Marketing Insights and Outrages

'So clear and concise that selective ~ u o t a ~ ofail n s to doj u s ~ c to e the

~chness of

its t e x ~ r e . ~it.e 'a d camp^^

rayto ton ~ i r d ~more o wa s~ o udirect t ~ a r k e t i n than g anyone in the~ o r lHis ~. ~ o o is k pure gold. ' David Ogilvy The most authoritative, and popular, European book on direct m ~ k e t i n gever pub~shed,offering practical, commonsense advice to both ~ractitioners and s~dents. 9 Paperback ISBN 0 7494 2584 9 384 pages

you manage to take on ~ o a r d j u s t h a suggestions, ~ o ~ t h e you will n ~ e r w ~ t a d u sales ~ ~ e ~aga~n.' er Business Matters hat ever is being sold - high or low price, product orservice - the chances of a sales letter not being consigned to the waste basket will improve vastlyif you follow this step-by-stepadvice. €16.99 Paperback ISBN 0 7494 1431 6 256 pages

Available from all good booksellers. For Eurther~ o ~ a t i on o nthese and other m ~ k e t i n gtitles, please contact: Kogan Page 120 ~ e n t o n ~Road le London N19JN Tel: 020 7278 0433 Pax: 020 7837 6348

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IT

First publishe~in ~ 0 0 0 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or renderthe C o p ~ g h tDe , ’ ents Act 1988, this pub~cationmay r by anymeans, with the prior perstored or transmitted, mission in ~ t i n ofg the publishers, or in the case of repro~aphicreproduction in accordance with the terms andlicences issued by the CLA. Enquiries c o ~ c e ~ reproduction ng outside these termsshould be sent to thepublishers at the~ d e ~ e n t i o n addresses: ed Kogan Page Limited 120 P e n t o n ~ eRoad London Nl9JN, UK

Kogan Page (US) Limited 163 Central Avenue, Suite 4 Dover, I?H 03820,USA

0 Drayton Bird, 2000

The right o f D r a ~ o nBird to be identi~edas the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designsand PatentsAct 1988. ~

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~ ino cation ~ ~ Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0 7494 3215 2

Typeset by Kogan Page Limited Printed and boundin Great Britain byClays Ltd, St Ives plc

~n~oduction Another blast ofhot air C o n ~ s e d You ? ill be ~ u b i o u logic; s wrong conc~usions ~aute ho~ash ~ y p o c ~ and s y logic exarnined ~ncornpetence(and incon~nence~ on every side Phoney s o ~ ~ ~ o n s m e a ~ o g a nofdo-gooders ce ~ r n e f o ra new a p p r o a c h ~ agents? o~ at makes ~ i c h a r drun? ~y don’t r n a r ~ e ~ directors ng last very long?

5 7 9 12 13 15 17 19 21 23 25

~n~oduc~on An in~al~ible guide to good a d v e ~ s i n g Another ~usinessschool Direct rnail~ollies God is in the details ow o r d i n a ~ ~ e live ople ~essons~orn s~ccess~l ~aili~gs

29 31 33 35 37 39 42

V

27

~eanuts and monk~s The basics The line stops here 'The l i n g e ~ death ~ g o ~ m a s marketing s ~y direct m~rketingmakes such sense ~ ~j onu ~ ak l i s m

43 45 47 49

52 53

IN Introd~ction An overcrowde~market Education; could it be the ~ e a t h o ~ m a r ~ e t i n g ? In w ~ i c hwe ponder them y s t e ~ ~ s o ~ e ~ ~ l o y m e n t It's ~ideous, but is it art? Lessons~om Ame~can mail order rogues ore t~oughtsabout planning ore w a ~ eZess ? sense 'Thejoys o ~ f o r e travel i~ The wis~omofLeo o ere does talent c o m e ~ o m ? ~y are you w ~ ~ -nand g what are you saying?

55 57 59 61 63 65 67 69 71 73 75 77

rn~odu~*on Do ~o~ st y o ~ employer? r ow much is c h a ~ w o ~ h ? ~ y s t e ~ ene e s eat^ the streets N ~ emind r thest rate^; hat a b o ~the t results? Not a very good idea S ~ l no e s u b s t i ~ t e ~substance or The misuse o~language 'The trouble wit^ marketing 'This week? a l i ~ l e h i s t oyou ~~or ~ i c are h the models to emulate?

79 82 83 85 87 89 92 93 95 97 99

fn~oduc~on Bullying wivesand silk u n d e ~ e a r Driving customers to~ e s p a i r ~ v a l u a ~ creative ng First the vices, now the sins God bless you,Sir~ohn Good, bad and indi~erent How long,0 Lord, how long? fs it a b ~ g hidea t to try to teach c r e a ~ v i ~ ? Letter-pe~ect mall talent, big temperament The basics o~postersignored T h e ~ v deadly e sins The sheepish ten den^ You don't have tosay you love me

202 203 105 207 109 211 113 2 25 227 119 222 123 225 227 229

fn~oduc~on Dangerous overstatements Don't call us, because we ce~ainlywon't call you ~ o b i l e s , t u ~and l e s~ ~ s s i a n s T h e ~ ~isrnever e as adve~*sed The~oyso ~ m o d communica~ons e~ The power o ~ ~ a r k egrossly ~ n g overes~mated vi~ally pe~ect

132

fn~ro~uc~on Are youbeing served? Bring on thec ~ o ~ n s Customer service: lesstalk, more action please D e ~ e r eto s the customerat Dixon's No room - but ~ i g prices h - at the inn

247 149 251 253 255 257

233

235

237 139 142 243 245

~ ~ ~or pro~lem? o ~ n i ~ s e ~ i c with e a snar? s e ~ i c with e no ? a u g ~ s "he customeris a~wayswrong, it s e e ~ s in^ a l i ~ ?-e it usua??ypays ~ f f t cout, h sop~isticatesa ~ o u t

I59

In~oduction ~~e~ words to the w i s e ~ o m ~ e n i s e idea obscured by - but notv e ~ ~ e i pro~essiona? n ~ ~ ? o ctoi?ets ~ e ~and p ~ n t e d g a r b a ~ e Does this m a ~ sense e to you?

172 2 73 175 2 77 179

161 l 63 165 167 1

~ s ~ n a nthat c e simple? I w o n ~ e r ~ ?thel otherone, pv "he ~Q?ance o~te~or You can ~ f f on ~ kit

183 3 85 2 87 289 291 193

In~oduction ow to a d v e ~ s e I don't thin^ t h a t ' s ~ n n y ,do you? O~to~oises and ot~er ma~ers On d i ~ c u ?c?ien~s t Poste~ania S h o u ?they ~ get a ~ a with y it? ~ o m weird e s ~ ~ g o i on ng f i e same old story ~y is so ~ u a ~cv e ~~* s i~n g a ~ ? y mer~ers are he??

195 197 199 201 203 205 207 209 212 213 275

~n~oduc~on A neat i ~ e a P~G Go ~ E c o n o ~ i c with a ~ the~ t h ow about a s ~ nyour g customers? It t ~ k e ~s ~but e~ ~, ~a rand ~ ~pays i n g Large ~ ~ o ~ st s~ tests a ~ ~ an^ courage L o y a ~research ~? e~amined ~ e ~and~other ~ sus~ect ~ o ~ractices n t h t a~~ k i n g a ~ o u t ? ~y not look you leap?

om

ore

3 I n ~ o ~ ~ c ~ o n A n y ~ o r e i gbodies ~ in your database? Conse~~ences o ~ a ~ edee ~ o n ' t c o nb~ ~s eb e ~ ~ o ~y i at ~h ~ 0~~ideffs c h a ~ ~ e n g e ~ ~ u ~d i s~~ oey fpfr~r ~o ~ a ~ ~ e s The de vi^ is in the~ e t a i ~ s ~ a t c your h ~a~~ets! at do you ~ e a n , ' ~ o y a ~ ~ ' ?

27 219 222 223 225 229 232

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In the world of marketing, obsessed as it is with the new, the different and the fashionable, it’s rare to find a voice willing to point out that the emperor of the month is, in fact, stark bollock naked. Drayton Bird is that voice. In five yearsof editing his columns for~ u r k e ~ n g I,can honestly say there wasn’t a single one that failed to w o m e~ ~ometimesit was because I feared hemight have libelled someone a fat bank balance and lawyers to match. Occasionally, it was because he would insist on promoting his latest book in his columnand still expect us to pay him forit. And now, here I am plugging Drayton’slatest book, and very def~itely not recei~nga penny in return. This means either that I’ve been beaten into submission by a couple of hundred columns and slightly fewer lunches,or that I’m happy to recommend this book because,despite all the grey hairs and nasty phone callsI’ve collected as a result of them, I think these columns are priceless. Think of~ u r k e ~ r~sig~ts ng ~ and ~ ~ u asg ae~ sn a s i u m for the marketing mind. “he mental muscles you’ll develop here are those of scepticism and common sense, both of which w l ineed to be pumpedup and bulging if you’re to fight your way through the torrent of fads, trends and snake oil remedies that pass for insight in the world of advertising and promotion. If you reckon you’re sceptical enough already, then read them for no other reason that, whether or not you knowthe characters involved, you’ll laugh out loud at least eight times while doing so, and there aren’t many business books youcan say that about. Oh, and once you’re addicted, you might like to turn to ~ f f ~ k e ~for ng your regular fx.There, done it. I’ve finally plugged my publication in one of Drayton’s. Maybe I’velearnt more fkom him than I thought.

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Every age has its little fads and fashions, but some, perhaps, have more serious consequencesthan others. In the 20th century quite a fewpretentious but dubious sciencesor disciplines have emerged. ~e have bene~tedfrom psycho lo^, psychiatry, socind their bastard offspring counselling - all too o as ~ene~olence - and economics, which even f m ~ r ~ e t ehave r s caused as much misery as psychiatrists, who

for so many years destroyed so many livesthrough the enthusiastic application of electric shocksan n o ~ a d aS still r e ~ l a r l yrelease murderous lunatics to rape and Isill our children. ind you, since we now h o w Rr Freud made up many of his casehistories, this is hardlys u ~ ~ s i n I am not sure to what degree such sharp practice exists e d and s ~ p i dseem i ~ to ers. I have seen a fairamount, but ~ 1 - f o ~ dconceit e more common than plain dishonesty. Neve~heless, itis ve ordinary folk, and even many practitioners, to make sense o f S things that go on. ne, for instance, if you made a listof skilled marketers ou would place the names Coca-Cola and PepsiColafairly near the top. arly in s ~ e yofs such trivia Coca-Cola isvoted the world’s top brand. And perh Hoover would deserve a place on your list. After all, there are not many human a~ivitieswhere one name becomes so pre-eminent that itis applied to an entire category. This came home to me when my PA, the radiant Denise, told me a while agothat she owned an Electrolux Hoover, How, then, are we to explain away why on one occasion Coca-Cola decided, afker who knows what extensive research and forethought by phalanxes of great minds, that they should reformulate and r e l a ~ c htheir sickly c o n c o ~ o as n ‘New’ Coke? And for those interested in curiosities, how

is it thathowever many people may have lost jobs as a result, the man who had this foolish ideawas promoted to become marketing boss of the whole enterprise? rind what about their deadlyrival,PepsiCola?Which genius there decided to spend $500 million or more changing the colour of its cans and thus reduce sales at a stroke by 5 per cent - a disaster that usually takes years of dedicated incompetence?I don’t actually knowhow high the person who came up with this floperoo was promoted but no doubt that person is e n j o ~ n gthe fmitsof this labour right now on a beach somewhere. For that matter, examine the case of Hoover. Someone there had the s t u ~ i n gidea of offeringfreeholidays to people who bought their machines. Since the value of the holidays appeared greater than thecost of the ~achines,the result - unsurprisingly, you would havethought - was hordes of people bought machines to get the holidays. Perhaps even less surprisin~ly,Hoover couldn’t supply them all. The final consequence of that little wheeze was no surprise either. The customers were all very ry;Hoover ended up going brokeand in the end was bought by someone else. This book is a collection of pieces I have itt ten over the years which endeavours to explore and explain someof these little peculiarities. Why do people do suchstupid things? What kind of people are they anyhow? rind why do so many of them seem almost totally lacking in common sense or ability to learn? The answers are often as bewildering as they are hilarious. I have a practical purpose, too. I have tried where possible to suggest things you ought not to do if you want your enterprise to flourish, and to encourage youto do those that experience shows will usually pay off better for you. It is a rather alarming reflection that if you plough through these pages diligentlyand make notes you will probablyend up better informed than quite a number of marketers, too many of whom are little more than plausible idlers.(I speak frompersonal practice, youunderstand.) At the insistence of myc h a ~ n publisher, g the book is dividedinto sections to make it appear organized. Please donot be deceived bythis stratagem. As you will see, each of these pieces covers at least two subjects and some as many as five. However,to prevent being exposedas a fraud, I have tried to make sure that each contains some element, however fleeting, which justifiesits being in the category.

I will end by sayingthat this is what they call good~ e d readin ~ e there is no plot; just read two or three pieces at a time,and ifthey don’t put

you to sleep, ask €or your money back.

