Letter: Team players needed

Phew! I’m writing this on the morning after the World Cup final, with the German nation waking up feeling justifiably proud of itself and South America – and Brazil in particular – wondering what went wrong. But why am I talking about football when this letter is a follow-on to your excellent reporting of the recent Warwick Commission Creative and Cultural Leaders’ Summit on cultural branding, which we, the Design Council, were pleased to co-host?

Well, one of the most popular theories about why Brazil suffered such serious maulings when they met the really good European teams – firstly Germany and then the Netherlands – was that they had lost the art of a national ‘style’ of playing football. The great footballing nation had allowed most of its players to disappear abroad and play for clubs elsewhere in the world and haven’t really played together – and, as a consequence, the Brazilian style of playing has just not kept up with the rest of the world.

At the Warwick event Simon Anholt reflected on the brand image of Britain from abroad and the extraordinary extent to which the combined attributes of the creative and cultural industries contribute to it being the 3rd most admired country in the world. His observations on how Britain’s collective creative heartbeat is being viewed enviously by the rest of the world were enough to ignite a moment of national pride in even the most hardened of cynics.

All fine and good and, yes, we’ve all known that for ever. But my caution relates to the wise words of our other provocateur on the day, Terry Tyrrell, who talked about the absolute need for brand ‘management’. It’s going to be so easy for so many organisations to go the way of the Brazilian players and not want to be part of the collective whole.

John Sorrell and John Kampfner’s new Creative Industries Federation may not be the whole answer – there is still a much needed drive to make more of our cultural heritage more readily accessible to everyone in society for example – but for the first time it will give our creative and cultural sector a unifying voice and a single access point for governments in the UK and abroad and perhaps be the starting point for that management of the cultural brand that is the UK.

So let’s not be a Brazil and let one of our largest national assets slip through our fingers.

John Mathers is Chief Executive Officer of the Design Council.
www.designcouncil.org.uk