KEY POINTS:
Those bleeding All Blacks, they're everywhere - dripping black blood on the telly, pushing clothing, computer games, stress balls, waterblasters, carseat covers, duvets, even curtains. If All Black rugby fanaticism isn't in New Zealanders' DNA, the conditioning begins at birth: the infant gift set at the allblacks.com online store includes a beanie, T-shirt, shorts and booties for newborns. Choose any colour as long as it's black, with the All Blacks silver fern logo attached.
As a sporting brand, it is one of the world's most recognised, and marketing has taken it beyond sport to symbolise a country. It is all-important to a professional sport which is a significant player in the New Zealand economy; the 2011 Rugby World Cup is expected to add $240 million to Auckland regional GDP alone.
Intrinsic to the brand's values - strength, courage, comradeship and determination - is the idea that the All Blacks are simply the best. And between World Cups, they invariably are - winning TriNations series and Bledisloe Cups, and ritually flogging northern hemisphere visitors. So does our perennial failure to win the big one, to be the official world champions, matter to more than just obsessive fans (admittedly, there are a few)?
Off the field, the All Blacks logo was everywhere in the run-up to this year's campaign as the New Zealand Rugby Union threw everything into winning the slippery trophy. Some claim $50 million was invested, the union says the net cost was $3 million - which accounts for the sponsors' saturation advertising and the endless product endorsements by hot properties Dan Carter and the kid from Kurow, Richie McCaw.
But the bigger the hype, the bigger the fall. When one of the most recognisable and prestigious sporting brands in the world gets knocked out early, becomes the butt of jokes and is associated with "choking", what happens to the brand?
Some marketing experts say no worries, history has shown it will bounce back in no time, but others claim the repeated failure to claim the World Cup has finally punctured the All Blacks brand's credibility.
Jonathan Dodd, a market researcher and commentator from Research Solutions in Auckland, remembers saying after the 2003 defeat: "You can lose a couple of times - but you can't keep losing."
After the latest failure he doesn't expect cancellations of sponsorships, but it could weaken future negotiations. With the Cup in the cabinet, the union would have been able to charge even more for sponsorship rights, says Dodd. "It's what they could have got to which is the real loss.
"It goes without saying you can't keep on damaging what your brand stands for repeatedly and expect to have the same brand you had before."
And that is a significant worry for our national game and the NZRU - a $150 million a year business whose role is to fund and grow the sport. With the ability to raise revenue past saturation point at domestic level, the union is increasingly looking to boost its income overseas. Its main weapon is the All Blacks brand - and there are pressing reasons to expand the revenue base.
After a record $23.7 million profit in 2005, the year the Lions toured, it ran a $4.8 million loss last year and is projected to lose $4.4 million this year. The union expects to lose $30 million hosting the next World Cup in 2011. Spectator interest in domestic competitions was falling and television ratings were down even before the decision to pull the All Blacks from the first half of this year's Super 14. Ticket prices for internationals are already beyond the reach of grassroots family supporters. Provincial unions are crying for help from club level up - the heartland game has been haemorrhaging players, coaches and administrators.
OVERSEAS, professional rugby is a second-tier game struggling to go global - and challenges lie ahead. While the NZRU insists only home-based players are eligible for the All Blacks, there is the spectre of our top players leaving our salary-capped competitions to play for vast sums in Europe. Expanding club competitions are squeezing the test match calendar.
The union is desperate to reduce its dependence on broadcast rights and expand sponsorship deals - the All Blacks are the clincher. The brand is among the top five international sporting brands outside the United States - up there with European soccer giants Manchester United, Real Madrid and Inter Milan.
The brand is the "quintessence" of the country's sporting achievements, says Auckland brand strategist Brian Richards.
"It's about the local lads who come from the farms of New Zealand and the small communities through the years. It's about 100 years of a procession of wonderful rugby players who have had a success rate of 72 per cent over all the games ever played."
That kind of stellar record is huge for any sporting code but what also makes the All Blacks different is that very few, if any, nations have such a national icon in a single sporting team. When Richards' company used focus groups around the world to research for Expo a few years ago, it found New Zealand had only three icons of any significance - sheep, green and the All Blacks.
"Of all the sporting teams in the world, I would say that as an icon and as a brand we would probably have world leadership."
But over-exposure could kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. With the expanded TriNations, home series and end-of-year tours, the All Blacks are playing up to 15 tests a year. Throw in the expanded Super 14 and inter-provincial competitions, it's no wonder fans are crying enough.
In Britain, with the All Blacks visiting on an almost annual basis, there are fears the cachet of an All Blacks test is wearing thin.
Never mind, there are new markets to explore. In France, sales of the All Black jersey are second only to the national soccer team's. Nearby Spain, Portugal and Italy are seen as having considerable potential - the union has a global sponsorship deal with Iveco, an Italian vehicle manufacturer which believes the All Blacks are a potent brand in Europe.
Plans to stage an All Blacks vs Australia test match in Hong Kong late next year are all about boosting the brand in Asia, a la Manchester United. It's worth remembering that not winning the top prize (the European Cup) too frequently hasn't hurt the world's richest soccer club, while in America legendary brands such as the Boston Celtics customarily don't win.
But the All Blacks' primary sponsor adidas acknowledges that not winning this year's event is a blow. General manager Greg Bramwell says the quarter final loss removed the "cream on top" from an otherwise "extremely positive" relationship. Bramwell says adidas wants to work with the NZRU to crack other markets including China, India and America.
NZRU chief executive Chris Moller agrees the failure to win the Cup means lost opportunities, such as new sponsorship deals and yet more matches for the All Blacks. "If you're the world champions people are prepared to pay more euros or pounds or whatever the currency is," he told the Weekend Herald from Paris.
