The Honest Persuader

Darling's revenge

2011-09-05T12:58:00.000-07:00

They say you should quit while you’re ahead. Though I’ll possibly disappoint the many who’ve kindly been tuning into The Honest Persuader of late, I’m afraid a seasonal break is long overdue. There’s only one subject I can end on: the happily departed Gordon Brown. We must all look out for the forthcoming book by Alistair Darling; for, if leaked extracts are to be believed, Mr Brown’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer has not flinched from sticking in the stiletto. You may have thought I was being harsh when I recently compared Mr Brown with Hitler*. There are two plausible reasons why you might. One is the possibility that they were actually two very different personalities. The other is that they were indeed similar, but that the last British prime minister’s familiarity stripped away the aura enjoyed by all tyrants when distant in time and place. Mr Darling’s testimony may help you decide which is right. Three revelations have hit the British headlines thus far. One is Mr Darling’s description of his former boss in the book as “brutal”, “volcanic”, and given over to flagrant political chicanery, employing unpleasant characters like Baroness Vadera to do his dirty work. The second is that Tony Blair considered Mr Brown to be as painful, as he put it, as dental surgery without an anaesthetic – quite something from Mr Blair, who appeared to have an exceptionally high pain-threshold in his years spent cheek by jowl with the mercurial Alastair Campbell. The third is that, like the Third Reich and other tyrannies, Mr Brown’s reign was “chaos” – a state of amateurish confusion perpetuated by the New Labour leader’s adamantine refusal to listen to his increasingly demoralised underlings' advice. When you add Mr Brown’s personality defects to his many other failings, I don't think it's too far-fetched to imagine that, if you’d put him and Hitler (or Stalin, or Mao) in front of an psychologist who knew none of them, the reports on all would have been filed in the same cabinet. It’s pure speculation, of course, but it would have been no surprise to me if, had any of the above had been born in Scotland in 1951, they'd followed the same sort of political course as he did. Conversely, if he’d been born in Austria in 1889, Georgia in 1878, or Hunan in 1893, the historical circumstances might have permitted his political life to follow a rather less turgid trajectory. Obviously I’m not suggesting that Mr Brown would have been destined in another place and age to be a mass murderer: small genetic and environmental differences make for big variations in behaviour. But I suspect that his personality type is to be found in the same section of the encyclopedia as countless other characters one hopes won’t come along during one’s lifetime – characters churned out with tedious regularity by the great genetic dice-tumbler. You’re entitled to your own opinion, but Mr Darling's account reinforces the opinion that Mr Brown is an example of those political thugs who stain every page of history, in every empire, nation or city state, back to the days of the first Mesopotamian civilisation. Though the names change, their ambitions are ever transcribed from the same grim template. Plainly modern democracy is no guard against their accession, and offers scant means of removing them once they’re in. (Think Mubarak, Mugabe, Chavez). And so we have to grin and bear them, as do wildebeest the lions that prey on them. I just wish they would make one small concession: not to rub salt into the wound by invariably claiming that their raw pursuit of power is conducted for the benefit of the people. Now there’s an idea for you to entertain your friends with while I’m enjoying a rest; as they say in America, see you in the fall. *http://honestpersuader.blogspot.com/2011/08/bunker-mentality.html

The dangers of selective memory

2011-09-04T02:25:00.000-07:00

I’ve never owned a Ford, and I’m happy to keep it that way. It’s not that I think their cars are no good: I’ve had no problems driving the occasional Ford hire-car while on holiday. What I don’t like is the sound of their showroom service. Over the years I’ve done a lot of tests on customer reaction to retail experiences, and some Ford salesmen do seem to me to have a peculiar knack of putting shoppers’ backs up. I’ve wondered if it’s what comes of being so big that you feel you don’t have to try so hard. So it gave me a good laugh to read what the President and MD (two titles, but just one man) of Ford India had to say while discussing Corporate Social Responsibility. Although the company doesn’t draw attention to its CSR initiatives, he said, they must have some trickle-down benefit to the business. Now, Mr Boneham (as the two-titles/one-man boss is picturesquely known) may or may not be right about this, though it surely can’t be beyond the wit of Ford Motor Company to do some sums. But it was what he said next that made me chuckle. Doing one’s bit for society is in Ford’s DNA, he claimed, because its founder once said that a company that exists only to make a profit isn’t much of a company. For Mr Boneham to lay claim to the moral high ground from the musings of a man already dead for sixty-odd years, simply because his name’s on the door, is arguably a tad spurious, especially when you honour it with the label ‘DNA’. Furthermore, the argument is a double-edged sword. Henry Ford also declared that great service is the key to embarrassingly large profits, which sounds good to me; but it's unclear how having that in its DNA tallies with the reality that, even before the crash, Ford Motor Company was so short on profits that it had to offer redundancy to its entire US workforce, and later ran up a multi-billion dollar shortfall in its pension fund. What’s worse is that, if the company’s “DNA” consists in everything its founder said, Ford has a problem. I accept that Mr Ford was adept at cutting costs and paying decent wages, so good for him; but this is the same Henry Ford, remember, who offered any colour as long as it’s black, who opined that history is more or less bunk, and who predicted in the ’twenties that people were now too intelligent to have another great war. If Mr Boneham had simply said something like, “Henry Ford occasionally knew what he was talking about, but we seem to forget sometimes which bits are worth remembering”, at least he’d get credit for accuracy.