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5

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When I first became a creative director many years ago I soon learnt meetings were an even greater theft of time than procrastination and never attended unless forcedto, merely sending in advance my ~ t t e views n on the subject in question, offering to turnup and discuss them if asked. I don’t recall this ever happe~ng,which probably says more than I would like about the poorquality ofmy thi g.In Up the ~ r ~ u ~ ~Robert s u ~ o ~ T o ~ s e n dwho , made Avis successfd, suggests all meetings be heldstandi l l not dawdle. p so people w ut Zeldin is right. The greatest curse of meetings is that most produce Either there is no conclusion save that another meeting should e or, if it is decided what should be done, it is not m whom; and even if that essential point is established, it is rarely made clear by when it must be done. If what I have written reflects yourown e x ~ e ~ e n cIeam , not at anization does not suffer from these vices, it either be amazingly successful.But don’t get complacent. S, it won’t stay that way long.

Have you been following,as I have, the thrilling adventures of ‘Big Ed’ Carter, who has been brought overfrom the United States by BT to introduce their Friends and Family programme? For the life of me I can’t think why; the idea started in the United States with another worked for.Why didn’t someone from BT go over, study it and just knock it off? It’s not that complicated. They’retoo lazy, I suppose. Carter is1.9 metres tall. Supposehe were like acertain type of US citizen - as vast in girth as height. He would be a very barrage balloon o~blubber-

himfrom their premises. We should salute them; it takes courage to do that tosomebody influential at thecountry’s biggest advertiser, whereas it takes very little to thump people if you’re built like a Sherman tank. They have now reaffimed the ban, because another of their clients, Simon Esberger of Cehet, has hired Carter to start a Friends and Family type programme and help them ‘escape the industry’s looming price war’. This may bea good idea, even if it’s a shame he can’t get somebody h o u s e - ~ a ~ e d Joking apart, friends, what would you call a to do it, but the logic escapes me. scheme wherebyyou pay lesswhen you ring several specified numbers? In ~ h t o n - ~ d e r - where L ~ e I was brought up,folk would sayit is about price. In fact even in London, where they like to complicate things a little, I i m a ~ e most people would say it is price-led.So what is Mr Esberger talkingabout, or to be more exactwhat is he talkingthrough? Here’s s o m e t h ~ gelse I can’t quite get my head round.Lloyds Bank-TSB is getting out of estate agency. Ten years and God knows how many millions

~ ~ o n slater ? ) they’ve decided it was all a bad idea and are looking for a management buy-out. But was the idea so bad? A n e ~ o r of k ~nancialservice firms cross-selling to each other makes perfect sense. I suspect not enough thought was applied to theboring details. You have to ensure every likely relevanto p p o is ~exploited ~ and every approp~ate commu~cation sent. se people think strategies execute themselves. Whenthey fdl todo solution applied often puzzles me. They squander sh~eholders’ ~ o n e to y buy somefirm for morethan it’s worth. Lots o f people losetheir jobs - ‘economies of scale’. Things go ~ o n gThen . employed -who failed - borrow the money to buy the ng m~lionseach. ~ h couldn’t y they do it before? Maybe they were just ts needed to rise to the top in these huge firms those required to run them? And why do these precious economiesof scale never reach as far as the top? learn more about the Me and times ofBiEd Carter on Esberger, who became famous for approvin ampaign forHaagen-Dazsice-cream,did not last long at should selling ice-cream qualify you to sell phones, I wonder?

0 0 0 DATE: FEBRUARY l 9913

few read anything other than tripe. A mere ance at what is going on snia and elsewhere suggests people remain as they ever were7 infimore swayedby emotion than reason. artial evidence S gests people are less willing now than 30 ay apremi~mfor abrand, even though the product is almost d i s t i n ~ s from h its competition? Does AndyBlac~ordreally believe Tango, Gold Blend or Boddin~onssucceeded because o f rational consumers? A d v e ~ i s ~ mass g 7 advertising, appealing almost entirely to ainly not ~ t e ~ edid c tthe ~ trick - and always will- espetter than ad~e~ising,’ never be abetter ay o ers at a l o y cost than advertisi S about 5Op to reach onepers to reach all your ical cons~mers through normal channels. A recent nday paper showed that traditional chanspite which increasing n~mberso f conowards the direct route. to believe, includin~ theidea that an ous way isbetter than amble spend billionseve ear on b ~ l ~ i brands. ng They knowthat on average adve~ised profitable than those that aren’t. This isnot going to change, any more than consumers will.

o n o DATE: DCTIJBER1994

One of my Sydney colleagues was ‘swooped by a maggie’ last month, pecked in the eye and nearly lost his sight. It seems the indigenous ma * violently attacks anyone who approaches the nest at mating time. Auld, my partner there,claims country kids walkto school weari ice-cream containers to protect themselves - a grand new use for old ar for catastrophe in Oz. New improved m~omatosis, se that slays rabbits much faster than the original, is ra arently a journo visitin not merely with the tis but also the virus. It has killed so many bunnies that the e those wacky hats feser cans, corks, ping-pong balls or a n ~ h i n to g keep the flies off are so scarce they’re havingto import them from the UK. In addition the fruit fly has swept in from the Pacific islands, to be greeted with less than to joy in northern Queenslandwhere it’s devastated themango industry anwhile the bogong - a moth about the size of a small plane- has been blown by strong winds to Sydney, where it does a lot more than et up people7s noses, being found in beds, air vents and units. Like all moths it loves lights and so has brought a new look to the harbour bridge at night. The birds love the s i ~ a t i o nand hunt moths happily through the hours of darkness. One plague, though, is worldwide:haute pime from the moguls of the rag trade. On a plane flight I was mesmerized by some magazine inte~ews with Calvin Klein, Ralph Laurenand Donna Karan,who boldly went where no poser has gone before. Ralph Lauren believes, ‘A. sensibility now is the freedom o f b r e a ~ n the g d e s . Sensing the thrusto f it [sic]out there. There’s a heritage behind my designs, but there’s also a newness and e~citement

that I inject.’ Calvin Kleinin his ads tries, would you believe,to ‘create an Who doI think image of what theproduct is’. Heasks, ‘Who am I a~racting? will wear this? Who will understand it? But then thep h o t o ~ a p hhas to say something to me that’s emotional. It has to make my heart start beating.’ Donna Karan, though, delivers a qualityof her that leaves the other in the dressing room.Success has been S a strain for her, poor 1 ‘People don’t realizethe demands and how difficultthis job is. In every creation, there’s the responsibili~of that creation. .. I became a statistic of what was ha~peningout there. Now I feel this power and I can try to shift it in my own moral way. I can try to work on developing a consciousness between my o w n ability and the people around me - the industry, the public. And I really do believethat is my mission.’ u ~0~~~ (reprinted ~ 1999)’ ~ Tom e Wolfe ~ pointed out why much In f i e ~ modern art is crap: technique and content matter infinitely less than the ability of critics to write hogwash about it. These fashion bozos go one better. They produce their own hogwash. You canreadmore adventures on pages 157-58. :

about my friend MalcolmAuld

o o n DATE: DECEMBER 1995

and his

‘How is it that theloudest yelps for freedom come fromthe ne~roes?’asked Dr Johnson before the ~ e r i War c ~ of Inde~endence. Similarly, I sometimes wonder by what coincidence our two most ~enophobicm i ~ s t e r s- Howard and Portill0 - are born of forei Could their minds have be by a surfeit o f Sun editorials? Five weeks ago I saw anarticle suggesting Howard is disliked because of his looks. His mind worries me more. I am even toldhis proposed ~ m i ~ a t i o n laws would have excludedhis own parents from coming here before the war. Being Jewish they would have been in danger of their lives -though tolook on the bright side we would havebeen spared him. Another politician with no sense of irony is Joseph Kennedy ~ e m o ~ a t , ~ s a c h ~ e now ~ s ) ,waging a campaign to restrict US booze a d v e ~ s ~How g. did y o ~ Joe g arrivein his present s i ~ a t i ons ~richand g p everyone &omhis representative’s pulpit? ~ ~ opro-Nazi u s Joe, made such a pile that he could buyhis son JohnF the US presidency. His proposal and others like it have always been rejected by the US Supreme Court because they restrict the freedom of speech: a d v e ~ s ~ informs people, however slightly,about things they might not o t h e ~ s e hear about; and if it is legal to buy and sell, it should be legalto advertise. How sad that US politici~sfool about with such trivia, yet have failed to

control the one factor which clearly causes infinitely more misery: Is itguns. that hard to understand that people who own guns are going to shoot them, and as a consequenceother people are going to get killed? Surely, even for politicians, that can’t be too diffkult to work out. In Washin~on,DC, guns are rife and deaths by shooting partic~arlycommon. You might even think that since a significantpercentage of the victims are children something would bedone about it - but how much easierto squabble about whether homosexuals shouldmarry or join the military than fight the National Rifle Association. I say this with some heat, since two young members of my American wife’s familyhave died violentlyin the past five years. And what about us? Soon we shall have a LabourGove~ment,swiftly followed byan avalanche of regulations to make sure we behave as our betters think fit. To be fairthis is alreadyprevalent in the present gove~mentthe ~ottomley tendency: ‘We know better thanyou how to run your life.’ l ibe M e r restrictions on adve~singthings that do us harm, There w starting with tobacco and moving on to alcohol. The logic is crazy. Why not outlaw ads for crisps, h ~ b ~ g e rfish s , and chips, sausages, beef, lamb, eggs, cheese, cream, fiied chickenand biscuits - in fact, anythmg that can harm you? Why not ban advertising for cars, oil, petrol and tyres - all those commercials of people racing along, their hair blowing freely in the breeze? M e r all, people die in road accidents. On this basis, crossing the road should be banned. Nonsense. Butdangerous nonsense,if you believe in Ereedom. : Many of

the things I predicted have cometo pass, though there have been one or two surprises. The present gove~menthas indeed buriedus under a landslideof busybody legislation. Happily, one of myclients publishesit all, and people have to read it whetherthey want toor not. Mr Portillo, realizing his views were not getting him ahead, has abandoned them with the alacrity o f a true politician to become agentler, kinder person, besidesadmitting to youthful homosexualadventures.

DATE: JULY 1996

Last night I had a terrible fright. I was directing a thin yellow trickle against the wall of a garage next to Brid concerned citizen came to check ifI was

A

little notice within the station l1 reads - literally:‘Toilets 0 hours (2.30 pm). As agreed by the station manager.’ Thisrare blend of illiterac~,a~oganceand incompetence swiftly calledto mind the pun aroma of recycled tripe that has been fouling the air lately, emanating for the rt from Blackpool and Bri

money forhospitals, for schools(and God knows they’ll needit free computers)yfor pensioners and better public services,wit us the vaguest clue as to how these goodies are to be paid for; or the Conservatives, featuring such as Michael Howard, face oozing deceit from every pore, who says he willlock up all wrongdoers for longer than ever before, without the slightest regard for the fact that first you haveto catch the The average b u r g l ~it, seems, has only one chance in seven of being cau sentence - long or short - is irrelevant. Somebody pointedout last week that part of Mr Blair’s speech was copied fkom the ~ ~ h i b i aorn rather , reptilian, Gingrich (who also promises a kiddies’ computer bonanza) and part from that great statesman, Harold

~ i l s o nBut . the mendacity displayedby both parties reminds meof nothing so much asthe splendid election campaign in the 18th century that was won t refe on the slogan of ‘Give us back our eleven days’- a p o i ~ a nappeal to some trifling but necessary changes in the calendar. Of course, in tho most voters were either drunk or illiterate, or both - which, come to of it, probably appliesto our present electorate equally well. But at least they used to insist on being bribed in real money,not phoney promises. The problem our politicians face is simple. They dealin two commodities, both in almost limitless supply:hot air, and other people’s money. So they think ifthey talk loudenough and spend prodigally enough it will solve any problem.But money is uselesswithout intelligent planning. The result is bad serviceon every side. Thus, seven-fi~re a sum has been spent in renr i d ~ a t e station. r The pe~ectlyserviceable 19th-century toilets have been closed, with new ones placed in the booking hall, which is locked promptly at 2.30 every day. Nobody has given any thought to the consequences of this for the aged and incontinent, like me. Or consider the Post Office. A century ago you couldpost a letter in the centre of London before lunch to tell your wifein the suburbs you wouldnot be arriving back for dinner, in the confident knowledge it would get there. Not now! What it all adds up to is that, whereas politicians are getting ever more subtle in their gradations of bullshit, none of them could run a brothel on a troop train. *

: Newt Gingrich, a creepy

Rep~blicanpolitician now discredited, suggested giving computers to all US schools,an idea copied by Tony Blair, a creepy Labour politician not yet discredited. Idiscuss the sorrows of B r i d ~ a t e station r in another piece - and the perils of believing politiciansin several. Having worked for the Tories under Thatcher and Major, and then for Labour under Blair, Ifeel thoroughly ashamed of myself.

