I drink Diet Coke. It makes me feel good. It helps me retain my boyish figure. It calms me down. It peps me up. It sings me to sleep at night. I love Diet Coke. I want Diet Coke. I need Diet Coke.
Advertising people will say this is because of branding. Branding, you will recall, is what happens when you’ve told a lie for so long that you start believing it yourself. Because of branding, they will insist, Diet Coke is my friend and confidant: I was taught to love Diet Coke by clever executives.
Which is nonsense. I love Diet Coke because of something called phenylalanine, a highly addictive chemical with cell-retarding properties. It’s so bad they have to mark it on the can with an asterisk. If you feed it to babies you will produce junky vegetables. My brain and mouth tell me that Diet Coke tastes like the run-off from a communal shower in a Cairo brothel, but my heart whispers sweet, phenylalanine-fuelled nothings …
Of course you can’t always drug your clientele, and so branding seems the next-best thing when it comes to suppressing those emotions that prevent us from swimming with piranhas or buying German sedans on credit. South African Breweries, currently shacking up with fellow booze pimp Miller, seemed to have got branding down to a fine art. Until Justin Nurse and Laugh It Off.
Those who were raised not to stare at ugly people might not know that SABMiller last week recommenced its systematic flaying of the incorrigible brand-defacers. It was all so terribly confusing. Why, if the corporation is concerned about its brand, did it do absolutely nothing when the cricketers it sponsored were found to be cheats and hypocrites, or the coach of the rugby team it backed was fired for being a racist, or the same team became synonymous with footballing idiocy?
It could have been worse. It often is, when money and sport mix. Certainly it was a touch short-sighted to keep Hansie Cronje’s five-storey visage looming over Newlands for six months after he was rusticated. But perhaps they didn’t have any ladders handy to get up on to the wall of the breweries and scrape Cronje into the dustbin of ignominy, being too busy peering over Justin Nurse’s wall.
The Gestapo treatment being handed to Nurse’s enterprise is repugnant, but it is not a moral catastrophe. Big sharks eat little fish. Schoolyard bullies kick chubby six-year-old girls in the shin and grow up to be CEs with anorexic trophy wives. And so the world turns. But one can’t help thinking that there must be some terribly stupid people sitting in some terribly expensive offices, because this is what the SABMiller brand now tells me:
l There is no threat too small to squash, which means they’re worried about their brands, which means there might be something wrong with their brands, which is as good as saying they’re mixing anthrax with urine and putting it in cans.Â
l Castle Lager and Black Label sue fun people.
l Castle Lager and Black Label don’t have a sense of humour.
l Maybe it’s time for me to start drinking vodka. And watching the cricket from home. Fully clothed. With my bags packed and my visas in order.
But most importantly SABMiller has told me that it is desperately, toe-curlingly, nose-pickingly uncool. In the space of a year they have gone from patriotic cheerleaders and roistering purveyors of bonhomie to faceless slabs of grasping corporate grease, their post-nasal drips plopping on to their patent-leather shoes as they struggle to get their bicycle clips on.
Indeed, suddenly their terribly stupid television advertisement for Castle takes on a wicked subtext. South Africans, blessed with superhuman strength apparently gained from mainlining jingoism, drag the world’s great landmarks towards our own shores.
Before they began beating Nurse with bags of oranges (still the simplest way to break bones and rupture organs without causing bruising to disturb spectators) that ad merely stank of a curious nouveau-colonialism and arrogance fuelled by ignorance.
Now we have to ask ourselves: If a Buckingham Palace guardsman refuses to be towed south by SABMiller, will they sue him?
If we point out that the anchorman in this enormous tug-of-war is black, and if we suggest that he is doing most of the tugging, will we be subpoenaed for raising the spectre of black labour?
I love Coke Light and I’m scared of Black Label. And that’s branding.Â