No credit here

2011-09-03T04:50:00.000-07:00

You may have read my post in June* about Groupon, the coupons outfit that’s been setting records for infringements of the Code of Advertising Practice. Usually the fault appears fairly trivial; but they’ve excelled themselves with one I just heard about. They claimed that you can get orthodontics at a 94% discount, paying about £100 for £1,650 of treatment. So what’s the catch? It turns out that you’re only entitled to the discount if you buy £3,500 of treatment – so you’d actually have to spend nearly two thousand pounds to qualify, a discount of well under a half. It’s like a used car dealer telling you he’s selling a vehicle for a token sum, but then revealing that the offer only applies to the chassis and wheels, and you still have to pay in full for the body and engine. I think such an infraction is not so much trivial as egregious, and it’s no surprise that the Advertising Standards Authority was up in arms. If you’re like me, you probably tire of the endless tales of scams, cons and rip-offs that have followed as the baggage train of globalisation. So here’s some good news to cheer you, which I’m offering you absolutely free of charge and with no strings attached. According to an independent report, Groupon’s web traffic has declined by nearly half in recent months. Once you know that we humans are well kitted out with mental equipment for sniffing out and shunning a wrong ’un, it’s no great surprise. *http://honestpersuader.blogspot.com/2011/06/cut-price-standards.html

Pause for thought

2011-09-02T13:57:00.000-07:00

If you were impressed by the experiments I reported last time, it's possible that you're being a bit premature. Given your brain’s hard-wired preference for trusting any comprehensible statement, you have to remind yourself always to stay sceptical, even when you’re reading The Honest Persuader. These experiments may appear to provide a convincing proof that market research is no infallible compass, yet the way I reported them ought to have suggested questions you need to ask before deciding whether they’re worthy of your attention. For instance, what about statistical validity? The numbers participating in all three exercises were small enough that you ought to be insisting on a much bigger trial before one can assume they’re replicable on the scale of a national election, with all its local variation. Then, just how big was in fact the uplift in actual voting? The truth is that it was much smaller than the increase in numbers saying they would vote, which should make you interrogate any assertion of a correlation between intention and behaviour. And third, of what intrinsic value is this knowledge? My own view is that you should not mention it to anyone you know in marketing (or politics, for that matter) in case they get ideas about using it to their advantage and everyone else’s detriment. So there you have it: academic experimentation that casts doubt on market research, yet simultaneously throws up some of the classic issues needing to be addressed if you want not to be bamboozled. Questions like these are usually to be found lurking just below the surface. I often wonder how many contemporary marketers (or, for that matter, politicians) normally delve that far.

What goes in must come out

2011-08-31T03:47:00.000-07:00

If you’ve never worked in marketing, you may have started wondering while reading The Honest Persuader whether some marketers and admen aren’t quite as smart as they’re made out to be by their dependents in the media. In their defence, I have to say that they’re not especially cussed or stupid. The problem lies above all in a naive belief that humans buy things for reasons, and so need to be given reasons if they’re to buy the ‘right’ brand. This belief is actively cultivated by market research companies – many of which ironically are owned by the ad industry – that feed marketers all manner of stuff about customer needs and wants that fits with the model but not a lot (in my opinion) with the way customers actually buy. Quite apart from this conceptual anomaly, however, you have to remember that the aura of certainty provided by market research is often illusory. For example, the way you frame a question can significantly change the response. A nice example was the work done by a social psychologist at Stanford* who, by changing the wording of a question about voting intentions, was able to raise the stated voting intention from just over half to about 90%. Then, in two follow-ups, he increased actual voting in real elections by the same device. It’s a formal demonstration of something familiar to anyone who’s done clipboard research and become aware that you can elicit different responses just through the inflection of your voice or facial expression. If market research findings are routinely reported as scientifically robust, and most marketers are arts graduates, the on-screen consequences are perhaps predictable. *http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-voter-turnout-simple-word.html

Life made fatuous

2011-08-30T04:57:00.000-07:00

Even Debenham’s, the department store group, is at it. This is a company that dispensed with advertising throughout the recession, but obviously feels there’s enough money going through the tills now to justify a slick TV campaign. I had no real problem with the work they ran in the spring, when they were telling people to “Feel Fabulous”. This was simple hyperbole in most people’s book, I know, but you have to appreciate that ‘fabulous’ is the fashion-world synonym for ‘not all that bad’. For example, you meet someone in togs that you think resemble an explosion in a paint factory, and it’s guaranteed that your fashion-conscious companion will greet them with the words, “Oh, darling! You look fab-ulous!” You have to draw the line somewhere, though, and Debenham’s has just overstepped it. Their new strapline is “Life Made Fabulous”. Now, tell me: is this line pretty vacant, or what? Think about it. The papers are full of war, and terrorism, and unemployment, and sovereign debt, and climate change, and Piers Morgan, but – don’t worry, girls, it’s saying; there’s always shopping to make life fabulous. Not that Debenham’s would see the problem. Clearly they’re given to hyperbole over there: the marketing director said that some of the TV spots he’d bought were “fantastic”. Or should that be “fan-tas-tic”?

Pie in the sky

2011-08-28T13:31:00.000-07:00

British Airways isn’t the only airline hoping to give itself a new persona. Rivals Easy Jet are spending all of £50 million on a pan-European campaign intended to reposition their brand – in other words, to get us to think differently of them than we currently do. Of course, it’s the prerogative of any business owner to try and do so. How much success they’ll have, however, has to depend on whether they can “strike a chord”, as my old creative director used to remind everyone about six times a day. So what might Easy Jet have to say? Currently I guess most of us would perceive its great virtue to be its cheapness. True, there’s a price to pay for that, in that the service and kit are about as rudimentary as rules permit; but it’s a drawback that many of us are prepared to put up with. So what can Easy Jet tell us that will make us more inclined to choose them? Have they cut their prices even further? Are they introducing new routes, or new aircraft? Have they upgraded the quality, so you get better value for money? Have they retrained their staff to be a bit less laconic? Sorry, no; none of that. In fact, the advertising is designed to tell us that the airline “connects people”. No, seriously. Yes, I know it’s scarcely true, and that Easy Jet only connects people with places. I can only argue in their defence that, in delivering hordes of holidaymakers to Ibiza, they probably imagine that, in a way, they sort of connect a good few people with others they’ll soon be having sex with. But I agree it’s a bit tenuous, rather like repositioning a hammer as an aspirational leisure device. I find it frustrating. This marketing stuff ought to be like falling off a log. I’ve flown with Easy Jet before, and will be doing so again. I think what they provide fills a gap very nicely. So, if they want to remind me to select them, or persuade non-users to do the same, why can’t they just say, “Easy Jet. No frills, but we get you there safely, with more cash in your pocket”? Instead, the new advertising bears the slogan, “Where are you going?” You might ask their marketers the same thing.

