Commercial: Brandorama

Two branding bits and pieces that have caught the eye over the last few days:

1. A quick stop at Paperchase meant the purchase of a delightful travel journal, on sale as part of their current 'Travel Slickness' range. It has a drawing of a TWA 1982 Boeing 762-200 ER plane on the front and, on the back, this message:

Shortly your sleek TWA starliner will lift her nose into the blue of evening and streak through starlit heavens. In a few hours, you will touch down softly on the other coast or in the once-distant lands across the sea.

Isn't that beautiful? Can any airline today claim that mastery of language?

2. In one of his more melancholic rants in the London Evening Standard, Norman Lebrecht yesterday mused on the purchase of EMI by private equity firm Terra Firma, and showed some affection for the old company: "a Canute-like stubbornness was part of its... charm and innately British character. This was a company that made producers come to work in striped trousers: as late as the Sixties, George Martin remembers artists being sent home from Abbey Road for being improperly dressed."

He then goes on, perhaps inadvertently, to define EMI's brand essence:

the peculiar blend of classical discipline and progressive experiment that spilled out onto Abbey Road tea-tables... EMI was a unique alloy of past and future, pull and push.

Not many brands today would dare to have such a challenging approach - or indeed one so evocative. One hopes the new owners make something of it, as well as the geographical heritage embedded in "the somnolence of Victorian mansion blocks."