When the business history of our times is written, if anyone can be bothered, a goodtitle would bef i e Era o ~ Q ~~ uo c s~ ~ ~enchma ~ s . d o ~ - s i z i n gright-sizing, y r e - e n ~ e e ~ nJIT, g yTQM: buzzwords and initials are coined as fast as business theorists can bang out pretentious, incomprehensible tomes to justify them. I have seen a fairnumber of these patent remedies applied,and the consequences - which are usually devastating, especially to thepoor staff.One of my clients, a huge multi nation^, even appointed head a of‘ re-en~neering.I met a friend who had just had a meeting with him. When he said her department was going to be right-sized, she responded that it sounded very like a good old-fashioned mass firing to her - which of course it was. In one article I read how Mercury hired some consultants with disastrous results, ending with a giant ‘motivational’ rallywhere their staff were con&sed and upset by having barrage a of multi-syllabic tripe, which nodoubt cost a fortune to think up, bellowed at them. Too many of these patent solutions, I fear, are applied by senior managers u n ~ l i n to g look in the mirror and recognize their own incompetence, an incompetence often matched, I have found, by that of the business ~tch-doctorsthemselves. I was once invitedto join a meeting of international TQM consultants. When I wrote to them all afterwards, not one was competent enough to respond.In one case I introduced a multimi~ion-do~ar prospective client.The quality ‘guru’ in question didn’t even get round to contacting him. Even intelligent people are taken in by these moon-gazers. The regional boss of one big advertising network hired one to address an inte~ational co~erencehe had arranged at vast expense. T w o participants showed me a

wondrous chart he hadcreated, with lines, arrows and dashes going hither and yon, rather like an electricalcircuitdiagram. They were most impressed, though unable to reply intelligentlywhen I asked: ‘As a result of this chart what precisely are you going to do differently t o m o ~ o wfrom what you do today?’ ersonally, I learn most from people who do things rather than talk about them. Last year I stayed at a hotel with levels of serviceI have only e n c o ~ t e r e dat a handful of others around the world. I asked the manager what magic potion he had applied.It had no initial, and few syllables. He said, ‘I don’t believein theories and rule-books. I simply tell people, “When you’re dealing with a customer, ask yourself: if you were that ~ s t o m e r , like? It will probably bewhat they would like;and what’s more it will probably bewhat I as a ma~agerwould like.”’ I recommend this simple approach, which works admirably for that hotel, and certainly would for your business. There is, of course, a fancy phrase for it - ‘staff empowerment, - and no doubt someone has ~ t t e an nee~esslylong and dreary book about it; but when I was young the expression was ‘Do unto others as you would bedone by’ - not a bad m you don’t need a book to understand it. : The hotel I mention is The Observatory in Sydney.

Mercury was aphonecompanylaunched to compete with British Telecorn. Theiradvertising, which was very funny, won buckets o f awards. Their advertising agency became famousand successful. They never made money becausetheir advertising was more interesting than their proposition. Now they are called something else.

DATE: FEBRUARY

1996

Did you read about the latest great idea from the busybodies at the childrenshouldbediscouragedfrom e they should change their name to the ~ationalSociety to ~ r o ~ i b i t ~ e c t i oChildren. nate It seems they think such affection may lead to perversion; a aself-righteousfreakcalledHarding,

(Mind you, that would probably make me a~ e n e ~ cofi today’s a~ political correctness.) Of course, this is the man who launched the utterly bogus campa end all child abusein a coupleof years. How can you completely ext - let alone that quickly? Suchdishonesty strengthens any such wickedness my suspicion that analarmingly high percentage,ofcharity marketers are a) round the twistand b) happy to make any promise, no matter how wild, to get money. A good parallel is our gloriousGovernment’spromises on schools, hospitals, transport, ethical arms policy, sleaze- you nameit. But myfeelings are nothing compared to those of mypartner, Phil Years ago he wrote copy that said, ‘If you suspect a child is being mistreated, call the NSPCC.’ This proved a licence for mayhem. and Philhis wife have themselves twicebeen victims o f cruel, false (and, thank God, easily disproved) allegations of cruelty to their children, bringing the police to their door.

reat effort, Phil got throu h to an NSPCC apparatc~kand asked why they don’t insist complainants give their names in e ~ c h a n ~fore an y won’t be passed on. Other agencies do this to discoura hoax callers. This means they can report back to c o ~ p l ~ i n if their worries are gro~ndlessand maybe clear some bast~rd’sname in the process.

ecome unreason~blyscare day they’ll bethe victims of c a l ~ y . attiThe NSPCC, with their a ~ o g a n t ,end-always-justi~es-the-me~s es, have a lotto answer for. :In all fhirness, this c ~ p ahasi proved ~ outstandingly success~l. Do the ends justify the means? I wonder.

My dentist makes a small fortune out of putting sundry ingenious pieces of miniature architecture in my mouth, which I plan to leave eventuallyto the Natural History Museumas an example of what can be achieved by a determined practitioner who gets his hands on a customer ~ t more h money than teeth. Our sado-masochistic relationship allows meplenty of time to flip through sundry glossy magazines, from one of which, ~ a Claire, ~ eI recently learnt that Christina Appelt,41, runs a dating agency in Berlin for married folk who want to screw around. It seems she is doing very well. Among the secrets of her success she emphasizes the importance of vetting people carefully.For instance, it seems that her clients are not that keen on bofEng foreigners - not that Berliners are racist, she adds swiftly - and she takes care to weed out people with eccentric tastes. ‘I have an instinct for these things,’ she said modestly. She gave as an who came in a few weeks ago dressed example o f her uncanny skill ‘the man from top to toe in rubber’. I think you’d have to be as thick as two short planks not to suspect that someone who goes in search of sexual adven~res dressed as a frogmanhas something a weebit special in mind, but we’ll let that pass. Having spent years as an agent myself, I have great sympathy for anyone who fillfils this diK1cult role. Manyo f those who act as agents are Seen not as intelligent, worthy contributors to society, but rather as opportunistic leeches. Think of all the show-business stories about agents, or the ay

3

people view estate agents: for years I have used a joke about them as an le of all-round shiftiness in my speeches, and rarely faile ~ h i c hbrings us to the subject of advertising agents, recent reports have it, clients are ~ r n i n less g and less to them for adviceon - whatever that may be. because they think agency people lack inte~igence- or they don’t ncies as much as they did? Could it be they sometimes fearthere may be some slight relations~ipbetween profit and the which agenciesurge them to invest in expensive TV campai

I

n o n DATEI:JANUARY1 997

A few years ago I read in a survey of American millionaires that most managed their personal finances hopelessly.If you knew my skills in that area as well as my bank, you would realize why I found this so hea~enin encoura~edme to keep trying. However, I still find financehard work and most ~ t i n on g the subject as clear as mud, which is why I was delighted last wee to find in a paper called the ~e~ York ~~~r~~~~ not one, but several, writers who were not only comprehensible but also entertaining. One dida rather sardonic analysisof the Donna Karan firm’sshare price suggesting the firm’s highinventory and receivables make the shares very overrated, one reason being that their principal asset - the brand name - has been cunningly retained by MS Karan and her husband. This got me thinking about the value of a brand. Years ago mostbrands were associated with one thing, limiting the likely appeal of new products sold under the brand name. Take two famous brand associations: Bass means beer; Guinness means stout. I doubt if Bass couldmarket a stout well under their name; Guinnesshas tried selling beer at least once - but not that successfully. This changed rather surprisingly. To explain what I mean, would you believe a motorbi~efirm like BSA, Triumph or Harley- avids son would do well at selling cars, let alone musicalinstruments? But Honda sell carsand marine engines successfilly. Yamaha sell pianos, guitars and so forth. Is this because instead of being known for oneproduct these fims became known for a desirablecharacteristic- in this case, quality?

ut if that sort of thing is a bito f a stretch, what do you makeo f Richard ranson? Some tim wrote a rude column about am r the aegis of airlines. I then had to go to Aust ang me in a state of some excitement:‘Richar

ust n e ~ sleep. ~ r S

riginally arms m

Are youa marketing director? I don’t envy you. Lately a client who reads C a ~ regularly ~ a commented ~ ~ to me on a change. Wherehe used to see stories about accounts changing hands, now he sees more about people like you changing jobs. They say the average tenure is now

your ‘vision’ is implemented (you need a vision now; ideasare not enough), someone elsehas your job.And you can be sure they’ll confiusechange with improvement and alter everything. But you shouldn’t have gone. The peoplewho hired you should. Most of them must be criminally bad at perhaps the most vital job in business: finding and keeping good people.If Ihired so poorly, soconsistently, I’d have gone broke years ago. There’s goodnews if youhave the right credentials, though. ‘A growing number of marketers are being wooed by other sectors hungry for staffwith FMCG experience,’ said this journal two weeks ago.I hope they get the right ones, but the evidence is not promising. The last great wave of migration was after the financial world fellin love with marketing. Like most lovers they skimped on reconnaissance. ‘Whatis marketing?’ the bosses asked;so their gophers went to theodd seminar, read some books and articles and

7

few lunches.‘It’s allabout brands,’ they said. ‘ ~ h knows o about ose chaps who sell ~ e t e r ~ e nwas t , ’ the answer. one thing these fims have plenty o f was applied to theproblem. It is called other people’s money. And we all k n o what ~ ha~~ened ost of it went down the drain, because neither they nor most of those they imported asked one or two dull but relevant questions. Like,

feis fill of dis~p~ointments.So~eone I ~reuveneers.Their service was so bad she would sue th er who would help.

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

liked were amazingly badwhen it came I have foundthis an admirable guide overthe years. If a d v e ~ s i n gand

- and vice versa. For exammarketing pundits like it, disaster is highly likely ple, the experts cast scorn on the Goldfish card. Whaton earth has with ~ n a n cservices? i~ Indeed,what on earth have gold~shgot to do with them? It seemed such a zany idea that few believed it could ‘work.So last week I read the crazy Goldfish already has o Compare this with the admiration sho n FirstDirect.Afterover eight years it hasn’t done that much better than Goldfish in terns of customers. A friend in banking told me it has yet to turn a profit. Hard to - but even if it has, it took a hell o f a long time.And how about ‘The future is Orange’ - the smuggest advertising campaign ever? praised - but not much to write home about if you’reinterested in profit.

I confess (forI too suffer fromthe curse of being amarketing man) I was sceptical about the Goldfish venture, though I h o w Bruce Raper, who was

involved, ispretty bright, with an agreeable touch of craziness. It’s niceto be right occasionally, though. I said First Directwas vastly overrated years ago. Theexperts derided Branson’s move into financial services.I predicted it would succeed.I also saidthe RAC rebranding jaunt would end in tears. tr, few years ago I was conducting a seminar for some Unilever brand managers and assorted marketing functionaries - as self-s ow-alls as you’ll ever meet.One leant bbish’, he said. ‘I get tons of and throw it all away.’ profoundly irrelevant,’ a long hard fast day’s drive across this CO E! less liketheir custo ers than you lot.Yo rants, talking about the nt things like whet is, most marketers are ~bysmallyba n as they succeed they stop living re appealing to their colleagues, not their customers. : Nobody

knows whether the Goldfish credit card is~rofitableyet. ect is a direct banker. Orange sell mobile telephony. When, a years o f pretentious adve~ising,they started telling people what them better, they began to do well. TheRAC spent a monstrous amount of ing their ‘corporate id en ti^, -jargon for the way they present themselves visually- but continue^ to do badly.

DATE: JANUARYl998

A

few years ago someone at 0 ilvy & Mather asked thei er what consti~tedthe ideal client. In response to this n indest~ctiblebra

00.He

said, in the o impress the fool-

sho~-termsales promotion activity at theexpense of long-term investment e x p e n ~ i ~‘below re the line’ to disciplines like sales promotion and direct marketing. ow sweet that LBS has chosen a marketing N e a n d e ~ aas l their new boss. Whaton earth makes himlump sales ~romotionand direct marketing together? And why on earth does hesuppose direct m ~ ~ e t i can’t n g build a ‘franchise’? Has he been locked in a Harvard toilet for the last 10 years? 33

Direct marketing has built plenty of brands, like Direct Line, Goldfish, Lands’ End, L L Bean, Viking, First Direct and BNA. Paradoxically, Quelch talked If he ever logs on, he will notice all up the Internet and electronic commerce. Internet commerce is direct.And maybe a kindlyf ~ e n dshould tell him the entire economic basisof direct marketing is longterm: planning starts with estimating the value of a customer over time, rather than thevalue of a sale. Surely hemust have seen this concept mentioned by Peter Drucker before being stolen by his old colleague Theodore Levitt. Quelch has advised 30 companies in the Fortune 500, and co-authored (‘authored’is a US word for ‘written’)no end of books. He is adirector of several big fims. I wonder if he has ever risked hisown money in a business. Those who do swiftly adapt theory to reality. For instance, advertising agents rarely suggest direct marketing to their clients but they nearly all use (bad) direct mail and direct response ads to sell themselves. Even A ~ v e ~Age ~ shas ~ just ~ g banned the dopey phrase ‘below the line’ from its pages - seven yearsand three months after I condemned it in my first piece for this magazine. Are we so short of half-baked academicsthat we have to import other people’s leftovers?