Up, up and away

2011-08-27T08:54:00.000-07:00

Here’s a story with an ending so sad that you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh. British Airways appears to have a problem with employee morale, and so is launching an ad campaign designed to raise spirits. The idea is to retell the company’s story from its pioneering roots in BOAC onwards, the advertising’s stated aim being “to put a great brand back on the map” – which is undeniably a good place to be when you’re in the travel business but have unaccountably slipped off. Although some who’ve had miserable experiences of BA might scoff, I think it’s no bad thing to try, since retaining good staff is always such a challenge. So what’s the sad bit? It seems that the mastermind of the strategy, head of global marketing Kerris Bright, is already on her way out of the company, after only eighteen months in the job. And what does the future hold for her? Well, she’s going to be Chief Marketing Officer of a Hull-based bathroom fittings company called Ideal Standard. No, I don't know them either; but I trust she’ll be able to put them on the map, too.

Brown shirts and brown trousers

2011-08-26T03:58:00.000-07:00

One other aspect of Ian Kershaw’s book that also intrigues me is his analysis of why the German people put up with the Nazis for so long. He takes a pot-shot at them, suggesting that they were perfectly happy all the time that the bombs were dropping elsewhere. Having learnt their language and lived in Germany for a bit (albeit not during the War), I know for a fact that this isn’t the whole picture. For one thing, Germany has and had such strong religious as well as social-democratic traditions that, even when the Nazi Party secured power in the general election of 1933, more than half the population voted against them. There’s no way all the Nazis’ opponents could have been carted off to death camps, even though grassing up the neighbours (and even one’s own parents) was assiduously encouraged. Mr Kershaw does acknowledge that mass psychology played a big role: a sense of powerlessness gave rise not to a spirit of revolt but to gloomy resignation. I suspect that it was very much like living in Soviet Russia. Closer to home, it probably felt like an extreme version of living in Britain in the darkest days of New Labour: unbearably oppressive if you weren’t one of the Party’s favoured few, but there was little you could do about it, so you’d better keep your mouth shut if you wanted to keep earning a living. It was during New Labour’s second term in particular that the ruling caste began to behave as though the sun would never set on its hegemony. New Labour's systematic politicisation of all state institutions bar the military engendered a palpable fear that contradicting Government newspeak was risky, especially when you had a business to run: if one of its 3,000 new laws didn’t get you, a visit from the tax inspectors would. In 2003, I wrote a satire of the Blair/Brown/Mandelson regime while in Italy, and vividly recall being warned on my return by a friend close to politics that it would be prudent to put a made-up name on it, or better to lock it away in a bottom drawer. For some years there was just a small handful of brave journalists, protected by their proprietors, who were prepared to speak up; and it was only when the Iraq War caused even leftists to take stock that opposition began to grow vocal. As we now know, by then the irreparable damage had been done. But let’s look on the bright side. At least we don’t have 45 years of Russian occupation to look forward to; just 45 years of paying off Gordon Brown’s debts.

Bunker mentality

2011-08-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

The End: Hitler’s Germany 1944-45 is a new book whose subject is a matter that’s puzzled me for decades. As a student of German in a college whose master had written the first great WW2 biography, Hitler: a study in tyranny, I used to wonder how on earth the Führer managed to cling on for so long. Now author Ian Kershaw has gathered a body of evidence shedding light on why the war continued well after it was obviously lost, at a massive cost in lives and suffering and to the enormous detriment of Germany itself. I won’t spoil it by sharing the big ideas – if you’re desperate, you can look up a review or two – but I have to say how struck I was by the eerie parallels between Adolf Hitler and our very own Gordon Brown, especially in their last days in power. Now, I know I’m not the first to make the comparison: a Youtube spoof of Downfall did that rather amusingly, to name just one. But there’s more to suggest that perhaps the resemblance was not just superficial. A provincial from a small nation bent on ruling a much bigger neighbour; an ideologue obsessed with power; a whinger with a deep sense of grievance; an error-prone control-freak; a martinet who reacted with fury to perceived betrayal; a limpet who equated power with existence; a loner who married unusually late in life; and a man said by friends and family to be delightful company, to everyone else’s amazement. All describe Hitler perfectly, and you can decide for yourself how well they capture the last British prime minister. Yes, I know that likening Mr Brown to Herr Hitler, and the New Labour project to the Nazis, would be like comparing a tremor to an earthquake. New Labour’s illicit wars cost not millions of lives, but merely tens or hundreds of thousands. New Labour did not actively ban free speech, but merely criminalised speaking against the Party’s fellow travellers. New Labour did not outlaw elections, but merely made them almost unloseable. New Labour did not murder its political opponents (as far as we know), but merely made life very difficult for them. New Labour officials did not steal a fortune in art treasures, but merely fiddled their expenses. New Labour did not smash its own nation, but merely its economy. New Labour did not cause millions of its own citizens to be killed or raped, but merely rendered unemployable. New Labour did not bring its people to be hated around the world, but merely despised. Nevertheless, it’s a difference of degree rather than kind. Interestingly, both parties – ‘national’ socialists on the one hand, ‘democratic’ socialists on the other – came to power democratically, and finally imploded after a dozen years; but it’s the personality type of their respective leaders that intrigues me. It looks to me as though, apart from a Charlie Chaplin moustache, all that Gordon Brown lacked that Adolf Hitler possessed was charisma: a quality that had to be provided by his grinning glove-puppet, Tony Blair. But it’s becoming clear whose fingerprints are on the smoking gun. It’s such a shame that Mr Brown never married someone called Eva.