The United States - a credible performer in this World Cup - is a definite goal. "Rugby doesn't need to be a huge force in America to be quite a significant force on the world stage."
Hence the licence given to coach Graham Henry to withhold players from the Super 14 and the player rotation at test level.
Critics such as former CEO David Moffett claim it's an eggs in one basket approach - the importance placed on the World Cup is unhealthy. "They spent upwards of $9 million when the rest of the provinces are crying poor," he told Radio Sport after the loss. The decision to devalue the Super 14 had harmed the franchises.
Moffett maintains that less is more. "We are flogging the All Blacks brand right around the world. We should be reducing the number of matches the All Blacks play and then saying to countries that want to see the All Blacks 'now you will pay more to see them play in your country'."
There's also an argument that before pushing the brand in new markets, first get the product right. At least part of rugby's problem is its arcane rules which make so many games an unattractive arm wrestle dominated by, ahem, referees.
Others suggest replacing the Super 14 with a transtasman provincial competition and boosting the grassroots to ensure All Blacks grow up better equipped to handle sudden-death games.
"What this World Cup may have thrown up is the need to get back to some old fashioned ethics and the virtues of players coming through [from the grassroots]," says North Otago chief executive Colin Jackson. Instead of plucking young talent into academies, Jackson says there's a case for leaving them with provincial unions before they progress to Super 14.
"Is the end result a well-rounded rugby player or is it a rugby player with headphones on, an agent in one ear and a mobile phone on the other?
"The best academy in rugby and life is to play in small provincial unions and grow up as a person and as a rugby player."
But Jackson accepts the NZRU's focus on the All Blacks as an international brand. "You need money to run an operation - they are running a business. I just think that to produce the winning team at the very top we have to rethink that process.
"If you strangle the life out of rugby in the smaller areas the next Richie McCaw won't be playing rugby, he'll play soccer. When a kid grows up in Kurow, he has to see a pathway."
Moller says broadening the focus is something for the forthcoming campaign review to contemplate.
"That said, all our stakeholders have told us that trying to win the Rugby World Cup is almost the single most important thing we need to do. If that's the view of your stakeholders and shareholders it's entirely appropriate to pursue that goal with as much effort as we tried to do on this occasion."
Moller's not saying so but the "lost opportunities" must add to the challenges at grassroots level in New Zealand. And if they're not addressed, the All Blacks may suffer in the long-term.
So much for the commercial threats to the brand, what about the fans? Like it or not, our national rugby team is integrally and uniquely linked to our sense of self and identity and, for a minority, happiness - even if the fans recoil at the concept of the All Blacks as a brand.
Come 2011, 24 years will have passed since the All Blacks won the World Cup, says Dodd.
"That's a whole generation of people growing up having never experienced a win, so all those people in their teens, 20s and 30s - a lot of them will not be able to remember the last time we ever won which makes all the claims in the positioning of the All Blacks ring hollow."
The pain of our worst World Cup performance is exacerbated by the unprecedented hype which surrounded the campaign.
"The hype's beyond anything this country has ever seen which, while understandable because the rugby union and associated sponsors have to get as much from their marketing dollar as they can, does demonstrate the one-sided nature of New Zealanders' perception of sport and what New Zealand is on the world stage.
"It's not healthy to have your patriotism, your satisfaction with life, your wellbeing and your happiness hinge upon uncontrollable things like this which are hyped beyond sensible levels."
A backlash against the hype could spell short-term damage for merchandise sales or affect crowd attendances and viewership for next year's Super 14 and early All Blacks tests against Ireland and England.
Dodd says whether the brand stays damaged longer-term will depend on the rugby union's marketing strategy.
"They can't keep on doing it the way they did so they have to learn to adapt and draw on history, on pride and mateship and all those enduring things that the tiniest little grassroots divisions still have, about camaraderie and doing your best and all that type of thing."
Dodd says an interesting difference compared to previous failures has been the rapid distribution of All Black jokes - which shows how angry, betrayed and frustrated people are. People don't make fun of a brand they believe in.
SO WHO is at fault for all this anguish - the players, the marketers, the rugby union, the fans or all of the above? It's the All Blacks winning ratio and aura which attracts sponsors keen to be cast in the same light. A cash-needy rugby union can be excused for going along for the ride. In cashing-in on the team's illustrious heritage and "core values", the marketing deliberately raises fans' expectations.
But long before professionalism and marketers came along, the All Blacks occupied a position like gods in New Zealand society. Boys grew up in the 1960s on tales of the 1905 All Blacks (cheated, of course, out of victory over the Welsh and completion of the first grand slam) while the 1956 series win over South Africa was like a rite of passage to nationhood.
The weekly Inky Newsletter, a rugby commentary emailed to subscribers, had this to say after Cardiff: "We do it to them. Our reliance on them for a vicarious sense of worth is too big a burden. We placed them on this pedestal (for pretty sound reasons considering they were winning every trophy in sight), and by sheer weight of steadily coagulating national pressure we almost forced Henry to love his boys.
"The only cure will come from cultivating the correct attitude to winning and losing. Even if we think we've finally learned this lesson we will probably still do it to them again in 2011."
But if you think the reaction to the World Cup loss is verging on the hysterical, go to a rugby match in Argentina, says Professor Steve Jackson of the Rugby Research Group (yes, there is one) at Otago University.
"If you think [fans] are mad here, that will put it into perspective. Not only have they got wire-mesh fencing for the totally crazy fans, they've got trapdoors in the field for the referees to escape."