3

like me, who immediately turn to the end of detective stones to find out whodunit. Almost e v e ~ ~ he n said g was eting, which is muchmore important than the ~ o r d s pictures, even if rather less interesting to work on. Here are 11 e~amples:

six per cent of the mailshotshadhis name and/or address antly ~ o n -gthough he carefully gavethem accurately. . He and his wife received identical mailshots in the same post with monotono~sf r e ~ ~ e n c y . 3. A slight variation on this wasteful techni~ueis to mail the S ce. This alsohappened often. ral mailshots were care~llypersonalized to the fam our house nearly six years a 5. ‘Sending the identicalmailfive times tothe same houseover a ur weeks - as at least one mailshotter did - be pen the eness of the words “your last chance”.’

favou~teexample,perhaps.) The firm who sent him lots of tiful brochures- all written in N o ~ e g i a n . 7. (But I quite liked this too.) ‘A bank wrote-to my 13-year-old son about financial planning and a travel company sent him a free wine offer.. .he may begetting cynical about direct mailat an early age.’ e same company mails you from different departments and sometimes ows your nameand birth date, and then forgets completely. 9. A companygives the name of alocaldealer or where to go to a presentation - several hours’ drive from your home. 10. The ma~shottergets his timing completely ~ o n g‘January . isthe least likely month to sell books. Moreare sold in the shops in December than at any other time.’ 11 ‘I have spent thousands of pounds with Thomas Cook and Austin Reed, but you wo~ldn’tknow it from their ~ailshots.’ had other interesting comments on: cheap mailings from companies who should not appear cheap; the need to vary copy to suit the au~ience (also an aspect of targeting); personalized letters which read as though addressed to a public meeting;patronizing or being d o ~ r i g hrude t to the customer; the fact that prize draws do work and the lack of imagination used in devising promotional offers. In two respects he is wrong. Prize draws almost invariably work, matno ter how rich the audience. And January is a very good month to sell anything, including books.But otherwise, I applaud everything he says. Even I can’tremember who m a s t e ~ i n d e dthe liar Clinton’s campaign, though to be paid to lie on behalf of someone who does it superbly without help speaks volumes.But I do rememberthis man’s face. He was having it off with the woman who did the same job for Clinton’s opponent. I think they got married. Maybe, instead of making love,they call each other shitty names all day long. And who the hell was Clinton’s opponent? I don’t rememberthat either; be for 15 minbut I do know who said that one day everyone would fmous utes. It was Andy Warhol. He started out,would you believe, in advertising. Some would say he never leftit. Maybe, boring as he was, he made more impact on our collective memorythan many US presidents. :

You may have noticed I regularly monitor the work of the ~ i n i s t Wasted Marketing Moneyand report on how they are fulfilling their remit. er all, your money as seller or buyer - and maybe both - is investe generously in their splendid initiatives. The ~ ~ e c ~ f which f ~ o r I, have r ad for 18 years, has just invited m become a subscriber with an offer so enticing I really must cancel my old subscriptionand accept. This will cost them money need1 see it as an inadvertent long-service reward. How didit happen? They have a record of me in Somerset but not London and have failedin the difficult task of de-duplication. This isunderstandable, unlike a silly letter from the EuropeanDirectMarketing Association,whichyou might think would have some clue about mailings, or even running an association. It begins 'Dear Siror Madam'. To be fair, sometime ago a reader suggested ' ~ r a ~ ocould n ' be male or female, but this is a special case.I sat for some time on the EDIvlA board, have spokenat several of their events, have written a column for yearsin their newsletter and have two books, one them to their lated into six European languages,which are regularly sold by members. I don't know what E D M do to other prospects or members (I am obviously a member) but if that's their idea of attention to detail they must initate the living shit out of them. I simply had^aqueasy feeling about the future of Europe, whichfirst surfaced years ago when I presented the prizes at their awards ceremony. It was a nightmare, because they made me doit in a sort of stuttering fashion. I conferred some prizes before the first course, others after the first course, moreafter the second course, yet more

r the third and, believe it or not, a final batch (which few w l ihave ced) after dinner when most were ~ o a ~ drunk. ng I can’t resist free offers.BT ~ o t toe me last year sayingI spent so much e. If you read these maudlin W I hate mobile phones, but greed swiftly resolved My PA,the increasingly franachine. I have neverus gh trouble a n ~ h a~oiding o~

er - nearly three month^ later.

In recent months I have undergone two gruelling experiences: speaking solo for three days with simultaneous translation to audiences in both Madrid and Barcelona.But nevermind mysuffering: what about the audiences’?Spanishcourtesyislegendary, but I was astonished how patiently they endured the endless hours.Not only did noone leave - they even applaudedat theend. Perhaps the applause expressed relief,but when they sent me nice letters afterwards I decided my mesmeric charm and oratory even survive being transmitted via another language. This ballooning complacencywas punctured when I learnt the seminars were free to members o f the SpanishDirectMarketing Association. Do people appreciate things more if they have to pay for them than if they get them free? Either way, only the bliss provided by vast piles of bullion willpersuade me to do it again. Nevertheless, Ioften find such events educational - for me if not the audience. This time I learnt about some direct mail by an electricity company, aimedat poor peoplewho can’t paytheir bills - folk who often don’t even have bank accounts. A scheme basedon their past bills was concocted. They could pay a monthly sum, which wouldnot go up for a year.The next year it would beadjusted up or down as appropriate. No more nasty letters or phone calls, and their budgeting would be much easier.It was very simple to enrol in thescheme: peoplejust had to sign. A wonderful idea- but when a mailingwas sent out the response was miserably low. Another mailing produced equally pathetic results. Then somebody decidedto try some research.(I am often amazed how rarely people who run unsuccessfiil direct mail programmesbother to contact a few recipients and learn the answers to such strategic questions as ‘Do you 39

remember receiving the mailing?’ not to mention ‘Did you understand it?$ and ‘If not, why not?’) In this case the mailings had gone to theman of the family, but in such households it seems the woman usuallyhandles the finances. These women re unli~ely toopen their husbands’ mail - and even less likely to if it looked as though it might be a bill. A new m~iling was aimed at the omen. Many people imagine men are

Since most of youare spending more on direct mailthan ever, youm like to know something about what works best. The place to find out ~~~~~0~ ~ o ~ ~~ aa r ~ (1992), ~ ~ a ~splendid g s book put together by t publisher of ~ o ’ ~s a ~ ~a- not~ ~ to be ! ~ confused ~ with g the UK‘s ~ a ~ ~ a - which ~~ is, ~ ? I believe, ~ ga copy ofthe original. This book analyses’71of the best US mailingsever - which the editors describe as ‘Grand Controls’,with priceless advice, much of it from their creators. Your ‘control’ mailing isthe one that works best for you, so these mailings are those that have beaten everything they were tested against for the longest time in the world’s largest, most competitive market. One, for the ~u~~ S ~ e e ~ ~has o now ~ ~ been a ~ ?workingwith only minor changes for23 years, pullingin about $1.3 billion. Many of their characteristics maysurprise you. Not one tried to conceal its intentions by masquerading as personal mail, 63 had messages on the envelope and 83 per cent had window envelopes. Most were inserted so the beginning of the letter is seen first. Almost every letter ignored the amateur’s rule that you shouldn’t exceed one page in length. The average length of letter to sell a consumer magazinewas 3.3 pages; for business magazines, 2.1 pages. To sell a newsletter the average was 4 pages; for a home study course, 6 pages. - and Free offerswere the rule, whether to consumers or business people were even more commonin the lattercase. As you would expect,the word

’ was plastered all over the outer envelopes, and was used in 71 per

money now’. Perhapsthis is one reason why only

at! itself.

at! any more. Its founder has i ~ eai^ and is still ut the pu~lication carries on, renamed ~ ~ sDirect w o ~ reading. h

I adore American lingo. They have a much livelierapproach to our not

always common language, as my American wife sometimesdemonstrates during our more heated exchanges. Maybe our culture is less able to innovate, but for whatever reason, I collect pithy lines like‘If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys’ - which cameto mind when considering, not for the first time, why directmarketing has a bad reputation. Direct marketers hate being associatedwith ‘junk’. But most door-to-door, direct mail and direct response advertising is junk. Ill conceived, carelessly executed, poorly targeted, it does the industry no credit.I don’t thinkthe practitioners alone areto blame, though.Clients who invest- or donot, as the whim t&es them - are guilty. First, they equate direct marketing with direct mail, whichto them often signifies sales letters. Since they themselves write letters every day, they feel any fool can write a salesletter. Having written more than most - and just about everything else, from speeches to scripts to books - I can tell you that writing a good sales letter is no easier than writing an adve~isementor commercial. Maybeharder. Few people can write persuasivelyto large numbers without losing that essential individual feeling. A second reason is the way most clients are used to paying for advertising.Althoughchangingnow, traditionally it has been pretty painless because o f the commission system. It almost feelsas though they are getting thethinking and creative work fornothing. So when direct marketing started to attract their interest, most clients naturally felt it too should either be ‘free’, liketheir advertising, or as part of the service their agency provided, or as a low cost add-on, to be furnished in thesame way as media analysis or sales literature. 3

This a t t i ~ d was e exacerbated by agencies’ feelings that direct marketing was at best merely a ‘line e~ension’ or, at worst, a threat totheir expertise, to be devalued. hrther problem is that m ~ sales y promotion houses claim to be expert at direct mail, which few are, and churn out mailings u n e n c ~ b e r e d by thought or knowledge. Evenworse, quite a feware unen~mberedby a

:~

t h Q umitten ~ h a fewyears ago, much of the above remai~st

u n o DATE: NQVENBER 1993

dio, or select discounts forproducts f e a ~ r e din thecommercials. Such marvels engage the lively imag~ationsof practitioners to an extraordinary degree. Most are obsessed with the kture,while few concern themselves with the past, from which much can be learnt, or the resent, when much is adequate or even laughable. To6 often the industry is attempting aerial acrobatics when at best it can barely crawl. ~onsiderhow nadequate most remain in thehigh s ~ a t ofe address^ ~ conferences I would show an envelope addressed t 5

that had on it ‘personal’, ‘personlich’and ‘personel’ - three different languages used in thehope that one would be relevant. Impersona~~ation in action. Sadly to thisday I am collecting ludicrously misdirected communications, like the one addressed to my secretary recently offering a cure for baldness. Denise may have her shortcomings, though I have noticed few, but this could never be oneof them. By one of those fickle freaks of fate, some of the worst offenders are direct marketing ‘professionals’.anya quiet chucklemaybe heard as c o ~ o s exchange c ~ ~ ~ stories about the duplication of communications from the Direct Marketing Centre or the inadequacies of the UK Direct Association list. A splendid instance occurred latelywhen Colvin Directwrote to promise they would add punch to my direct mail and make it personal. They certainly knocked meout by the clever ployof addressing me as a hermaphror/Ms D Bird. Understandable¶ perhaps, if they were wr Drayton, conceivably a female name, but as I say, they wrote to me a I am astonished that they did not have the wit to do the obvious: omitthe M r / ~altogether s and assume I would respondto D Bird. Maybe allthis is just another case of the tailor being the worst-dressed man in the room, but I find it depressing that alleged experts can’t get the basic things right. x

r of the bean"counte~ at

cept, but rather on the damage it does to many marketing efforts. The mere phrase 'below-the-line' implies that all activities under such a category, evenif they are necessary, certainly do not require muchintellectual fire-power. They should be accomplishedwith as little expendi~reand ef5ort as possible so we can all get back to themore important matter of the music track on our new W commercial. If you findthis example far-fetched,let me tell you that in a meet^ long ago,that is preciselywhat happened: we spent 57 minutes discu the music track for my client'snew commercial and just three cussin the direct marketing which produces mostof their business. y this sort of thin you, I haue somes ~ p a t h with that thecommercial in question cost about as much as a Spike Lee m o ~ e . However, direct marketin in particul~uses highly i n t ~ s i v emedia like the telepho~e. To send out badly aimedstuff th reflect yourbrand values throu h these media isa very ex

US research by Starcha while ago revealedthat customers in C a ~ f o r ~ a

were exposed to 623 a ~ v e ~ i s i nimpressions g daily, of which they only remembered 9 favourably 24 h”ourslater. Three actually lefta bad impression. Conversely,my agency discoveredthat one mailingto frequent fliers was recalled by’74 per cent after four months. ~e repeated the research for a cosmetics mailing:the figure was 70 per cent after three months - so the first finding was not an abe~ation. Cato the Elder used to end all his speeches with ‘ ~ e ~ est e ~C u~ ~a ~ a ~ o ’ (Carthagemust be destroyed)until eventually allthe other with him and did destroy Carthage. Now, ensuring your directmarket in^ receives the same level of attention as your advertising is not as critical as the Thir think it important enough to return to from time to time in the months that lie ahead, in the hope that e v e n ~ a l l y s t a n ~will a r ~rise s ap include this piece partly for sentimental reasons, as it was the first I wrote for ~ u r ~ ebut t partly ~ ~ ~ because , ei ht and a half yearslater it is still relevant. Change in this world is much slowerthan we think. ost direct mail is arbage, but the good stuff still makes a very stron pression. A letter my agency sent to older customers for a bank a few months ago was recalled by 97 per cent a month later. The client who spent so much time on the music track was the topadvertising man at American Expressin New York. Beinga gentleman, he actually apologized to me forwasting my time. :I

Now, you might imagine that the readers of A ~ v e ~ sAge, i ~ gfired by these thoughts, would in 1955 immediatelyhavemade an earnest endeavour to move into targeted marketing, that they would have concentrated on the wealthy few, offering them individually tailored products based upon their personal needs. Of course, nothing of the sort happened, except to some extent at Time magazine, where they seem to have done rather well sincethen. Most marketers have continued to operate along exactlythe same lines as they did then, as though the mass market isthe only thing that matters. In this country, for instance, they operate under the delusion that it makes sense to spend E20 million in mass media, sellingshares in the public utilities, when much the same results could be achieved through the free medium of the regular bill. However, all is not lost. If Peter Drucker is correct in thinking that it takes 40 years fora new development to come to full fruition in our society, then we shallwitness - in about five years- the triumph of the age of individualized, i~telligent,cost-effective marketing. None too soon - but too late for some. : Of course, I was

fartoo optimistic. I wrote this in May 1991.There isnow, in November 1999, a great deal of hot air about ‘one-to-one’ marketing, but very little done. Names and addresses continue to be erroneous; people who have not shopped in a store for a year still get cliched letters thatbegin with the turgid formula, ‘As a valued customer’. Only the other day one marketer commented that she was often written to by firms who assume she is a man. h d of course marketers continue to shy away fromthe perils o f having the results of their efforts measured.No wonder, when you see someof the antics they get up to.

O

O

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DATE: MAY 1 9 9 1

of the US Association of National ng Association took place,the former 11 even ~ ~ v e ~ s i ~

Ishall viewthe carnage with e~uanimity,having spent thankless years eaching the direct marketing gospel to my advertising brethren at Ogilvy Mather. They paid lip-service,but little more, as one story ~lustrates.In the mid-80s we invited the creative director o f 0 & M to speak to our direct people. Nearly all my stafl‘cameto hear what he had to say, whichwas trivial but delivered quite well. David Ogilvyasked me,‘Is there going to be a return match?’ Isaid, ‘Idoubt it,’ as I had seen few signs of intelligent osity at theagency. However, eventuallyone took place.Of their 300 sta five turned up. ed. A while ago an ex-Ogilvy ofice MD told me he up ‘above the line’, adding h a l f - ~ ~ t i l‘not y , that phrase means anything any more’.o though this man is no fool,I’d bet all the teain China to a bent tin watch that he has never seriouslystudied

thing other than advertising. Such curiousmyopiaexplainswhymost ‘through-the-line’agencies, being founded by advertising people, do so poorly - and even the successful ones don’t do direct work well. I have tried to give up my evangelistic practices,but maybe it’s worth restating why direct marketing has grown and will grow, whatever fancy labelpeopleslap on it - relationship marketing, loyalty marketing, one-to-one ~ a r k e t i n gand so on. First, you know rather than guess what your investment r e t u ~ s .I remain astonished that anyone other than a half-wit thinks it wise to spend money without knowing the results except in terms of awareness and attitude shift, when a keyed response device tells you exactlywhat pays and what doesn’t. You will learn, for instance, that your customer is three and eight times more responsive than a similar non-custo that a promotional responder is ce as likely to buy. Second, your database reveals which people are m pro~table,so YOU can build a stronger nd with them rather thansquander money indisc~minately.Thus, ~ ~ t i s h ays sell over26 million flights a year but concentrate on 750, tomers. Third, since the database shows you what characterizes your current customers you canlearn how to locate new ones, because the customer you want is likethe customer you’ve got. These inescapable realitiesare why lip-service is not enough: realunderstanding is requiredif youwish to survive the next 10 years as competition sharpens and the focus mives more and more to accountability.

DATE: FEBRUARY 1 996

company, leaving me helpless despite the fact that counsel told me I had an ccable case.I simply wasn’t rich enough to sit it out through legal proThe skills requiredto do hisjob were well definedby an infinitely better jou~alist,Nicholas Tomalin,who said it only required ‘rat-like c u n ~ n ga, plausible m ~ n e rand , a little literary ability’. Ihave more s ~ p a t h with y m u c ~ a ~ of n gthe Sun or even the S u n ~ a ySport than with the S of the ~ u a s i - q u a lpress. i~ least Keeling spared us the chopping-do~-the-forests routine - irrelo counts, since the paper used for print comes from forests ing replenished faster than they are used up, and the paper direct mail is minuscule compared to thatgobbled up by popuitor should commission him to examine the reasons why natio~alpress has for sometime had a declining circulation,whilst year er year surveys indicate that direct mailin this country wins more acce tance from both business and public.

ter, theprint and broadcast media are still churning out e sort of stuff, direct mail continues to thrive and I am honin Keeling, I hope, is unemployed.

5

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I don’t knowhow many of you study the stock market, but I know is you must buy low and sell high. The problem of course is that nobody ever seems to know either when a rising market has yet to falling markethas hit bottom. The people who got it most spectac~larlyright were the Rothsc legendis that in 1 15 they bought shares ama~inglycheaply on the London StockExchange just before the news of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo became generally known. Allegedly they knew about it before anyone else through the advanced technology of a carrier pigeon - though I have heard that this is all just a good story. Whether that is so or not, I r e ~ e m ~ e r e d it when reflectingon the monstrous regiment of companies who are now selling insurance direct, inspired in many cases by the triumphs of Wood, late of Direct Line. At a loss what to do onemorning, I analysed allthe display adve~ising in a recent issue of the ~ f f~ ~f ~Nearly f y~ ~20. per cent of it was selling insurance directly. This leads meto conclude that there will be tears before bedtime for manyof these firms. Indeed, sincedrafting this I see one has dropped out of the field. This market is a perfect example of the classic business case study where lots of people do some research (that is, see host a of red Direct Line phones on TV, followed by announcements of Mr Wood’s astonishing income) and then separately conclude they should go into the same business. One reason why I am rather pessimistic is that it is not only the same business, but they’re all offering the same proposition: we’llsaveyou

money. No ludicrous device has been ignored in an effort to favourite is the admiral taking his sabre to slash rates, though the bulldog has a certain kitsch charm. I must confess an interest here. I was approached by motoring a organization some months ago that didn’t knowwhat todo about their insurance Their pricesweren7tvery keen,and price was what was selling. I pointed out, itseemed to me reasonably,that whilst most people are inter,and nobody likes paying for insvance, there are always some rently and might be motivatedby other things - like better

dvertising I proposed. ~ a i n l yI rea. It wouldhave cost just €~,00~€3,000 to test the ness knows how much moneythey could have 0 million

cleverer

o o persuaded d the Bank ofScotland to back himin settin t Line, a firm selling motor insurance directly. Their symbol was hone on wheels. He made a fortune as a result, and was widely ot justin Britain, but all overthe world. The timorous motoring organization I mention was the RAC. : Peter ~

9

h from a typical handout. ‘Strategies- how to follow on from objectives. Inthis case we are dealing with achie plans that may be long-term strategic plans, but strat~giesd he longer term, altho~ghlogically, as they derive from objecS should beconsistent with the strategic approach.’ uce doesthat mean? I can’t get my head round it at all. Can be very happy to send a bottle of decent wine to anyone able fit. I will be evenhappier if somebo~y at the CIM takes a ok at their teachers and their teaching. y of unemployed bus conductors could bunch will, if unchecked, fatally poiso

honest and say that this has

, I may be one of th

n o 0 DATE: DECEMBER 1 F396

ote suggesting these pages are ‘preoc~pied of other people’s money,g n somewhere else. I’ve n ing has ousted bottom of the rofessional com~etencetable’. Thisisunfair to our newshounds, 1can onlyreport the facts. It the claims of social workers, economists and teachers. Surely we can’t beas culpable as many of them? At least we don’t destroy families, cripple entire national economies, or render whole g~nerations illiterate, morally nd derelict. Indeed,weevenmake up some of these disasters by taking ni ates off the streets to write impenetrable, jargonents and marketing plans, which luckily for them no one reads. Some professions’ sins find them out more surely than others’. remembers the names of the horde o f economists who wrote to atcher saying she was wrong in whatshe was doingwith the economy? Did any losetheir jobs as a result? Wow many ‘caring workers’are clapped in jail for the misery they inflict on families? But each ~ s ~ s t i bnug~ d i n that architects design testifies, until it falls down. or is ~ e m o ~ s h etod ,their bad taste and incompetence,just as for us each sight ofthe sales graph does much the same.

It takes longer, though^ for Sir James Stirling to design a maste~iece

than itdoes to reposition a soft dri&, and longer still for anyoneto notice the roof leaks, by which time another dumb committeehas coughed up for s o m e t h ~ gelse on the other side of the world. With us, the process is quicker; in under two years the average marketi director has been hired, had a go, and either been found out, or done well d moved ahead. But why do the duds get good jobs in thefirst place? Oddly enough, people often take less carehiring senior marketers than secretaries, which is maybe why secretaries keep their jobs longer. The criis, ninetimes out of ten: has the person done this sort of job before, W good is this person? One obvious question is rarely asked:if the ood, why is heor she looking fora job? Th S employers. A friend in Sydney once r firm was about to hire, unvetted, an English direct just he asked. ‘A fine man for a fast tax loss,’ Ireplied, since he had lose his previous firmso much moneyso quickly they went broke. eople are kicked out because their firms lack patience. the effects of years of folly be overcome in 18 months? 0th didates for the chop thrive unpunished. Remember Pepsis~uaRdering$300 million or was it $500 million on ‘relaunching’their product in new cans, much of it wa~tedon silly gimmicks likepainting Concorde blue fora day? When sales slumped was the big boss fired? No. Yet he’s presided over years ecline. Was the person responsible fired? No - promoted. F ~ n old y business, this. : Isee Ihad

forgotten when I wrote the introduction to this book that therewards for failureat Pepsi Cola are also promotion, whichshows how similar they really are to theirgreat rival, Coke.

second wife Anna yearned to paint, to which end she to course for a year before going to Maidstone Art College M1ti ,poor darling, because she wanted to d they scornedsuchtrivia, concentra teaching their charges to express themselves. To be fair, Anna used to express herselfama~inglywell, if mymemo our spectacular rows is any that wasn’t quite what her teachers had in mind. Theywere eener on the sort of self-expression displayedby ~ ~ d s t o n e raduate Tracey Emin, recently escribed as ‘one of ~ntain’sforemost ists’ in The Big Issue. mind uncluttered by c u n o s i ~ about a n ~ h i except n ~ herself,Tracey’s impressive marketing skills far exceed her artistic talents. She even has her own museum near at er loo where she proves beyonddoubt that she didn’t waste her time learning to draw, concentrating rather on being ‘fiercely creative’. Her dreary self-abso~tion makes her the only possiblesubject of all her work, and her latest masterpiece, E v e ~ o I’ve ~ eEver ~~e~~~i~~ 2963-2995, isrevealinglyvast.She bullshits fluentlyabout her ‘painful, joyousand u ~ ~ t e ~ ndirect’ g l y art in that phoney, s t r e e ~ s eay best calculated to beguile idiot critics and es. ~pparently? her inspiration wells up from noo r ~ i n a ~ artistic source, but fiom an abortion, an experience after which, she eloquently notes, ‘You can’tmcking paintings, not honestly.. . Isto ed making art ‘cos Iwas so lir aff at it.’ If her current ~ u v r is e little has changed. Who started all this nonsense? Take a bow, Marcel Duch surrealist prankster. One day after a drunken lunch he submi~eda urinal to

an art exhibition in Philadelphia as a joke, signing it R Mutt, 1917. Things in Philadelphia beingthe way they are, it was accepted. From then on it is but a modeststep to saying you can take anything - Gilbert and George’s turds, for instance - and say it’s a work of art. We’ve comea long way from William Hogarth’sapproach, yet I fear the seminal works of MS Emin, amusing though they are, may not last the course as well as his. This year the is tercentenary of his birth, and it’s ironic that ~e Big Issue hasn’t noticed it, since if any painter’s work reflectsstreet life, his does. It’s more than ironic -it’s disgraceful- that whilst lou~mouth Tracey has her museum, no major exhibitionof Hogarth, oneof this country3 greatest painters, is plannedas far as I know. It is interesting to reflect how the oddities of today’s education affect the work o f those of us who communicate to sell. We already have asituation where many copywriters,weaned on arestricted diet of 30-second W commercials, are exhausted by the effort of ~ i t i n more g than 90 words, baffled the mysteries of the apostrophe and can often only determine with difficulty the in~nitelysubtle differences b e ~ e e singular n and plural. d it’s years since I met a young art director who could draw well. Come back, Anna: all is forgiven. : Only

the other day, reading about the Turner Prize, I saw that Tracey Emin continues to be regarded as one of Britain’s foremost young artists, though I have no ideahow many more people she has generously favoured with her charms lately. God knows what Turner would have thought. Anna has not come back, which is just as well, really.

n was si~ni~cantly advanced byme operators, somenone too S to bemade in Europe,

arlo’. His host showed him the ~ e w over the harbour and asked if he liked it. ‘I’ve got to. I paid for it,’ the operator replied. Some of the US scams were hilarious. Slumberslim,for instance, would lose youpounds of ugly flab‘through the miracle of auto-o~idation’.When I asked the genius responsible what that was, he said,‘Sweatin .’ It was legal because you could make outra~eousclaims book and get away with it,as they are only the author’s opinions. (You still can.) The~ a r a n t e was e brilliant: if you’renot happy, just tear the cover off the book, send it back and you’ll get your money back. (You didn’t.) This ventually found hisnatural home sellingp o m o ~ a p h yin ~ e ~ a r k . y favourite scamp was Monroe. He was a superb cop would have done well anywhere. U ~ o ~ u n a t ehe l ysacred fkom a ~ p p ~ n g disability: he simply couldn’tbring himself to tell the truthS i t was at all

possible to lie. Onead he ran sold fast-growingtrees that did exactlythat grew extremely fast. That wasn’tenough for him.He showed a manstandin front of a coniferabout 10 times higher than him. The headlinewas, ‘Just plant - and stand back!’ Monroemade loadsof money but never kept it. It all went to his lawyerto keep himout of jail. I wonder how much we’ll end up paying for the UK Government’s dishones^. I only ask because of something I commented on last year: the right of politicians to tell whoppers in election advertising - legally. I quoted lies about hospital waiting lists (now longer than ever) and school class sizes(now larger than ever). If this ~overnmenthad to withstand the scrutiny poor old Monroe was subjected to, they’d all be in jail double-quic~. I saw recently that the Minister of Consumer Affairs, somebody called G r i ~ t h swants ’ to stop holiday firms ~uotingmisleading prices. Scandalt how does it compare with finding out my children are bein or my old Gran will pop her before she reaches ~ospital? When ~rifflthsstroll boldly into er 10 to nick MrBlair? ocrisy. Look at all t e flannelthey unloaded n’s new ISA rip-off. As ,he has salted away mountains of money ofTshore. Legalor not, I wonder how many people feel - as I do - that if he were as poor as the rest of us, he’d never get away with it. Puttin him in charge of how our money should be invested is like appointing the head of the Medellin Cartel as a drug ‘tsar’. I suspect what theUK needs isan opposition party. : Since I wrote this, everything has got worse. People with vested interests are giving more money than ever to theLabour Party. More people are waiting for operations. More children are being crowded into school classes. ISAS are a flop becauseno one understands them - and they’re a worse deal than the things they replaced. And there is still no effective opposition party.

pose one of the rincipal objectives of a columnist shoul reaction - the ore vehement the better. This can achieved by disputing ~ r r e n wisdom, t which Idid a few wee porting planning from the adve ect mar~etingagencies. My iconoclasm earned me t w o outraged letters to ~ a r the~verye next~ ~ ~ ~ lus abasiliskglarefrom the Head of P l a n ~ n gat 0 very next day. A1 concerned were aghast, I supose, that if such a view became popular, it might lead to a w ~ v e of ~ n e m p l o ~ e amongst nt planners. So I should makeone point clear: it is neither planning nor planners I object to the first is essential, the second tend to be intelligent - it is plan^ separate ~ n c t i o nor department. In the letters three a r ~ e n t emerged. s The first can be quickly despatched: one correspondent inferred, with no evidence, that I wa interested in response and not the impact of the marketer. Thosewh ze this is alderd dash as well as being irrelevant. a r ~ m e n tequally , ludicrous,was that surely creatives couldn’t be expectedto understand consumers. I would respond that itis precisely distin~ishesgood creative people was that advertising would go d at tripe this is, simply referto the OS, when Doyle ickinson 81Pearce, and others were creating adver-

tising distinctly better thanmost of the stuff churned out today. One apposite example is John WebsterBMP, of one of the cradles o~planning.He was producing superb workbefore the days of planning, as were Charles Saatchi, Alan Parker, Tony Brignull and others. Current wisdomapplauds planning: indeed, agencies like ChiatDay and ~iede& n Kennedy in theUS have imported British planners to instituteit. But iswhat is right for advertisingright for direct marketing? Copying what. advertising agencies are doing, nomatter whatspecious intellectual allure may be on offer, is pretty dumb: as a group they are not doin their direct marketing cousins. lanning was introduced durin the fat years of the early 70s, when budgets were growing and laxly supe~ised.But today most clientsare cutting costs and reducing layersand ~nctions.Generally agenciesare wise to mirror their clients; whygo the other way? In short, I am allin favour of planning, but have gravedoubts about having a separate departm~nt.Many clients find direct market in^ agencies appeal because they have a simple approachto business without unnecesfrills - or departments. This attraction is goingto increase rather than d i m i ~ s has the present slump endures. Oh, and by the way, at a recent meeting of the Database Marketing Group it became abundantly clear that direct marketers are not sure what planning is anyhow.Some saw it as preparing a mailing;others viewed it as making a marketing plan. How can you successfully institute something most people cannot define?

A few years ago signs started popping up proclaiming the ‘mission’ of the agricultural college next door to my country home, a fine institution that had flourished for decadeswithout such flim-flam. They read Our ~ r i o r i ~I ’don’t . knowhow they arrived at this - maybe to d i s t i n ~ i s h themselves from collegeswho believe quality doesn’tmatter at all - but it was a good excuse foran article. Shortly afterwards the signs disappeared. I felt mildly pleased, even foolishly thinking perhaps someonehad read my piece. They must have spent almost as much removing the signs as erecting them. Such folly is one reason whyy no matter how much money is squandered, education will not improve until stupid ‘managers’ are replaced by intelligent teachers who arrange their own affairs, as they did when people (including aspirant teachers) left school able to read, write and count. God alone knows when this or any government will learn this. Alas, I learnt my pleasure was unjustified when walking my dog through the college’s pleasant grounds recently. The signs had onlyvanished because they have a new mission statement that couldn’t conceivablyfit on anything smaller than a 48-sheet poster. Imagine the agonizing, scratching of heads and i n t e ~ i n a b l ecommittee meetings about commas and adjectives it took to produce something as ill written as this: G

Welcome to C a n ~ g t o nCollege. The mission at Cannington College is: to provide quality assured education and training, for people and businesses

involved with plants, animals,or e n ~ r o ~ e n sensitive t ~ y land use. E v e ~ o n eof 16years or over is welcome at C a ~ ~ College, o n irrespectiveo f b a ~ ~ r o u nAd belief . in equal o p p o ~ ~ t iunderpins es thewhole ~ ~ o s o p h y for the e n ~ o ~ eand n tfor health and saf‘ety. of the college, as does a concern Our hallmarkisafriendlyapproach and aconcernfor the ~ d i ~ d u ~ , combining a sense of fun with an innovative approach to quality assured education and training.

ority’ was hardly original,but itwas at least short and clear. Saying you welcome anybody i~espectiveof background isat thevery least tomisinte~retation and evenabuse.What,for inst alcoholic with no disce~iblesigns of literacy incre~ibleamount of time and energy is wasted on this sort of w by semi-literate, underemployed posers who should be given * . re asurable results. It is ahappy p l a y ~ r o u nfor ~lazy The b e a u t i ~priory l which houses part of the college Irefer to was built e when one ofthe few successkl committees in history was ducing perhaps the most beau ti^ book in English - the ion of the Bible. Isay erhaps’ because the Book of Comaybe even more movi It had its origins rather earlier, in ere’s a sign from a hotel bedroom I stay in opposite one of haunts, Hampton Court. ~~e endeavour at all times to operate our business ronmentally aware ~ a n n ewithout, r of course, detracting from high standards of service and facilities or your personal comfo~. t, however, achieve our goal w i ~ o u your t co-operation, and below are a few waysin which youcan assist us if youso wish.’ That, believe it or not, introduces a plea to reuse your bath-towels. I sometimes fear we will all end up drowned in thiscreeping swamp of litergarbage - a point I have made severaltimes before, but will not stop making whileI write these columns.

In the office ofthe boss of Eurostar hangs a sign: ‘Rule 1:The customer is always wrong. Rule 2: When in doubt, refer to Rule 1.’ Actually, Imade that r as I can see it’show they think. A while agomy daughter, her baby and I had alittle jaunt toFrance. the way backdiffkult train connections meant I had to ring Eurostar in Paris to change our pre-booked train. No problem, they said, as long as I turned up a little in advance. Anyhow,the day deteriorated sharply and our train to Paris to link up with Eurostar was an hour late. Very thought~lly,though, SNCF handed out envelopes to all of us to get a compensatory rebate, an idea our rail firms should copy. ~e got to the Gare du Nord in plenty of time for the train - but not to change the tickets, said the booking-office dragon. Iexplained the problem, and her magnificently moustachioed ‘chef’ appeared. He said I must pay for mydaughter and myself - E200 - though he magnanimouslylet the baby on free. Iprotested. It wasn’t my fault I was late but SNCF’s - and showed my rebate envelope as proof. He was unmoved and suggested Iwrite and complain. I suspect he was smiling inwardlywith glee becausehe knew the complaints department’s mission statement - Rule 1: Reject all complaints. Rule 2: Refer to theboss’s rules. However,they do have a profound sense of the ridiculous. They sent me two free tickets to the first-class lounge. When someone’s talking about E200 down the drain the offer of a coupleof cups of free coffee as is close to aninsult as you couldmanage, besides ensuring the aggrieved party tells everyone heor she knows what arrogant tossers you are.

~ o m p their ~ e peflormance with that o f Compass International, a relaly small firm. They did all they could to solve a minor problem. I had decided in a moment of madness to have 50 bags emblazoned with our 0 . They had to be bigand strong enough to ca usual loads o f business ~umph. en we got them we were d, but the clips a ~ a c ~ the n gsho~lderstraps to thebags were enough to bear a really heavy load,and tended to come apart. epeatedly to solve the problem. Even~ally,not only did they replace the ~ ~on each ~ bag, g but also s gaveus a 50 per cent refund on the rice of our order - which we used to buy more,better-made bags. They probably made more profit. They improved their pro~uct.They n very happy.And they ensured that thenext time I want a meet anybody else that does, I’ll mention their name. On he next time I want a loadof old bollocks,I shall turn with e com~laintsdepartment at Eurostar.

7

the service which business renders. o one makes mistakes on purpose. owing this should allow us to concentrate on c o ~ e c ~ the n g mistake rather thanmaking Me miserable for the mistake maker.If he is the right sort, nothing you can say or do to him will make him feel any worse than he does already. aking mistakes is very easy. All you haveto do is swear off usiness weare people talkingto people, and that’s what running through our fin eative person is more i ted in earnestness thanin es more satisfaction out o f converting people than in e a friendbeforeyoucan

effectivel~makehim a

kes a real genius to keep hish ctive originali~in advertising is not the creation o f S and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and ictures into new rel~tionships. un ~ t h o u sell t gets nowhere; but sell without f im tends to become obnoxious. Steep yourselfin your subject, work like hell,and love, honour and obey your hunches. urnett is now a great agency again, but they went through some rough years when they forgot about Leo. Others could’lea~ from that. During the years I worked for Ogilvy & Mather, a surprising number of their people were dismissi~eof their founder and his thinking, but, as he once said to me, ‘I made their bed. They lieon it.’ : ~eading through this compendium, I see I mention David 0 more than anyone else.No surprise. He had more influenceon more people in advertising than anyone elsethis century. &d adve~isingis the partof marketing that interests most people.

DATE:DECEMBER 1993

Remarkable people see things more clearly than us second-raters. Nine years agoDavid Ogilvy made a speechon recruitment to thepanjan of his group, of whom I was then one. A friend had asked how his d might get into adve~ising.David suggested tryi ency,, said mock-modestly. he onths later he asked what had appened. It seems she never even got an i n t e ~ e w because she didn’t havean To the distinctly muted hila^^ of those present, who probably introduced it, David said this rule meant that nowadays hew o ~ d n ’get t a job with his own frm; and what’s more, because our clients paid newly qualifiedMBAs twice as much as we did,we would get the dross. He prescribed a typically trenchant and paradoxical course: ‘Hire people your clients would neverdream of hiring.’ Thoughto be honest, since BAS are taught how to run things before they know how they work, I strongly suspect wise firms should never hire them under any circumstances. Finding peopleand helping them do well is the hardest, yet I think most impo~antjob in business. You never really know where they’re going to pop up, so you must constantly keep your eyeopen for likelyprospects, no matter how improbable, including people who themselves may never have considered they might do well. One day a PA who had been fired c m e in distress asking meto help find her a job. Althoughshe had some publishing experience, it was hard work

5

c o p ~ i t i ~but g , a yearlater she won an award and ame a very good creative direct0 other find w ~ someone s first an average receptionist, th an ~1-focused artbuyer before bein good copy. Shewas a creativedirector in 18 months. A n, a PhD. I asked She liked hisjob and he said, ‘Not parhim what he’d really like to do, and he said, ‘Be a

n~

~was one ~ - a

I have no recipe for success in this: just trial, error and luck. m e most people I dwell on my successes morethan my mises but I think the prime r e ~ ~ s iist an e insatiable interest in peo S.

successhl librarian, Steve Harrison, is now a partner in his own a ~ e nwhich ~ , does very well. Oddly enough, one of his partners also used to work with me - but I can claim nocredit for his success. : The

rked? Not enough hours S too many words - too tings; too many people that takes too long to get to thepoint, doesn’t get to the misses the point. this: ‘The crucial resource U deliver the desired business plan outcomes is, as ever, the people resource.’ Roesn’tthat mean: ‘You need oodpeople to get oodresults’?The culprits are consultants called Results Inte~ational.They sent me their newsletter, m e ~ e s~ ~ ~ ~~from s which ~ I ~ e ~ ~ , quisitely t o ~ o u passage. s g isquite good judging by the newsletter -but if youhire will you have to read and listen to presentations, letters and reports that are all, like that sentence, M1 of jargon and twice as long as necessa~? how much w l iit cost youto be thus tormente~? Do you really have enough time in your day to read about ‘How people buy into your Agency ‘Vision?’ (Mine has always been ‘WO lunch, then go home.’) Is there not more to life than ‘detailed ~uantitative feedback from current clients about how you perfiom against their riorities’? Do I really need a Culture Audit - whether it is a priceless ‘dia tool’ or even a ‘sophisticatedlistening tool’? Maybe. But ifthey can e can think properly? concisely or well; what makes youi m a ~ n they Excuse such intemperate defence of the English language; but it a shame that people who clearly have someintelligent if not entirely new

77

cannot express them clearly, or even answer their o w n questions. , for example, to the back p e of their bulletin. A heading read, Results?’ Sincethe bulletin d no accompan~ngletter, I wanted to know. I was thwarted. They began: ‘The birth of our Web site was not (as some may havespotted) closelyfollowedby our Web pa .res~tsconsultan~.com going n there was lots more stuffabout them, but none of it much help. nine consultants, which is w o n d e ~-l for them, perhaps. But ey, I wondered, becomin frustrated. Well, they told me what - even more vaguely; aguely; about their i n t e ~ a t i o nnetwork ~ ey’ve been in business; how they want tobe seen by ‘the indusver foundout what I wanted to know: who As I say, allthis started when they sent me the bulletin with no c o ~ e ~ n g letter. Such a letter, explaining (amongst other things) who you are and your reason for writing, is essential. A startling number of marketers don’t ut what you havejust read shows what happens when a columnist with time on hishands gets such a mailing. He says things to his PA like, ‘Who are they? Why have they sent this to me? What do they want?’ swers, please, in every mailing. S

shrewdly, the boss o f the firm I was so rude about invited me to lunch and got me to write an article for him.

n o n OAT€: JULY 1 9 9 8

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I think I once revealedin the pa es of ~ u that I spent ~ a mornin ~ e s from the advic f the celebrated Dr the ~ 0benefiting heard of him, but he was a psychologist who coined oneof those jazzy phrases well calculated to have big co~orationsreachi ogenitors much richer much

zzy phrase was ‘mo-

nitely more imporfamous u ~ e was r ~‘A~convertible is like a mistress’, which roba ably cost Ford or Gene 1Motors untold thous It probably also led to the popular parlour e in which customers are asked to compare a brand or firm with some animalor person. I have never understood what benefit could possiblyder but it can lead to h i l ~ o u results. s In one case a group of S their organization t o a cockroach, scorpion and one or two other beasties you wouldn’t care to meet closeup late at night, let alone work for five days a week. Many employees probablyregard their finns inmuch the S I don’t blamethem. AT&T started theyear by ~ n o u n c i th n~ fire 40~000employees, whichhad a g r a t i ~ n gefZect upon their share price, and no doubt their chairman’s bonus. When queried it erne had been pluckedout of thin air because it sounded irnpressi~e,though not, I suspect, to thepoor sods who’ll get fired.

A lot of this has to do with pernicious theories like d o ~ - s i z i n g , right-sizing and, a subject I have discussed before, re-engineering. studies give an’ ideaof how wellthese nostrums, often peddled by who have rarelyrun a n ~ h themselves ~ g let alone riskedtheir o w n money, a c ~ a l l work. y In over 50 per cent of a selection of US organizations that had been re-engineered it did moreharm than good. One thing we can safely say about cockroaches and scorpions is that whilst they may not be very lovable,at ast they are good at what they do. This is not the case with so many man ments whose indecision, laziness and consequent lack of confidence often lead them to import consultants. Some of these ramblings were prompted by the activities of Ed Carter, who you will recallhas been employed by T, no doubt at a fancy price,to tell them how to run their mar~eting.A shame, really. I cannot believe a business is in safe hands unless its bosses have a clear idea of what to do at’s what they’re paid for. internal survey last year revealed of BT employees t h o ~ g h t agers could be relied upon to do what they had said. Since in the case of the marketing d e ~ a r t m e they ~t ower, this is hardlys u ~ ~ s i n g . denies that Mr Carter isrunning the show; but I prefer to put my trust in the old and sound jou~alisticmaxim: ‘Never believe a rumour u ~ t iit’s l denied.’

so uncouth and, allegedly, physically ~olentathatBT’s advertising agency refused to have him on their premises. See ‘Conhsed? You will be’on page 9. : Mr Carter was a fat ~ e r i c a nconsultant

DATE: JUNE 1996

ilvy oncebought me dinner a associates, was a rare event. over 30 years without ever getting him to pick up the tab. h I’msure it was all paid foron his expenses,he was reassurin Scottish heritage. He was mean with the wine - a half-cara house red- and only bought one course (each, not between two).But, as always, he was generous with his thoughts, which I invariablyfind interesting, often funny and sometimes delight~lly slanderous. ‘Do you knowthe secret of success in this business?’ he asked mein his sudnway. ‘No,’ I replied.‘Charm,’he rand bow-wow voice he reserved for revelations. I was thinking about this the other day, when considering the W commercials for one bankI did not mention in my recent broadside on financial advertis~g. Do commercials with charming people in them sell better? An versely,do those f e a ~ r i n gobnoxious prats havea delete~ous ~warenessis the ratherunsatisfacto~measure generally usedby advertisers. But clearly you can have a campaign with extremely high a w ~ e n e s s that irritates the hell out o f many of those who see it. The boorish antics of the unspe~ableDanny Baker selling detergent come to mind, but I don’t Ido have little a money. So let’s discussthe curbuy it very often. However, rent commercials forthe Co-operative Bank. ical one, as I recall, opens on a shaky close-up,somewhat distorted

by the lens chosen, of a woman’s leR nostril, panning back to reveal the moonscape of her face, the whole shot in grainy blackand white, reminiscent of a cross between early Vittorio De Sica and a very dull 1930s documenta^ about Hull clog-makers. The woman has clearly had a severe charisma bypass operation, being an unpleasant person of extremely politically correct opinions- probably the ‘chairs of the local wimmin’s anarchist knitting circle. She speaks in the sel~-righteousmonotone normally reserved forher speeches in that capacity’ but is in fact explainingthe policies of the bank. Other commercialsin the series have the same ambience. QW did these commercials come about? Are people who believe in the right thing all would-beIs1 on councillors? More impo~antly, h people have much money to The bank’s proposition -we only i things - appeals to me .Indeed their press adve~isinghas expressed it very well,but casting of these commercials undoes the good work. They bring out my Marxist tendencies.I wouldn’t join any club fullof the people featured in them. Maybe it’s just me, but I asked one or (liberal types, also quite good bank prospects)and they seemed to agree. Incidentally there is a puzzleat theend of the commercial. A rather different thought is intro~uced.Most slogans are a complete waste of time. This one, though, is excellent:‘The Co-operative Bank - why bank with one that isn’t?’ Unfo~natelyit has no obvious connectionwith whatprecedes it. I see the account isunder review. TE : Danny Baker was

and may still be a vulgar ‘cockney’ comedian. The agency responsiblewas hrious about this, and wrote, as usual ignoring the fact that I was talking about the W commercials, to tell me how well the ~ d v ~ ~ i(which s i n ~was, as I pointed out, excellent) was doing. Agency people are rather like politicians.You talk about one thing; they respond to another.

5

h a ~ a hour. n ~ y h o wthat , means you can sayquite a lot on them and it is interesting to see how people exploit, or more often don’t exqloit, this. A perf?ectposter for John Lewis says, ‘IfJohnLewis isnever ~ o w i n g l undery sold, why aren’t our carpets the cheapest you can buy?’ There follows lots o f ntly laid out copy, well calculatedto persuade most people that John if‘they aren’t alwaysthe give you abetter deal for your money, even cheapest. I reckon sheep on drugs must have dreamt Others examples puzzle me. ’S new effort: two words, ‘Vantage Point’, plus the brand name, and lots of lines like map contours. Almost incomprehensib~e;and even when you workout what they’re drivingat, it’s obviousthat any competitor - the - could make the same point just as credibly. t, a’gascompany- show a dull diagram of a house, captioned mpany you cannow fit in your home’ plusthe fatuous slofuel for thought’. The thought it fuelled in me was: why should I try h e r a d a ? The answer came almost instantly, because I saw over so~eone’sspoulder an excellent e d i t o ~ a l - s ~ad l e saying, ‘ h e r a d a raises standards and lowers bills.’Why did nobody havethe wit to use that or something similar on the posters? It’s a mystery.

a 0 0 DATE: APRIL 1 9 9 8

Do you recall the people whb influenced you most? RufusLeven, a

a im~ressionon c o p ~ i t eIrworked with in 1960in Manchester, made vast me. For one thing, although he was 50 and nothing special to look at, he lived

7

quake in Chile. Notmany dead.’His spirit would take its hatoff, Isuspect, to the main heading on the front page of ~ u a while~ ago: ‘ICL~ unifies e core brand strateg.’ than hisChileanline.Besidesbein interest in^ occurred in marketing that ne who does not delve in the recondite this business, and nigh on incompreives from the Greek for ‘general’,but

The mil it^^ book that i n ~ u ~ n c

so often in these columns, Iwas wrong about the recession a ~ i v i nDespite ~. the gove~ment’sefforts, it has not come yet; but Iwill be right when it does. : As

11100 DATE: SEPTEMBER 1 9 9 8

8

Who says there’s no suchthing as a free lunch? The publishers of this esoteric organ bought me oneat theMarketing Society’sannual Christmas bash. The speaker was Michael Heseltine.M a ~ n gsuch speeches usedto be easy, he said.You just rang Conservative Central Oflice’s jokes depa~me~t for some timely quips. Unfo~unatelyit had been closed down. I could haveshown him a goodmarketing joke: the big illuminatedsign on the Battersea PowerStation, reading ‘Midland 97’. This ‘initiative’ came about after the Midland Bank announced it was to stop sponsoring opera as too ‘elitist’. Instead they funded 17 days of pre-Christmas jollity featu~ng the likes Boyzone, of Morrissey and the Brand New Heavies.I tried to picture how this came about. Perhaps some sleek, corpulent Tai-pan from the Hong Kongand Shanghai Bank - new owners of the Midland - was advised that they should go for the ‘youth market’. Or - who knows? maybe a ‘communications strategist’ said, ‘Research says we’re still known as the “listeningbank”. Deafening everyone for miles will off play our existing imagery.’ But what did this achieve? Did it lift awareness (costliest word in the marketer’svocabulary)?Impossible,surely. If anyone in Britainhasn’t heard of the Midland, I’ll be hornswoggled. It certainly did them no good amongst their neighbours, who were infuriated by the din. In my blockthe management committee put up a sign suggesting any Midland customers complain to their bank manager, and giving a phonenumber everyone else could call. To add to their misfortunes, they attracted so few people they had to abolish admission charges. But what of those who did turn up? What isthe aftermath o f a coupleof hours of the tedious Morrissey?You can picture the

conversations. ‘What shouldwe do, love? Switchthe overdraft to theMidnd throw up?’ Do Boyzone induce any feelin same thing four yearsearlier and twice as To score one own goal is ma i s f o ~ eto; score two takes real dedication. How would a sensible bank have viewed this silly venture? Take one that is m a ~ n big g inroads in this country - MBNA. I picture them as a bunch of -Westerners, though they’re probably nothing of the sort. risive hoots of laughter ringing through their co~erence ne suggested this silly idea. I imagine they’d ask pointe ou justify-this? What measurable results will it produce? ards w l iwe get? ~o~ many new ~ s t o m e r s How ? richare pared to the folks we’ll enrage in Chelsea? Follo best discover vice,but adversity doth best discover virBacon. The better firms do, the harder they find it to ey proposals always find a welcome in themarble halls lomerate is cu~ently ss monsters are joining to create e? Intellige~ceand common sense are more often the prerogative of the small and nimble. Big is rarely~ e a u t i-~orl smart.