Sunnyside science

2011-08-24T12:52:00.000-07:00

One contribution to the study of how genes and experience interact to make us what we are is Professor David Barker’s theory concerning the impact of birth weight on future pathology. It was the subject of a Horizon documentary this week, called Nine Months That Made You. Knowing how touchy the BBC normally is about genes and heritability, I was looking forward to hearing the evidence for and against the theory, and a better understanding of the relative contribution made by the different factors. What I saw instead was an unqualified endorsement of his thinking, plus other material from around the globe in support of the belief that what happens to you before you are born is decisive - the implication being that a lot of health problems could be solved if only the welfare state would provide well enough for pregnant mothers. Now, I would never dispute the principle that nutrition during pregnancy (and up to the age of two) is immensely important in brain and body development; but I’d have hoped for something less like a glowing report and more like cool analysis from a flagship BBC science series. I first smelt a rat when, after discussing the famous case of Dutch babies conceived during the wartime famine, the narrative ran, “Biologist Tessa Roseboom saw an opportunity to find out if our experience in the womb was as important as our genes”. Well, that’s what it should have been, anyway. What it actually said was, “Biologist Tessa Roseboom saw an opportunity to find out if our experience in the womb was every bit as important as our genes”. This sounded rather more like advertising copy than science documentary. Mind you, the production team was again the BBC’s distaff crew (eight members, all female), a fact that is hard to justify on any scientific grounds when you consider that – as I read only this weekend – women are more than a third as likely again to believe in the supernatural compared with men. You get the sense that western science is devolving into two disciplines: hard science based on hypothesis, experiment and peer review; and soft science that turns its nose up at the nasty laws of nature in favour of sciency stuff giving hope that the state can do something to make life less horrid. I’ve no doubt that the work of Professors Barker and Roseboom is conducted with integrity and rigour, but this kind of uncritical puff hardly does them any favours.

Stating the unobvious

2011-08-23T08:34:00.000-07:00

Professor Ian Morris is a talented man: having annoyed me with his ignorance of how history unfolds, he managed to annoy me again by making this statement: “Human beings are pretty much the same wherever you find them in the world. The genetic differences are very small. The human beings are pretty much all the same. The basic motivations are pretty much same”. To be fair, we should acknowledge that he earns his living in academia, where you have to spout the PC catechism if you don’t want ‘liberals’ (i.e. illiberals) smashing your windows on the campus. On the other hand, he could always keep his mouth shut; and, tragically, it’s possible that he actually believes this claptrap. What matters here is what I call the Observer Fallacy, named after The Guardian’s sister newspaper. When Craig Venter announced ten years ago that there are fewer active genes in the human genome than had been expected, the paper ran a headline reading, “Revealed: the secret of human behaviour. Environment, not genes, key to our acts”. It was one of those landmark moments that made me realise that modern leftism is much more about quasi-religious belief than science. As Matt Ridley’s book Nature via Nurture graphically demonstrated, the simple number of genes has little to do with anything; it’s what they each do in concert, and for how long, that makes the difference between a lamb and a gorilla, or indeed between Mother Theresa and Gordon Brown. The big lesson of genetic studies in the intervening decade is that heritability is fundamental to the way we end up; but the story’s even worse for all who continue to believe we are merely blank slates written upon by our experiences. In reality, experience modulates the effect of genes, making for a very broad palette of possibilities when it comes to human development. But the interplay between genes and environment doesn’t just create significant differences between individuals. Because of the reinforcing effect of global factors like inadequate nutrition, heritable susceptibility to pathogens, political powerlessness, etc, minor initial differences between groups can turn into large-scale determinants of differential behaviour in short historical order. Think, for example, of the highly organised and physically vigorous population that built the extraordinary statues of Easter Island, and contrast them with their physically and mentally stunted descendants who greeted the first European visitors just centuries after they’d lopped down the last trees and consumed the last fish and fowl. The evidence today is that genetic diversity among humans is accelerating – a fact of life that is celebrated by geneticists because it offers the hope that at least some of us will survive a global catastrophe. But one shouldn’t need a geneticist’s knowledge to appreciate this. Is it really plausible that ancient Egyptians had pretty much the same basic motivations as modern-day Egyptians, let alone as modern-day Chinese - or even ancient Chinese? By motivations, I’m talking about more than the nearly ubiquitous desires for sex, money and power. I mean the sets of dispositions, attitudes, and behaviours that form the engine of success as societies, thus becoming the distinguishing characteristic of large groups of people. How these cultures form (for want of a better word) is itself largely a matter of evolutionary and ecological chance; yet their reality is as tangible as the physical features of any species. (Think peace-loving Tibetans, and contrast them with the epoch-making Mongol hordes). If Professor Morris really thinks that the actual and likely impact on world history of the Hutu is “pretty much the same” as that of modern Belgians or Mexicans or Jews, I’d say it’s high time he stopped reading The Observer.

It ain't what you do, it's where you do it...?

2011-08-22T03:29:00.000-07:00

What got my goat on Wednesday was Professor Morris’s statement that, “History has not been driven by great men or great women, not been driven by religion or politics, not even driven by accidents. The forces of geography have been the motor that drives history along”. This is not an original idea of his. Jared Diamond most famously publicised the notion that the world’s geography lends itself much better to east-west movements of peoples, armies and trades than north-south ones in his book Guns, germs and steel. Yet he was not the first, either: years before, Prof Morris’s Stanford colleague Luca Cavalli-Sforza had made the same point. The importance of geography is fairly obvious even without knowing the details: you’re more likely to become a sea-going power if you live on an island rather than in the jungle. But, as the professor’s big Harvard rival Niall Ferguson would argue, any explanation of all history on the basis of that one variable alone sweeps too much else under the carpet. For one thing, ignoring the all-importance of the vicissitudes of fate betrays an ignorance of quantum physics, as well as of the way that events unfold entirely differently in consequence of even the tiniest changes – this being the basis of the branch of mathematics called chaos theory. To cite a couple of real-world examples: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 happened only because of the most absurd collection of chance events, yet had monstrous (and wholly avoidable) ramifications that went so far as catalysing the decline of western civilisation; and John F Kennedy’s speechwriter once told of being conscious, whilst writing a crucial missive to the Soviet president at the nadir of the Cuban missile crisis, that, if he got even a single word wrong, it could mean the literal end of our species. I expect you’ll find that Professor Morris’s conviction about geography is rooted in the sort of ideology that still reigned in academia when he was an undergraduate. It was Hegel, two centuries ago, who proposed that history is all about great invisible forces colliding to create big historical outcomes – an idea in response to which Marx proposed dialectical materialism, according to which history must necessarily unfold in line with some universal socio-economic law of nature. Subsequent history proved it to be largely bunkum; but it’s left the academic Left with a vacuum to fill if they’re to continue to maintain that humans are the same everywhere, and it’s only big historical forces majeures that create difference. More of that next time.

