Posts

Fluffy and me this afternoon before the rain came.

Today started off very sunny but the clouds moved on in to bring us a tad cooling off period. Thanks Mother Nature:)) How was the weather in your neck of the woods today?

[Cross-posted] If you follow my ramblings, even when they don’t make sense, you know I had my knives out for the ANZ National Bank here in New Zealand for what I think is questionable practice. So it was interesting to meet a few people tonight who are employees of the bank, one of whom was very staunch about defending her workplace against my charges about, well, bank charges.
   Humble pie time first: Sir John Anderson left the bank as a director 18 months ago, so the criticisms I put at him were unfair. I apologize to Sir John.
   Tonight, I don’t know whether I should be applauding the ANZ for brainwashing its younger staff so effectively or whether I should be congratulating myself for closing the overwhelming majority of accounts held there, given that there are people who do not give a damn about the customer.
   While people should defend their positions, they should also be open to hearing others’ viewpoints. Respectfully. The customer is right. Not so, it seems, at the ANZ.
   ‘The bank must make a profit, so it should make it from the mass customer base,’ I was told. ‘How would you do it?’
   I answered, ‘Through investing, as you did years ago before charging us.’
   She argued the usual points of the bank providing a service, before I confronted her with some basic logic that I have stated here before.
   A deposit to the bank is, after all, my loan to the bank. When the bank loans to me, can I charge it a “Jack privilege fee”?
   Around this point I was asked if we could change the subject.
   There are several conclusions we can draw. First, an executive at the ANZ bank, a fairly high-up one, is not open to hearing from her customers. She has her own world, where she has been conveniently conned into thinking the monetarist solution is the only one, when history tell us it isn’t—and that the bank’s cutting of costs over the last 20 years should actually make it more efficient.
   Another member of the staff, a little older but I understand a little more junior, put forward her theory which made a bit more sense, about how mortgages no longer funded the bank’s costs as effectively. She did not know for sure.
   But this shows just how bad the ANZ brand is. Different answers from different people—but the higher up you go, the less they care.
   Front-line staff, as I discussed earlier, cannot offer a credible explanation about bank fees that any customer who has been there for 20 or more years can fathom. Fact: people do have memories.
   And it seems that it is accepted as gospel that customers are to be taken from even at a higher level, no questions asked.
   How well ANZ has managed to blind its staff.
   A good brand is one that listens to consumers about their concerns—and actually levels with internal and external audiences about its policies.
   This experience confirms that the ANZ cannot level to either executives or front-line branch personnel, which means consumers are too far down the food chain for it to reach.
   This Australian-owned bank has been profiting very well from everyday New Zealanders over the last few years, too.
   But I cannot see that continue.
   Any brand expert will tell you that for all the financial analyses that a client shrouds itself in, the minute the brand falters, the effects on the bottom line will be felt.
   One of the symptoms is what I describe above: one based around the hope that people simply do not remember how they behaved before they began cutting their services and putting up charges.
   It is a failure to be transparent and to tell the truth to those consumers—and it only takes one who is aged over 30 to be able to remember the good ol’ days versus what I consider to be the unethical treatment that is metered out today.
   Just as I said a few months ago, the TSB Bank seems to be the only choice New Zealanders have, and at least the profits don’t make their way over to Sydney.
   It was my ‘prerogative’, said the executive, for me to do as I wished with my money, if I had gone to the TSB.
   No attempt to get it back—no promises to look into things. Even others have offered that to keep me on as a customer. Higher up, I guess, no one really cares. A lost customer isn’t important.
   Even if the lost customer is a stubborn bastard with a big mouth.
   If the ANZ wishes, I am happy to run a seminar for them to inform them of the niceties of listening to their customers. Unsurprisingly, I understand tonight that its profits are heading south this year.
   This problem won’t be fixed with advertising, rebranding or PR.
   It might be fixed by giving customers what they want and pursuing something other than short-term profit, which is exactly the message the ANZ has been sending me year after year.
   Because if banks aren’t looking at the long term, then what heck are we entrusting a penny to them?

Photographed on the way back to Auckland Airport: Counties’ Hunting & Fishing. If it were not for the Japanese truck outside, this could have passed for a similar store in the US, according to colleagues who have been to the southern states. There are hunting and fishing stores in New Zealand, but seldom signposted so strongly.

Not everyone in New Zealand has a brand-new car. At Bristol Motors in Upper Hutt, where I get my car serviced by Stephen Hamilton (one of the rare breed: an honest mechanic, ex-New Zealand Army), there are quite a few classics being looked after. New Zealand does not salt its roads, so many of these have been well preserved. I have blanked out the number plates of the cars shot indoors since these are not vehicles you would see passing by Bristol Motors’ building.

   Two Germans: a BMW 633 CSI (one of my old favourites from this company) and a Hansa coupé, from the now-defunct Borgward company. There’s a small plate inside mentioning Goliath-Werke AG, another name from the past. Next to them is a Bentley.    I am no authority on Rileys but I assume this is a 2½-litre model?    Another rarity, a Vauxhall Velox drophead. A saloon version was parked outside:    If it were not for the SUV across the road, you’d have to ask what year this photo was shot:    And finally, an Australian Ford LTD from the 1970s with a grille that aped Rolls-Royces and Lincolns:

Yesterday wasn’t all Audis. Some of my journalist colleagues came in other press cars.

   There were plenty of jokes being bandied about the BMW X6, the car that blends a coupé roofline with a four-wheel-drive concept. I even joked that someone had left the Rover SD1 files around when BMW owned Rover. But really, I quite like the shape and I even think a market exists for it. This is not because of any “category” but because there are people who want something looks butch—yet they do not want to have the “domestic” feeling of an upright tailgate, particularly from the inside. I reminded my colleagues of the AMC Eagle SX/4 of 1981, which found buyers—ultimately the market will decide, not us.
   The registration is BMW 630, which was something else altogether 30 years ago.    Everyone loved the Jaguar XF, apart from its thirst. Again, it’s a coupé roofline—just that it’s mated to a saloon. It’s on my must-drive list.
   All in all, I found the journos on this press launch far nicer as a group than what I confront in the fashion media. Maybe it’s a gender thing but everyone was so relaxed. We in the fashion media tend to be uptight most of the time and the only people who appear relaxed are the people who can fake looking relaxed. There were some genuine friendships and colleagial respect at Pukekohe.

David Fisher's company 'Dynamic Architecture' have developed a moving skyscraper! The building will be made up of 80 floors, with an apartment on each floor.

The rotating building is made possible by 79 giant power-generating wind turbines.

As well as the rotation, the wind turbines will also provide enough energy to power the entire building and feed extra energy back into the grid.

There are two buildings planned at the moment. One in Dubai and one in Moscow. The Dubai building is planned to be up and running by 2010.

Since I posted about the use of the word coon on radio in New Zealand, I did get a reply from the plumbing firm which it advertised.
   It was very short:

It is raccoons the ones in the woods. Of course there is no limit to the number of interpretations.

   Fair enough: we now know the intent. I would have written more in response (e.g. signed the thing with my name), but that is another issue. I still wonder if the alternative, racist interpretation was in the back of the copywriter’s mind. I guess we won’t know.
   However, every time I have talked about this radio commercial, most people are shocked. No one seems to come up with the raccoon explanation. It’s a 100 per cent response to the notion that the advertisement is racist.
   Sure, this is nowhere near scientific. I must have mentioned it to about 15 people. That’s hardly representative of the population. And on this blog, opinion was divided among an international audience.
   A check back then did reveal that the word was also a racist term used to describe Aboriginals in Australia by certain Australians, and it came up again when Lucire covered Naomi Campbell’s sentence last Friday.:

Capt Doug Maughan, a pilot of 28 years, had filed a complaint [against British Airways] after the use of the word coon during a training session. He also claimed Saudi Arabians were referred to as ‘rag-heads’ on one flight.

   This was in relation to Campbell allegedly being called a ‘gollywog supermodel’ by airline staff.
   In this context I don’t think I was being too sensitive, since I get the feeling the racist interpretation is more commonplace than the animal one, even in the British Commonwealth.
   It’s hard to believe the ‘gollywog’ comment, too. Campbell’s words could have been dismissed if it had not been for Capt Maughan’s own evidence that British Airways allegedly, and casually, used racist epithets. (The airline denies the allegations.)
   I won’t add more as I think the two points of view were well covered in the earlier post’s comments.