Of Sardines and Men

By Patrick Hammond, Co-Founder, Head of Strategy & US Lead at Hot Pickle

At a recent brand home conference, I heard a talk from the owner of Conservas Pinhais, a small family-run Portuguese sardine factory that has recently launched a factory tour and experience.

A central moment in the factory tour is a short film that details an emotional story about a fisherman’s daughter. What struck me was that there wasn’t a sardine in sight. Now, it wasn’t a true story, and it wasn’t about the founder, but it was a real story in that it was a story of human emotion.  It wasn’t projection-mapped, or VR or linked to my mobile, it was just a short classical linear story, well told.

At that same conference, there was a lot said of the role of tech in experiences, from AI to AR. The resounding assertion was that story is primary, and tech is secondary and at best an enabler or augmentation of story. I certainly concur, but I wonder if we really act out that principle?  We seem to be putting more and more tech in our experiences and our lives.  All blindly accepting that because we can, we should.

Take for example the growing capability for experience personalization through tech.  Through clever data capture and algorithms, my experience is tailored to me, and therefore different from yours.  Taken at the surface level of preference this can be fine (my drink preference, my language, etc) but taken to its extreme it could mean we haven’t actually shared the same experience.   And if we haven’t done that, what have we done?

You may have been standing next to me, but like so many screen-bound hunchbacks, we are isolated in our own personal worlds, cloistered by our tech. Sat watching the reflections of Plato’s cave, rather than out in the light where the same sun shines on us all.

And this to me seems the antithesis of experience. Experience is communal. Experience is shared. Experience is temporal.

I’m not a luddite and I’m not Chicken Little.  But I believe we are made to work, to share, to remember, to feel, to create, to love, and all of those are done best when they are done together.

And so, I think a brand experience is indeed best built at the human level that taps into that. The level of story and song, campfire and commons, emotion and empathy.

That little sardine film was much more memorable than any bit of fizz from a sliver of silicone because it sat at that human emotional level.  That is why I remember it, and that is why I’ll share it (which is what all brand experiences aspire to do).

As the poet John Donne says, ‘no man is an island unto himself’, so put the phone away and jump in, the water is warm and teeming with sardines.