Gone west

2011-08-21T12:19:00.000-07:00

Stanford professor Ian Morris was in London this week talking about the paperback version of his book Why the West rules – for now. Although very long, it’s a readable potted history of the world – or at least its most significant regions – since the end of the last ice age. What historians fail to learn from history, however, is the danger of drawing over-arching inferences from history about future history. Professor Morris’s whole book is such a failure. This may not be his fault. His professed aim was to quantify ‘social development’ (actually a composite of four factors that purportedly evidence the advancement of societies at any particular time) as a contribution to understanding how history unfolded. Here we meet the first stumbling block. Unless you challenge his four factors, you’re liable (because of the availability error) to treat them as gospel. Aside from the fact that there may be other factors that could do the job better but are simply harder to measure, I think there’s a case to be made against all four. For example, the creation of large cities is construable in the modern era as merely a reflection of population growth, which itself is already less about ‘social development’ than discord and inequality, and ultimately will spell the collapse of civilisations. I should cut him some slack: the professor did acknowledge that his suppositions were open to dispute. All would have been well if he’d presented his data and left it at that. So what went wrong? I suspect it was the fault of some marketing-minded publisher who told him that he needed a good u.s.p., and the imminent decline of the West would make for a snappy and politically fashionable book title. Hence the silly graph that shows China overtaking the West in about a hundred years' time – something as silly as inferring from post-War growth that, by now, we’d all be travelling around in gold-plated skymobiles. That’s not to say that China’s resurgence relative to the West won’t go on and on; just that it’s baloney to give the idea an appearance of ‘scientific’ probability when, in truth, there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip – let alone twixt tea-plantation and lip. More tomorrow.

Cheese and chalk

2011-08-19T04:49:00.000-07:00

Ever heard of Mr Strings? Nor had I. It’s actually an advertising property created to support a brand called Cheestrings, owned by Kerry Foods. According to Phil Chapman, the company’s chief marketing officer (sic), the character is “hugely popular with mums” – so you can’t knock it without evidence to the contrary. I faced comparable challenges as an adman myself: where you’re trying to appeal to mothers as the youthful end-user's gatekeeper. To my mind, an amiable character called Mr Strings to advertise Cheestrings doesn’t sound half as daft as some solutions I can recall. All you need to do, I’d have thought, is show Mr Strings getting up to silly capers that capture the essence of eating cheesy, stringy stuff, and customers will love you for it when they discover you’re not making it up. At first, Mr Chapman seemed to be agreeing. “We think it works really well both to capture the attention of mums...” he began promisingly. Sadly, that’s where it all went wrong. “...and drive home the message about calcium”, he continued. Calcium? What the heck has calcium got to do with it? The clue is in the headline: “Cheestrings to push health credentials”. Plainly the company is in thrall to the 1950s notion that an advert is not worth its salt unless it offers an explicit reason to buy. Never mind that purchasers seldom ponder benefits, unless to justify previous purchases. Never mind that overt selling is more likely to annoy than to interest. Never mind that ‘health credentials’ based on a claim about calcium content sound to me distinctly shifty. What this is all about is worshipping at the altar of the defunct deity of the Unique Selling Proposition. It's in such rituals that the perception of marketing expertise is grounded. Despite an avalanche of evidence to the contrary, the world is still submerged in this tosh. Just this week, I heard a representative of some minor university (the sort that used to be called ‘redbrick’ until the term was rejected as elitist) explaining on the radio that the place had scored third after Oxford and Cambridge on student satisfaction – this being, the spokesperson expertly announced, its “u.s.p.” Even Jonathan Swift couldn’t make it up. Just as there must be a hundred better reasons for choosing a place to be educated, I can think of two dozen better reasons for buying something for my kids to eat; and, in the unlikely event that they weren’t getting enough calcium, I wouldn’t be looking for the solution on the packaged food aisle in Asda.

More haste, less speed

2011-08-18T05:01:00.000-07:00

The Monty Python team once brought out a book featuring a spoof ad for the imaginary Welsh martial art of Llap-Goch. It contained the claim that mastering Llap-Goch would let you “go to bed with up to any ludicrous number of girls”, clarifying in a footnote that “the phrase ‘up to’ clearly includes the number ‘nought’”. I’m reminded of it by the furore over broadband speeds, which have been the subject of notoriously inflated claims by providers in their publicity, leading to considerable agitation at the Advertising Standards Authority. What it all boils down to is the industry use of ‘up to’ claims that are true in a literal sense but can still only be construed as misleading because the speed cited is seldom achievable in practice. The ASA decided to clamp down on the practice earlier this year, which is why it was unfortunate to learn that it has subsequently got even worse. The satirical magazine Private Eye judged this to be proof of the toothlessness of self-regulation in UK advertising. My take is different. I think it’s evidence of marketing thoughtlessness. The underlying belief of marketers who publish such claims is that (i) we’re in it to make money; (ii) getting the punter’s money depends on out-promising the competition; and so (iii) if everyone’s making dubious claims, we have to go one further. There’s one flaw in the argument: the contrariness of the punter. I’d say that internet users can be divided into two types: the ones to whom broadband speeds mean absolutely nothing, so you’re wasting your time trying to impress them; and the ones who do understand broadband speeds, and so discount ISPs’ claims anyway. So what might impress all of them? Well, what I’d like to see is just one of the ISPs publishing an industry comparison chart showing the inflated speed claims of all the competitors and, alongside, a much slower figure for the advertiser. The point about this figure is that it would be defiantly realistic. What better way of signalling their honest-to-goodness difference, while marking out the competition as people one really doesn’t want to be in bed with?

