Well, that’s me back in the Update chair after a few weeks away, and as I put 20p in the mental meter and my gears grind slowly back into life, I see that quite a lot has changed since I fled the country at the start of July. Not all of it good. I’ll be honest, I had a bunch of smartalecky stuff planned, but given a) the events of the last couple of days and b) the fact most of you are now on holiday, I might go for a sort of timeline-cleanse for those of you still at the desk. Maybe I’ll manage to crowbar it round to some industry stuff halfway through. You never know.

Before I get into it all, readers of Jenette’s extremely high quality Update last week will know already that the lang cat’s PR and comms practice won a YUGE award recently – Agency of the Year at Headlinemoney. We were up against some proper heavyweight opposition and to have got the nod was one of the best worky things to happen in my nearly 14 years of running the lang cat. If you visit Amboise any time soon you may well hear locals using the phrase “ya f—ing dancer” so as to indicate approval and I’m afraid I may have to take the blame for that.

The best thing about winning HM Agency of the Year is that it was voted for by journalists, and not the sort of ‘buy one get one’ kind of award do of which we are all rightly contemptuous (actually, I think that kind of award ceremony is pretty much dead in our little corner of the industry). The reason folk voted for us was that we’re subject matter experts as well as good PRs and good content creators; one of the benefits of having an in-house consulting, regulatory affairs and insight business I suppose (the other being getting to approve Mike Barrett’s cricket expenses). And that’s hugely gratifying because it’s exactly what we set out to build all that time ago. I’m massively proud of the PR and comms team and I don’t tell them that enough.

So let’s talk about expertise because I think it’s got at least some tangential relevance to our lives. And let’s make it about sport, not finance, because it’s Olympics time.

When young Govey said “we have had enough of experts” most of us didn’t listen because not valuing expertise is, to put it politely, stoopid. I for one would have liked to see the Govester’s doubtless burgeoning portfolio placed in the hands of a well-meaning amateur who is, like, totally immune to the MSM and not one of the sheeple, you know? and see how he got on. A chance missed.

But someone must have been listening, because over at the discreet lockup that is Nike HQ, a strategy of ignoring the experts in order to grow the business faster and pump that share price has been in place for the last few years.

Broadly speaking what’s happened is that Nike has decided to stop focusing on third-party retailers and to stop getting in deep with individual sports. No need for all that pettifogging expertise! The brand will carry it in a direct-to-customer channel, and we’ll control distribution and cut out a bunch of middlemen and make lots of cash into the bargain.

This has worked brilliantly – so brilliantly in fact that Nike has wiped about $30bn off its valuation, seen its share price PLUNGE (this being the opposite of SOAR which are the only things share prices can do) by 59% and had to rehire their old North American strategy guy to try and rebuild. You can get a good summary here and this post is long but worth a read.

The long and the short of it – moving away from really understanding the individual sports means Nike loses relevance to the athletes that are their biggest brand asset. Getting things right technically for those guys leads to all sorts of good things. And cutting out or deprioritising third-party retailers just means other, younger businesses (such as Hoka) can get shelf space.

So we’ve got a total lack of market understanding shown by Nike and its main consultants – you just knew it would be McKinsey – and a hubristic belief that the brand is stronger than the market.

So! I guess you can decide for yourselves whether there’s any lessons to be learned here. I can think of a few – such as the danger of assuming that commoditisation means you can reshape a market, or that your brand is so strong you can misbehave right over the heads of the people and businesses that got you there in the first place. But the real mis-step to me is twofold – first, failing to recognise the awesome power of subject matter expertise, whether technical or retail. And second, to assume that it’s easy to change public buying behaviour. I’ve got a suspicion that in our sector many, many affluent clients desperately want to hear from experts (although preferably in language they can understand) and have no desire to go it alone, which is why the robos all have such a tough time.

And that’s enough of that. Back to whatever you were doing, and your music choice just has to be Gojira, surely the winners of the entire opening ceremony in Paris. Never mind the 4-hour run time, this three minutes is just gloriously crazy and brilliantly heavy and completely French. Ah! Ça ira!

I won’t see you next week as I’m off to a metal festival in Helsinki. It’s called – and I’m not lying – Hellsinki and I think nothing can top that.