s identity spew forth in joyful harmony. So if you’re a serial entrepreneur or marketing exec in one of those meetings and start to feel the eyes glazing over as the ‘secret sauce’ is squirted around once again, pause for a moment, reflect and remember that without it your brand may be conscribed to a somewhat pedestrian stroll down a distinctly un-royal Average Street.