Ethics for profit

2011-08-17T05:51:00.000-07:00

Since the crash, this whole ethics thing has taken on new life for businesses anxious to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi. A so-called ‘integrated’ marketing agency – meaning a marketing services company happy to do any work it can get its hands on – has launched a new service with which it hopes to ‘educate’ businesses on aligning their commercial operations with their core values; to which one can only say, “Good luck”. To get itself some publicity, the agency resorted to that great PR staple, a survey. I was drawn to it by a headline reading, “Consumers consider brands' ethics when shopping”. I’m always interested in announcements that are counter-intuitive. “Counter-intuitive?” I hear you ask. "Isn’t it the Honest Persuader who’s always banging on about the fact that we tend to choose less on account of product benefits than the trust we implicitly place in the person we’re buying from?" True; but that’s all a far cry from consciously considering someone’s ethical track record – an energy-intensive process that in a supermarket would have our brains fading fast. What the market researchers had actually done is asked people some mother-and-apple-pie questions like whether their purchases are influenced by the treatment they get from a company, its behaviour, its ethics, and its charitable donations. If you said ‘no’ to any of them, you’d sound either bolshy or stupid. So you'd have to say yes, even if in reality you often haven’t an inkling of who even made the product you’re picking up. Yet the idea that anyone pauses to contemplate the ethical standards of even a familiar company like HJ Heinz when picking up a tin of beans – or indeed 99% of the purchases we make on shopping autopilot – strikes me as faintly ludicrous. It’s a neat example of the chasm, well known to science, between what people say about themselves and how they behave in practice. We tend to be very adept at flattering ourselves, but nothing like as good at living up to our rosy self-image. I don’t know whether the market researchers are aware of this; but the integrated agency concerned wasn’t bothered either way, and was happy to sell its own services on the basis that the findings reflect reality. I’d just question whether it’s really ethical.

Ethics redefined

2011-08-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

Since I first ran a piece on the silliness of repositioning, examples have been coming thick and fast. One I particularly enjoyed was the announcement that L’Oreal is to reposition the Body Shop for the second time since it acquired the business just five years ago. In case you’re in a part of the world that’s deprived of that particular retail brand, it was founded in the ‘sixties by the late Anita Roddick, who positioned it aggressively as an alternative ‘ethical’ brand in contradistinction to all the dirty capitalist rotters who otherwise provide for female needs in toiletries and cosmetics. I was always a bit suspicious of the woman, as one should be in respect of anyone who spouts their third-world philanthropic credentials while making a packet, and especially so if they were ennobled by New Labour. Over time the stories started coming out about how the Body Shop wasn’t all it seemed: the concept had rather obviously been copied from a Californian business, and for its first decade the company contributed not a penny to charity. Any doubts about Lady Roddick's modus operandi were finally confirmed when she sold out to L’Oreal – a megalithic corporate conglomerate – for more than a billion dollars. You might think, "I don’t blame her"; but then you should pause to consider that, after noisily campaigning for years against testing on animals, she flogged her business to a company known to do just that. L’Oreal, in case you don’t read the newspapers, has in fact been beset by controversies, from its celebrated succession struggle to chastisement for excessively airbrushing photographs of Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington. When it took over, it was naturally anxious to restate the Body Shop brand’s ‘ethical’ credentials. It seems, however, that this particular treatment didn’t wash: sales of late have remained a bit smelly, necessitating another makeover. So what’s next? Your guess is as good as mine. One thing you won’t be seeing, however, is ads saying, “Look. We admit we’re just another big, ugly soap manufacturer that's in it for the money; but we do make some rather nice products”. It’s a shame, really, because that’s about the only ‘repositioning’ that might actually encourage me to drop in.

No guardian angel

2011-08-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

If you’re into schadenfreude, you’ll have enjoyed the news that The Guardian has lost £38 million in its latest accounts – and this despite saving £27 million in ‘restructuring’. This newspaper has led a charmed life, somehow getting by on a circulation of about a quarter of a million, equivalent to less than one per cent of homes in the UK. That’s also less than a tenth of the circulation of its bête noire, the Daily Mail. It does get a lot of hits on its website, where it earns additional revenue from display advertising; but plainly nothing like enough. If you wonder how this newspaper could have survived so long, there’s a simple answer: it was central to New Labour’s business operation. The whole thing was a breathtaking means of redistributing public funds that seems not to have interested the police in the slightest. The Government created literally millions of bogus jobs in the public sector, The Guardian made a fortune out of publicising them – page after page of them, day after day for thirteen years – and the editorial staff provided a veneer of ideological legitimacy to Blair and Brown’s capers, right up to the time when the writing was on the wall. The paper then abruptly shifted its allegiance to the Lib Dems – the junior partner in the coalition – but could do nothing to stop the Tories turning off the paper’s oxygen. The Guardian 's u.s.p. is of course to provide daily affirmation of the beliefs of the nation’s metropolitan elite. If you want an idea of how out of touch it is: a recent poll showed that more than seven in ten of UK citizens (even including its large immigrant population) think there are already too many immigrants here. Yet The Guardian still high-handedly dismisses anyone who speaks against over-population or multiculturalism as fundamentally fascist. From any other perspective, this sounds like the pot calling the kettle black. If you look at the paper’s coverage of this week’s riots, for example, the impression you’ll get is that they were the fault of everyone but the rioters. Yet, though The Guardian is consistently, forcefully, and meticulously set against the UK’s indigenous people, values and fortunes, it remains bizarrely influential. I’ve read that it’s the second most cited newspaper on Wikipedia – presumably because it’s the preferred reading of academics, who are overwhelmingly and devoutly leftist. Even The Week, a publication that summarises the news for the politically neutral middle classes, gives credence to The Guardian and its sister paper The Observer out of all proportion to their readership, even though their interpretations of events are so one-sided that the only objective description is 'bigoted'. Yes, I know you'll have trouble swallowing that word, because the left (notably these two newspapers) has so unremittingly applied it to all who speak against them; so here’s what you must do. Go and read The Guardian online for an hour. Then consider Wikipedia’s definition of a bigot as “a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from their own or intolerant of people of different political views, ethnicity, race, class, religion, profession, sexuality or gender”; and then decide for yourself whether or not it would be a good thing for humanity if The Guardian went under.

Heirs to blur

2011-08-11T09:24:00.000-07:00

One of the week’s most depressing news items was the announcement that the Prime Minister and his deputy are setting up their own in-house marketing unit. I’ve believed for years that politics is just another type of business, rather like drain clearance or waste collection but less useful to the public. It’s no wonder then that so many politicos have an obsession with getting their business communications right. The trouble is that this marketing unit is not concerned with advancing the case of the governing political parties so much as using marketing to address Downing Street's pet social issues. I suspect that, like most corporate bosses, these two consider themselves to be as expert in the subject of communications as anyone they’ve met at Notting Hill dinner parties: David Cameron used to be a PR man in a TV advertising sales house, while Nick Clegg fancies himself as something of a pamphleteer. (Ever read one of his? Me neither). But tell me this. When you consider how good they are at doing their day job, just how do you think they’ll make out as marketers? I mean: they face three threats – over-population, climate change, and national debt – any one of which could finish off the UK in your lifetime. If you’ve seen signs that any of these has got better in the last fifteen months, I’d be delighted to see it. In fact, I’d be happy to have wind of even the prospect of improvement. So if you’re expecting to see much by way of marketing ingenuity from these two most powerful men in the land, don’t hold your breath. All right: I’m being disingenuous. I appreciate that they’ll actually be bringing in half a dozen agreeable marketing ‘experts’ – civil servants and their mates – to do the grunt work. If nothing else, these experts can tell the Prime Minister how clever he was to find Nudge on an airport bookshelf. They'll also be paid to take the blame when their interventions have either no effect or the reverse of the one intended. (If you think I’m being uncharitable, take note of how Mr Cameron has today blamed the police for the riots, despite running a government bizarrely intent on cutting police numbers). But what earthly good they'll do the populace of this nation, I'm not expert enough to tell you. All I can observe is this. The historian Arnold Toynbee described the final descent of any civilisation as involving three stages: hard times; a period when a talented few fight back; and a final collapse when the political leadership throws in the towel. The last government was given over to sticking decorative wallpaper over the growing cracks; what disasters lie in store if this coalition also turns out to have a talent only for telling stories?

It's a riot

2011-08-10T13:15:00.000-07:00

Every cloud has a silver lining. The one attached to the riots was the look on the faces of the Guardianistas. Just a fortnight ago, after the devout Norwegian mass murderer proved to them beyond doubt that they’d been right all along about opponents of multiculturalism, you couldn’t walk five yards without tripping over their smugness. The riots have changed all that in double time. They’ve tried putting a brave face on it, pointing out that white faces can be seen under some of the hoodies; but you only have to look at the venues of the first outbreaks (Tottenham, Hackney, Brixton) to know what’s going on. The BBC website tried a different tack, asking in its headline whether the riots were a cry of rage – a Rousseauesque populist outburst against ancien régime tyranny; they dropped that angle when it became clear that the mob’s objective was less about regime change than nicking stuff to put on e-Bay. I suspect the metropolitan left’s anxiety attack will have had less to do with this breakdown in civil order than the fact that such unpleasantness isn’t supposed to happen in their brave new world. They’d learned the lesson of the riots in Detroit, Washington, L.A. etc: that black power on the streets is a force that’s not easily reckoned with. Their answer was indoctrination. You present an endless stream of positive black stereotypes on TV, and soon these people will know what sort of behaviour is expected of them. The snag is simply this: the underlying theory is twaddle. It’s based on an amalgam of the behaviourist psychology and Freudian gobbledygook that were fashionable around the time that today’s middle-aged metropolitan elite was at university – the last time they learnt anything. One truth that leaps out from studying today’s neuroscience is that attitudes and behaviour are highly resistant to manipulation. Another is that, when it comes to young males of most backgrounds, reason doesn’t come onto the radar. So the luvvies who thought it would be smart to cast a black man as Friar Tuck are finding that their folk remedies don’t work, big time. The cloud to this silver lining is that they’ll no doubt be wanting to flee from the demotic beast in the next borough and move out here to the sticks. We already have a few: affluent TV performers, PR types and lawyers who spout PC over the claret in their oak-beamed dining rooms. Let’s hope no one posts their new addresses on Twitter when they’re on their next £10,000 trip to Sri Lanka.

Lion beggars

2011-08-08T10:19:00.000-07:00

One of the problems with the ad industry that outsiders seldom appreciate is the private agenda of both the agency and the creative team. Agencies and creatives can be hired because of either the quality of their thinking or their willingness to do as they are bidden. But, marketing directors being all too human, it’s often the agency or art director with the most entertaining showreel that gets the business. Hence the industry’s compulsion to come up with ever more ‘creative’ ideas, which ought to mean inventive but all too often means wacky or even wacko. If you imagine I’m talking about exceptions, you should be aware that I once had a boss whose first reason for rejecting creative work every time was that it was not ‘sexy’ enough for the agency showreel. If you explained to him why it was exactly what the client needed, you knew you were simply talking down your next salary review. 'Creativity’ matters in advertising, not because it’s necassarily better at selling products (though it can be) but because creativity wins awards, and awards create publicity for agencies looking for their next client and creatives looking for their next job. If you want to know how dynamic a force this is in the ad industry, consider Moma Propaganda, a Sao Paulo agency that won a pair of prestigious Cannes lions for its work on Kia Motors. It turns out that the ads they created broke the Cannes rules for the rather turgid reason that they had never actually been published. I remember how, in my account handling days, creative teams (and the agency boss I mentioned) were forever begging for a budget to screen a ‘director’s cut’ of whatever commercial they’d shot – rather longer than the real one, and more ‘artistically’ edited – that would be screened late at night in one remote and cheap region to qualify it as an awards entry. It appears that Moma Propaganda didn’t actually even take that precaution. Indeed, Kia itself announced that it had never signed off the work, nor indeed even worked with Moma Propaganda. Not that any smart client would have run the ads, which had all the wit of a Benny Hill sketch. We’re back to the same old story. Cheats and liars always think themselves very clever; and this practice of ghosting apparently plagues Cannes. Yet, now you know the truth, would you ever entrust Moma Propaganda (great name, guys) with designing even a 10cm x 2 column ad in the Shropshire Star?

Nice if you can afford it

2011-08-03T10:29:00.000-07:00

The public's take on advertising is that it must work, or no one would do it. It's taken as read, I suspect, that the ad industry’s pitch for the client’s buck rests in the final analysis on one premise: that the advertiser ends up commercially better off with advertising than without. It sounds a no-brainer; yet that premise has the potential to cause ad agencies untold grief nowadays. Proving a greater uplift in sales value than the cost of the advertising is notoriously hard to do, except occasionally when, for example, a product is being launched or relaunched or supported promotionally. It’s perhaps unsurprising that, in recent decades, the industry has repudiated the notion that advertising is responsible for selling things. Nowadays, admen maintain that advertising is intended only to create the right backdrop for sales. Selling is the job of salesmen; so, if sales don’t pick up enough, it’s someone else’s fault. This repositioning in turn has led critics to retort that advertising is a luxury. Advertising doesn’t create sales, they say; sales create advertising. That argument has certainly been lent some weight by the chief executive of Domino’s Pizza. Announcing a 15% rise in profits – driven not by advertising but by store openings, PR, and Facebook - he promised a threefold increase in marketing spend, plus the obligatory heavyweight brand campaign. It makes you wonder whether, for corporate bosses, owning a heavyweight brand campaign is above all a badge of honour, like one of those redundant fly-swats carried around by African potentates to let everyone know who’s who.

The lesser of two evils?

2011-08-02T16:10:00.000-07:00

At the opposite end of the PC spectrum were the visiting fans at the football match I watched. Supporters of Tottenham Hotspur, they quickly announced themselves as the ‘Yid Army’, in defiance of an edict issued by TV unfunny man David Baddiel. (You need to know that there's probably a simple explanation for Mr Baddiel’s strange status as a Jew who decries Jewish pride: I suspect he's simply a contemporary western metropolitan leftist who's decided that his fortunes lie with other contemporary western metropolitan leftists). But there was more. Brighton being England’s counterpart to San Francisco – a magnet for gays – they next baited the home crowd with a chant, to the tune of Men of Harlech, that ran, “We can see you holding hands”. Most of the home supporters seemed to take it in good part in the shirtsleeve weather; but not all. One fellow, who sounded as though he’d availed himself of at least one of the new stadium’s bars, vented his spleen at this insult with a string of four-letter words. This was hardly prudent in the family enclosure, and he was swiftly removed by the security men. As they escorted him to the door, the Spurs fans followed up with, “Send your boyfriend over here”, which raised a laugh. It was interesting to reflect that, under New Labour, such insolent disregard of PC would have brought arrests after a police investigation of the CCTV footage, if not a baton charge by leather-clad Brownite Stasi types; yet here, in the summer sun, it passed as good-humoured banter. There’s an incorrigible liberal streak in me that had me agonising a bit over this afterwards. Stonewall founder Simon Fanshawe and his mates at the Bosom Buddy Collective would no doubt have been fuming, and I couldn’t help wondering whether perhaps this event was a backward step: the beginnings of a reversion to the altogether more unpleasant anti-gay language and attitudes that were the norm a generation or two ago. Homosexuals face plenty of menace from various religious quarters, and can do without football fans joining in. I concluded that it’s certainly something to which society needs to attend if a happy balance is to be maintained. But out there, so soon after the horrors of New Labour, it felt like a pleasant change to see people able to sing what they felt like without fear of being arrested.

Exclusive inclusiveness

2011-07-31T10:53:00.000-07:00

The politically correct Confused.com advertising was nothing beside a bus-side poster I saw yesterday near Brighton on the southern English coast. The poster – advertising the bus company itself – depicted three young people, supposedly typical users of the service. One was Afro-Caribbean, one Oriental, and one Asiatic. It marked a new high-water mark for PC, in which the custom of the “token black” had been so far superseded that there was no room for a token white. The irony was that, just an hour earlier, my son had commented on the universally Nordic look of the crowd about us, which contrasted dramatically with the multicultural appearance of London, whence he’d just travelled. Now, the propensity of human beings to identify with others socially and genetically like themselves (aside, that is, from contemporary western metropolitan leftists) is so well attested scientifically that it ill-behoves any marketer to ignore it if he wants his advertising to strike a sympathetic chord. In this instance, a simple question leapt screaming in one’s face: how come an ad targeted at the populace of a rural county actually bearing the name of the South Saxons failed to depict the local populace so absolutely that it completely excluded them? One can probably muster a good guess in answer to that one: contemporary western metropolitan leftist communicators feel the need above everything else to signal their right-on-ness to other contemporary western metropolitan leftists, even at the expense of the message they’re paid to deliver. So ingrained is the arrogance of PC that one can only shrug one’s shoulders. I couldn’t help thinking, however, that, if I had shares in the bus company concerned, I’d want to know why the marketing department was not concentrating on winning business but channelling my money into self-serving ideological claptrap.