Brand Failures

294 Brand failures
One argument was that as Cream expanded it gradually lost its cool factor.
In 1992, the year James Barton and Darren Hughes set up the club, Cream
was immediately viewed as a welcome antidote to the business-minded
approach of the London club, Ministry of Sound.
Word of mouth helped to fuel its early growth, along with celebratory
pieces in dance music magazines such as Mixmag which named Cream its
‘club of the year’ in 1994. Around this time Cream decided to expand its
operation, moving the club to a larger venue and launching nights in Ibiza.
By the middle of the decade, Cream was everywhere. Clubbers were sporting
tattoos of the distinctive Cream logo (which itself had won awards for its
‘propeller-style’ design), DJs from around the world were lining up to play
in the main room, and one Liverpool couple even decided to get married at
a Cream event. In 1996, Cream was cited as the third main reason people
applied to Liverpool University in a poll conducted by the university. Over
60,000 people rushed out to buy the ‘Cream Live’ CD in the first week of
release.
Then, in 1998, the first signs of trouble started to appear. Darren Hughes
left the company to set up his own super club, Home, in London’s Leicester
Square. The year after the first ‘Creamfields’ festival, Hughes started his own
‘Homelands’ event. The club’s former director was now the competition.
Another problem was the cost of putting on Cream events at the Liverpool
club. Ironically, for a club which helped to establish the cult of the ‘superstar
DJ’, the fees charged by big names such as Fatboy Slim, Sasha, Paul Oakenfold,
the Chemical Brothers and Carl Cox were becoming the major weekly
cost. However, without paying for the DJs, Cream would have risked losing
its market altogether. ‘It’s the performers who make the real money, though
they used to draw in enough custom to make it worth the club’s while,’ says
Mixmag editor Viv Craske. ‘Big clubs still rely on the same old DJs, despite
no longer drawing the crowds.’ With big names typically charging four or
five figure sums for two hours’ work, the costs could clearly be crippling for
a club such as Cream which always advertised their events on the strength of
their DJ line-ups.
Another factor, and one beyond Cream’s immediate control, was the fact
that its original customer was now getting too old to be on the dance floor
at three in the morning every Saturday night. For many 18-year-olds, the idea
of ‘super clubs’ and ‘superstar DJs’ was starting to be wholly unattractive. As
Jacques Peretti wrote in a July 2002 article in the Guardian, this generational
shift took place at the end of the 1990s: