A quick follow-up from yesterday’s blog about Tipping Points. I’ve had occasion to ‘assist’ more than one FMCG organisation in their ill-starred attempts to encourage the British public to take on board the habit of drinking iced tea. They’ve all failed. I haven’t been involved for a few years now, but I still keep watch of the market closely enough to know that – regular as clockwork – one player or another will make a futile re-launch attempt at the start of each summer season. A new brand name. A new twist. A new camera angle. The next inevitable failure.

It’s always been my hypothesis that the combination of (relatively) cold-climate and highly ritualised drinking of tea at work (‘builders’ tea’) just mean that iced-tea makes no sense to the vast majority of British consumers. Iced-tea makes complete sense if its 30degC outside in the same way that hot tea makes no sense if you try and make it with lukewarm water. And yet the FMCG companies keep plugging away trying to get a product past it’s early-adopter Tipping Point to become – commercial heaven – a staple of the British fridge.

I still kind of believe that mis-fit is there. These days, I also know that getting past Tipping Point has little or nothing to do with external contradictions, but is rather about the FMCG companies resolving some of the internal ones. They’d be far better off, in other words, looking at Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run or U2’s Joshua Tree as a model for success as the latest piece of expensive, ill-conceived consumer feedback from the advertising agencies.