What are your favorite brands and why?

There is no single brand, or collection of brands, that I could point out as favourites. Rather than considering a brand, I try to examine the business model behind the brand. Is the product reliable? Is it built to last? Does it live up to expectations?

Let’s start with a confession – I am a grizzled, cynical IT veteran. Having worked in software companies for the last 35 years, my experience necessarily colours my view about brands. I do not know anything about textiles, food products, or furniture companies. However, I am very familiar with IT as a service, and have delivered projects for companies transitioning from a manually-based environment to a computer-reliant organisation.

If I had to single out a brand in the IT industry which I will miss, it is the search engine Ask Jeeves. What the hell is that, you ask?

In 1997, when Google was still just an experimental idea of a search engine, and we all relied on Yahoo or AltaVista to carry out internet searches, Ask Jeeves was launched. A conversational-based search engine, you could ask anything you liked. From ‘what are the best sites to visit in Italy?’ to ‘What is the capital of Mali?’, the Ask Jeeves search engine would answer your query instantly.

This was in the days prior to the behemoth of Google and its market dominance. What on earth is Jeeves? The latter was a fictional character, a valet, from the novels of P G Wodehouse. Jeeves, the loyal valet, would attend to the needs and requests of his master. Taking this character as a brand, Jeeves became updated to the internet world.

The search engine as a conversational helper – in the era before ChatGPT and generalised AI – was a master stroke. Taking a character from novels written in the pre-1915 era, and making it accessible to a modern audience, was a brilliant ploy of branding. Ask Jeeves became, if not a household name, the epitome of a manservant.

It made the search engine personable, a likeable helpful assistant in your life.

Sadly, Ask Jeeves is no more. The parent company, earlier this month, decided to discontinue the Ask Jeeves service. After some 29 or 30 years, Ask Jeeves has retired. Ironically, conversational search engines are considered marketable assets and the way of the future. Gemini AI and ChatGPT are modern day incarnations of the famous search valet.

I have used Google a billion times over the years, but I will never forget the humble and effective Ask Jeeves.

Let’s step outside of the IT realm, and examine the real world for a moment.

If there is a prolonged exercise in branding, or more specifically rebranding, in Australia, it is that of soccer clubs. What do I mean? Numerous soccer clubs (yes, they are called football clubs overseas) began their lives from the multiple ethnic communities that populate Australia. For instance, Marconi, in southwest Sydney, began its life from Italian Australians; Hungarians, Croatians, Serbians – each group founded a soccer club.

Soccer languished for a long time as a secondary cousin to the main Australian football code, the rugby league and the Australian Rules Football (AFL). We were told by the sporting authorities that to make soccer a truly national sport, its ethnic image and origins had to be discarded.

I understand the need for integration; commercial sports is very good at rebranding. No longer are soccer clubs seen as ‘ethnic holdouts’, separate and distinct from the wider Australian society. Australians from non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB) had to fit into the majority Australian society.

Removing the ‘ethnic’ branding of Australian soccer has taken decades, and the major political parties have jumped onto the bandwagon. The Socceroos, the national soccer team, was cheered on by the ultraconservative former Prime Minister John Howard, of all people. The quintessential Anglo-Celtic political figure finally accepted that soccer was not a narrow ‘ethnic’ preoccupation, but a national sport.

Taking the rebranding – some would say cultural homogenisation – of Australian soccer at face value, I would like to point out a glaring exception. There is one soccer club, with a strong presence in Australia, that has failed to shed its ultranationalist ‘ethnic’ image, with its fans engaging in riotous, racially motivated violence in the streets. The fans of this particular club have not abandoned their thuggish antisocial behaviour.

I am referring to the fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv FC, a club with stridently Israeli ultranationalist fans. Known to engage in racist chants and attacks against Arabs – it is difficult to interpret their repeated chanting ‘death to Arabs’ as anything but a call to racial violence – this club has failed to shed its ethnic nationalist particularism.

Fans of this club have failed to respect multiculturalism, and refused to integrate into the peaceful way of life. The rebranding of Australian soccer from an ethnic nationalist stronghold into a sport everyone can enjoy has obviously not convinced the ultra fans of this club.

Rather than select specific brands, it is more important to choose reliability and authenticity. Not all business models deserve our attention or loyalty.