say it, mean it, back it up
lessons in storytelling from last week's England shirt debacle
A quick essay from me this week on a topic somehow still rattling around the discourse somehow. I’ll be mixing up short-ish essays with top tens going forward, just to keep myself amused.
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Sam
I wanted to wait for last week’s bilge around the St George’s cross on Nike’s new England kit to die down a bit before weighing in, because I think there’s actually a very useful lesson in storytelling we can take from all this bed-wetting.
A mercifully quick recap for those lucky enough to have no idea what I’m talking about:
Nike dropped a new England kit for the Euros and it’s actually nice. The Home is simple and effective; the Away is more exciting and navy; both are blessed with texture and detail. And it is one of those details that have made people fill their nappies with impotent rage.
In a thread, Nike Football tweeted that there would be a “playful update” on the St George’s cross on the back of the shirt, and people lost their fucking minds. First because they thought it was a inch-long “gay flag” (the colours are actually similar to the bisexual flag and, despite all sexuality being a spectrum, people didn’t like the idea of this one bit) and then, once they realised the colours actually referenced an old England training kit from 1966 and their homophobic line of questioning was bollocks, they retconned the argument into actually being about “protecting the sanctity of our flag”, chanting “GO WOKE, GO BROKE” as they sit at home wondering why their children don’t return their phone calls.
Politicians weighed in, demanding the jersey be changed, embarrassing themselves for clicks in this race to the bottom, just a phalanx of donuts hoping that their argument — that St George’s flag is already perfect and, therefore, should never be touched, despite it having been re-designed for countless England shirts in the past — sounded a tuneful enough dog whistle to appeal to your everyday patriot in the high street as well as the ardent bores who just wants an opportunity to talk about WW2 and Thatcher and fishing quotas again and that lapping at the jowls of both of these demographics would translate into votes. Most fucking egregious, however, was its blatant political misdirection, driving attention away from important matters affecting millions of lives to something which should matter to literally no one. Latest numbers show that 1 in 5 people in the UK live in poverty but no, no, let’s talk about the kit.
And onto to lessons, finally, and here it’s about how, in the age of bad faith takes, robust storytelling is non-negotiable. I know that’s my answer to everything, but bear with me: While there may have been a time when simply saying someone was a “playful update” on iconography in your copywriting would have been met with a polite nod, that day is not today.
Instead what’s needed is a little more show and tell: Imagery that presents us with a strong visual narrative backed up by copy (also known as writing) that explains those choices in more detail. Pretty much design is referencing something after all, and sharing those details in more (don’t say detail again) detail is going to help people understand what story is being portrayed here.
In short: say what you mean and show your working. Otherwise someone else will.
I’ve written about this before over on IG, but you really cannot rely alone on a lukewarm Aimé Leon Dore moodboard retread (I thought we were done with drop-clothes-and-stools but, no) and the revolutionary idea of putting a football shirt with some trousers (“Tucked into trousers? By god, you’ve cracked it.”) alongside boilerplate copywriting to sail your story into the sunset. People are both too savvy and often too snide for that. For each product, there should be a story to tell — a why — and you must explain that why. It actually makes your job easier. And if there isn’t a story to be told, well… This nonsense just shows that in the presence of a vacuum people will fill in the blanks with the dumbest shit imaginable.
Descriptions should be concrete, not abstract. Instead of Nike saying the ‘update’ was to ‘unite and inspire’ people (most people are scared; they only unite in fear), the marketing should have said what the design was actually doing. Don’t say ‘update’, say ‘take’. And if it really was inspired by the colours of a World Cup-winning training kit, say it. If it wasn’t, don’t say anything. Don’t mention it. Just say it looks nice. I don’t think the flag update was a sports manufacturer deploying a bisexual-agenda psyop. I think a designer thought it looked nice. Sometimes you can just say something looks nice.
But we’re back in the age of full-scale moral panics. They’ve always been a political tool to distract people from larger issues but things have been getting worse. Whereas bootlicking media titles of old carried the mantle, thanks to our lovely platform-based society, everyday people have been handed possession of the bullshit bullhorn. We can shout the fear-mongering agendas of the powerful from the rooftops ourselves, thank you very much. We can divide ourselves just fine.
Horseshoe Theory posits that far-left and far-right ideologies often share more traits than differences, bending towards the same direction other like the two ends of a horseshoe1. Here, take the left viewpoint that corporations manipulate populations’ beliefs for their own ends and the right viewpoint that this is totally fine unless a corporation they do not like is doing so for an end they also do not like. This causes an unfortunate ripple effect along the political spectrum and careerist politicians — turning their big dial marked, if not ‘outright racism’, then certainly ‘fear’ (of the new, of the different, of being left behind) — feel they must safeguard their markets by bowing to popular opinion.
That all this posturing is bollocks is besides the point. Marketing was once allowed to be casual in its spiel: You could put a story out there and let society’s aggregate media literacy take the wheel. But now anything can be weaponised in the Culture Wars and marketing needs to be far more careful. That doesn’t mean marketing needs to be afraid — politics already has a monopoly on the machinery of fear— but the stories it tells about the products it shares needs to be more robust than ever.
Say it, mean it, back it up.
Nature abhors a vacuum, even if it’s just the air between the words of a throwaway Tweet. Getting your story straight first is the only option. “Owning the narrative” gets a bad rap, but the ‘communication’ portion of marketing is severely underrated. Nike did that eventually — telling clueless reactionaries to wind their necks in after they asked that a tentpole release was changed because… [pulls a small Crusader figurine from behind your ear] — but it should have done so from the jump.
If they had, maybe we could focus on things that actually matter.
For more on the way the ways divisive ideologies shadow each other, you should read Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger.