I'm Such An Icehole!

As a consultant, I am of course enamored of performing extensive research before beginning any project.

But I'm also a fan of listening to your gut. By that I mean intuition.

And my gut tells me that there's a fantastic viral branding opportunity in iceholery.

For those who don't get it, "iceholes" was the name American comedian Stephen Colbert applied to Canadians during his rant about how the team he was sponsoring for the Olympics wasn't getting enough practice time on the ice.

Typically we all reacted to the complaint itself, some with umbrage, some with humor. Then today came the news of a new beer from local microbrewery R&B Brewing Co, called "Iceholes Celebration Lager".

Now, I don't particularly like shilling for beer, but some clever person over at R&B is on to something there. Iceholery can be iconic, kind of harkening back to the popular I Am Canadian rant by "Joe" of a few years ago.

(Anyone else find it  appropriate that the best Canadian cultural icons seem to involve beer? Maybe it's one of the definitions of themselves that Canadians are perpetually seeking.)

Underground and viral iconography is probably the most effective cultural self-definition because it's real. And it's even better if it's slightly self-deprecating and more than a touch rebellious. Think the Aussies and their "throw another shrimp on the barbie" self-definition. Or even the oh so proper Brits with their adoption of the term "Limey" (and sometimes other ruder ones) for themselves. Heck, even here in Canada we adopted the once-pejorative and now tired Canuck -- also coined by Americans -- as our own.

So, I think Icehole has legs. It's our way of laughing at ourselves, of telling the world that we don't take ourselves too seriously. That we're not all like Stephen Harper.

BTW, this doesn't have to involve ice fishing, even though that's what it referred to originally. It works for everyone, even if the nearest you've ever come to ice-fishing is fishing it out of a glass.

To work, of course, this has to go viral. So I'm calling on everybody in Vancouver to get their creative juices flowing and make it so.

All you creative shops in Gastown, use your brainstorming over beer sessions to dream up some cool logos and slogans. Downtown professionals: Display an icehole badge on your suit and

And all you pub crawlers and partiers, proudly call yourself Iceholes. Maybe you can even come up with some secret hand signal (thumb and forefinger forming a hole, perhaps?).

Twitter fans, tweet that you belong to icehole nation. (Would that make you a twicehole?)

With slogans and hand signals, we'll flood the streets during the Olympics. It can be our secret signal among the visiting crowds, a quiet notice that we're local and not really caught up in all this artificial hoopla. (Best of all, it won't have the ubiquitous logo.)

Then, once we've conquered BC, we'll spread iceholery to stuffy Toronto. Who knows, maybe they'll stop trying to pretend they're New York and realize they're just as big iceholes as the rest of us .

Say it loud and say it proud. I'm an icehole.