Brand Failures

Tired brands 295
These teenagers were more interested in rebelling against their siblings
and joining a band. Instead of going to clubs, it became cool to follow
American nu-metal bands such as Slipknot and Papa Roach – bands
that preach hate and pain in ludicrous gothic garb, not peace and love,
as ageing house DJs might. [. . .] Even to their natural constituency,
super clubs epitomised everything that had gone wrong with club
culture [. . .] The cutting edge of this culture now is not Cream or
Ministry of Sound, but tiny venues with a word-of-mouth following.
As Cream became ever-more commercial, it was seen to lose its point. What
did it have to offer which couldn’t be provided by mass-market pub, club and
restaurant corporations such as Luminar and First Leisure (which began to
borrow the super clubs’ music policy for their own venues but without having
to fork out for the high profile DJ) Cream, and the other super clubs, had
suddenly seemed to lose their sense of creativity and personality. (It is perhaps
not a coincidence that in 2002, the year Cream shut its Liverpool club, the
biggest nightclub event in the UK was School Disco – which completely
rejected the dance music ethos in favour of unpretentious good fun, with
clubbers dressing in school uniforms and dancing to Duran Duran and
Dexy’s Midnight Runners).
Some people have also questioned the competence of Cream’s management
team. The owners certainly had no formal training, as with most people
in the clubbing industry. As Oxford graduate, former merchant banker,
chairman and co-founder of Ministry of Sound, James Palumbo, once put
it: ‘The world of nightclubs is so populated by incompetent people that you
only have to be a bit better to make a success of it.’
This accusation is at least partly unfair though. In many ways Cream has
been too ‘business-like’, at least ostentatiously. In an interview with the
Liverpool Echo, James Barton was asked about the decision to close the club.
‘It is something which is unfortunate but I think we have to make these sorts
of decisions,’ he said. ‘At the end of the day we are businessmen.’ Of course,
they are businessmen, but that doesn’t mean they have to advertise the fact.
Equally, they were perhaps unwise to make such a big deal out of their tenth
anniversary.
Cream is, or at least should be, a youth brand. As such it needs to be about
the here and now, not the past. As one anonymous commentator remarked
on the Internet, ‘when was the last time you watched other youth brands like
Nike or Nintendo celebrate their birthdays.’ Certainly, when your core