0 0 0 DATE: JANUARY19913

1 told you a while ago that theCable & Wireless mob wouldspend ages

about with their ‘corporate image’instead of getting down to their jobs. Soon they’ll start the usual silly adve~ising cam~aign - aimed at themselves, of course, because no one else gives hoot a - about whatever they think they have now miraculously become. I’ll bet a fiverto a bent tin can it willbe a deluge of aren’t-weclever oldtosh. The RAC are engaged in a similarbut even more asinine exercise, ‘restyling’ themselves in what Gavin Stamp in The S ~ e c ~ ~accurately ~ o r describes as ‘so often the action of an institution in decline - by dropping the royal crown and adopting a peculiarly hideous and outdated sans-seriflogo’. The value the of word ‘royal’has always been such that its use has been hedged about, rightly, with great restrictions. These fools have given it up, no doubt because some research says people don’t esteem our royal familyas they did. Theyare wrong. Thousandsof years of engrained respect for the idea of monarchy do not vanish in 10 years because a few idiots in two generations of one uncannily stupid family behave foolishly. Whichremindsme: the New Zealanders,youmayhave read, have decided to ‘rename’the kiwi fruit and call it the‘zespri’ becausetoo many ‘low price producers’are eating into their market - forgive the pun. I can understand rebranding, but not renaming. Is it possible to change the way most people describe a well-known product without spending years and millions? I doubt it. Is it wise? It sounds downright dumb to me. The kiwi

fmit has another name already anyhow - the ‘Chinese goosebe arketers, if they were to reach the happy c ~ c u m s t a ~ c duct named after their region, would~ ~ i n ggive l y it up, let alone k to? ~urelyit isclose to beingamarketer’s n ~ a n Would ~ . the

As you get older you noticeto your chagrin that you’re s t a ~ i n g to show

some of the traitsof your parents, especially those you found they call ‘a charact e just tomarvel at his erly, he usedto go r ers - no help if you’

ter. The other day I read an i n t e ~ e w ncy boss. Deftly combining clichti!and inaccurac~’he said of his love for wine: ‘It’s a great conversa” tion-sta~er. Also it helps to know your Beaujolais from the rest of you n u r’p ~ ndies.’ ‘But not as much as if you know Beaujolais ~ ~ a B muttered pe~ishly. g claptrap. I’m like someonescratching an itch I can’t help~ a l y s i n such en Fergie said she was going to ‘ d o ~ - s hher i ~ lifestyle’, I wondered i ~ t a bhow l ~ it could get much lowerthan it was and why she didn’t just say she was going to squander less money. Reading a man’s descri~tionof his Me’s work as ‘providing Internet and Intranet commu~cations to the corporate environment’, I wondered what he meant. And ifhe meant what I think, was it true? Suppose the Sultan o f Brunei offered him E10 million fora basinfit1 ofInternet and Intranet. Would this chap turn him down because he isn’t aco~oration? The evidence suggests m ~ a ~ e m e consultants nt have now o v e ~ ~ e n 3

marketers as world championsof linguistic garbage.‘We deal with the nuts and bolts, but we cannot work in a vacuum - our work must be viewed holistically. Some ofour guys havemarketing experience -but this does not play to our core skills. Basically, our remit is always to change a department’s ~nctioningso that it is more effectiveand more efficient,’prattles Ann Ross of hdersen Consulting. William L Shulby of Ernst & Young babbles, we have involvement with the top executives in the company. We think issues through with them; we set up their success re~uirementsand build key matrices.If you don’t havethis communication with the management - the sponsorship from the topif you like- you willsu~-optimize the results of the exercise.’ Pick the bones out of that lot. Why do people speak such tripe? I suppose it makes them feel better about themselves. It certainly impresses the gullible. What worries that it is wildly contagious. Ordinary people now talk about images and brand values. Eventuallyit will be impossible to have an intelligible conversation. I must proactively realignmy keyissues, refurbishmy mission statement and re-engineer my core competences- before it’stoo late.

DATE: APRIL 1 997

ere’s how you presented the ads 37 years ago when I wrote copy rial Leather. You read them to the sister of the firm’s boss and then showed her the layouts. You did it bolt upright on a small, uncomfo~able chair in a little room. If you were lucky she OKed them. It worked, too.orepeoplebuy day than any other the process was ridiculous. I wanted to be judged by the customers, not the clients, so I went into direct marketing. But that story is the prelude for some serious comment because, despite all the hoopla and pseudo-intellec~alguff pervading our industry, I doubt whether many people do better today than that(very shrewd) lady didthen. Sadly, our industry media, includingthis magazine, too often hold up for ad mi ratio^ the most dreadhl people - bullies, and smoke-and- or merchants - whose chief skills are adroit self-promotion and polysyllabic W&fle. They float between overpaid, fancy-titled jobs for years before being found out. Some moveso fast their misdeeds never catchup with them. ~ r i t i n grude pieces is h n , but what is the solution? The hirers are the reason phoneys are hired. Education,as usual, is the answer, starting at the top. How many senior directors of disasters like W H Smith or Sears understand marketing? Have they noticed or learnt from the fact that their best competitors - entrepreneurs likeBranson or Murdoch, and firms like Unilever or Procter & Gamble - are brilliant at it?

Effectiveness awards do much good, but are their lessons publicized enough in the right places? Ed Artzt, P & G’s ex-chairman, once remarked that they measure everything. That is vital, too - proper measurement, not unscientificguessworkbased on statistically unrepresentative focus groups. Often the measurement is naive or pointless. What do you learn from k n o ~ n ghow much various firms spent on ads last week? Or from which campaigns were most recalled? The two figures must be linked to have any meaning. You can see why marketers are poorly thought of. Bizarrely for people involved in communicationsy fewwrite well; fewer are broadly cultured; I hardly anystudy their profession (ortrade, as Iwould say) deeply. Frankly, can understand why. Most serious business books are dreary and ill written. Those that aren’t - Sloan, Ogilvy, T o ~ s e n d Reeves, , for inst rarely read. Frankly, it’s disgraceful how little training there is in our in dust^. Young people come to us barely literate or numerate; many ‘creatives’ don’t preciate that marketing is about selling. And what do we do about it? Far too little. This maynot be true of your firm,but it is of most, believe me. Marketing is like management consult an^ - immature, and maybe worse. ‘How do I know if McKinsey& CO are the world’s best?’ asks a former AT&T employee in thenew book ~ f f ~ ~ eC roo~ ~~ sf (O’Shea f ~ y and Madigan, 1997). ‘What businesses havethey managed? Look at thepeople they send out, all under 30 and fresh out of business school.’ Trouble is,most of our lot haven’t evenbeen to business school.

embracing the folly ofthat approach again, but this time it has been tarted up as ‘loyalty programmes’. Goodness knows how much time, trouble and money could be saved if people studied history a little. One person, Robin Wight, has made it an important element in his rather brilliant career. For years he has recommended to clients what he calls advertising archaeology. He points out something we all know: people remember successful advertising campaigns long after they have ceasedto run. So it’s worth looking at what’s worked well for youin the past and seeing if you shouldn’tresuscitate it. There are two admirable things about this approach. First, recycling old ideas that have worked is a lot easier, and could well be more reliable, than finding new ones that may not work. And second, oldadvertising is not just of historic interest: it represents money, money invested in creating a brand. When you move away from it you are, as it were, throwing away the benefits of your investment. this and related matThere isa very good expositionof Robin’s views on ters in ~ o ~ e~ ~ f s f~ rc ~a ebook ~ edited ~ ~ and , partly written by GavinBarrett, but now out of print. It is a compendiumof articles by various luminaries, and it contains some good stuff, some onmatters unwisely neglected, like ‘below-the-line, (stupid phrase) literature. What he means is that all the messages, about service and the like, are ones that marketers tend to feel are too trivial to spend a lot of time or thought on, but which matter so much to customers. Too many peoplein our business mistakethe visible for the important.

0 0 0

Having spent 40-odd yearslearning, with great di~culty, to write, I was torn between hysteria and derision wh the lead of the oing to write a book,following ever her agent says she is very seriousabout it, told what to read’. She shows most laudable a self-discipline; and I shall approach the late-blossom in^ career as a modelthat I am now planning in the same spirit. But hard work isquite the fashion in modelling, In a 1994 interview Cindy ‘Doyou think I look like C r a ~ o r asked, d this naturally? I work. I work eight hours a day to look like this.’ This is an attitude many in our field would laugh to scorn, preferring the sloth’s gospelof ‘Express thyself’to a p p l ~ ~ proboscis to grindstone. I cannot think of any serious businesswhere not some but most of the people take so little trouble to study. It is not the exception but therule that, when at conferences or seminars I ask who has read one of the cardinal works on the subject, 0~~~on A ~ v e ~ s (1987), i ~ g a tiny minority raisetheir hands. No wonder so few can write: hardly any of them have read. How, then, can we be surprised at theconstant stream of speeches and articles on the theme o f ‘ ~ ~ t h-eif ranywhere - marketing?’ Imagineif doctors were let loose on their patients with so little knowledge. ~ a r ~ e t i is n gnot a matter of lifeand death; but I find it interest~gthat the people I admire most have been, without exception, keen students.

David Ogilvy once confidedto me that he had stolen everything he knew from John Caples, and that his brother-in-law Rosser Reeves admitted the e Adve~isi~g same. Anyone who has not read Caples on How to ~ a k Your d s certainly should. ~ Q k e ~ (1983) o n e yor Tested Adve~ising~ e t ~ o (1997) I used to read the latter repeatedly, as I did Ogilvy7sC o ~ ~ e s s i (1963), o~s Reeves’ ea^^^ in Adver~sing(out of print) and, of course, the shortestand A ~ v ~ probably the best book on the subject everwritten, S c ~ e n ~ ~ c by Claude Hopkins, published in 1924. Ogilvy observed of it: ‘Nobo~y atany level should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times. Everytime I see a badadvertisement, I say to myself, “The man who wrote this copy has never read Claude Hopkins.”’ ~nfortunately the book isnow out of print. I stole my copyfrom Ken oma any former head of the Ogilvy Group,who himself has co-written an excellent book called~o~ to A d v e ~ s e(Roman and Maas, 1976). But when we considerour audience perhaps all this study is wasted. The other day I was riffling through the Sunday P e o ~ magazine. ~e I saw a heading that read: ‘Win €100.’ Beneath was a picture of a shapely rump in a bikini bottom. The copy read: Tan you tell us what this mystery object is? It’s taken from a picture on page 40.’ I boggled. ‘Looks a lot like an arse to me,7I muttered to myself. I turned to page 40. It was an arse. Ah, the joys of the consumer society. ’

ata time when it looked as though ‘models’were about to take over the world. The spectacularly lovely Naomi Campbell had w r i ~ e n- or had had written for her - a spectacularly bad novel. Unlike her, it flopped. :This was written

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

Composers, like everyone else, come in all shapes and sizes. Hitler’s favourite, Richard Strauss, was a tiny man who by a s a t i s ~ n g compensato~mechanism wrote some of the loudest music forthe biggest orchestras ever. I suppose the piece even the least musical among us recognize is Also S ~ r f f cZffrff~~~s~rff ~ the theme for 2002: Space Odyssey. His wife, who clearly had atouch of der re^ about her would instruct him every morning,with admirable simplicity:‘Richard, go compose!’ and then send him to his work room - a disciplined approach to the act of creation, you will agree, and not unlike Anthony Trollope’s. He workedfor the Post Office, writing his novelsin the mornings, starting at 5.30. To grind out his interminable masterpieces Wagner demanded the most sumptuous conditions - incense, silk underwear and rich fabrics. Rossini found writing so easy he banged out 1[1 ~ f f r ~ i edir eSevig~iffin 13days, a celerity put toshame by Donizetti, who dashed off ~ ’ E l i sdi ~ ~ ~in eight. o ~ That r was because he always left things to thelast minute, an approach most of us can relate to with ease. The playwright Sheridan’slast-ditch tactics were so extreme that two days before the opening night of The ~ ~ v fhe f ~had s not started the last act. His backers were understandably rather agitated. The solution was to lock himin a roomwith two bottles of claret, a pen, ink and limitless writing paper. I have found two of the elements in that solution effective myself.

3

There seems to be no relationship between the methods used and the quality ofthe work,save that they were all nder some sort ofpressure, whether to eat, keep the wife quiet, nou us amount o~moneyhe costLudwig who went mad, quite In our business we too are under pressure to produce ideas. Only one

ow of has systematically explai d the process in a way o r d i n a ~ understand: JamesWebb Yo a brilliant early creative director ofJ Walter Thompson, ew York, in a book called A ~ e c ~ ~Pro-= ~ ~ ~ he learnt, which starts, not sur-

ng a proposition people find easyto accept, series of other, less plausible ones, until the erfectly reasonable. Oh, and for God’s sake, edit, edit, edit.

H a ~ n gread the ~u~~on S ~ n ~ udescribing y PaulGascoigne as a ‘tormented genius’, I think I’ll et stinking drunk, go home, kick the dog, strangle the cat and beat the living shit out of the wife. If that’s what it takes to be agenius, I’ll make the sacrifice. I’ve always agreedwith whoever said genius was an infinitecapacityfor taking pains. Apparently,though, it’s an infinite capacity for giving them. Mind you, I’ve never had illusions about my genius, if such a word could, however remotely, be used in the context of our business. My pedormance has often been so pathetic I have nightmares just thinking about it. For instance, in 1966Idid the launch advertising for the Audi. My God, it was bad, though in some ways no worse than some recent ads. For Honda the creative people fall back on pun, a with the headline, ‘A press ad for the Honda Civic’. Howwe could mistake it for anything else I can’t think. It didn’t resemble a pterodactyl,King a Charles spaniel, an article on 20th-centu~philosophy or a recipe for fried chicken. In fact it showed pictures of the buttons you canpress when you buy a Honda, which look to me just like the buttons you canpress on other cars. To my mind a weak playon words is nosubstitute for sayingsomething relevant and competitive that makes me feelI would prefer a Hondato anything else available. Things are not much better when we turn on the haunted goldfish bowl. The current Fiat commercial isan odd mishmash. First some evocative old

5

Italian music is played over sepia pictures - perfiect if youwant prospects to think Fiats are Italian but obsolete. Fightingthis visually is something we etting rather bored with: features listed on a computer screen. e have disentangled ourselves from these two messages to conclude whatever we are supposed to about the car, up pops oneof those pret e n ~ o little ~ s lines c o p ~ t e r adore s - ‘a choice, not a compromise’. Like ch linesthis is not at all persuasive,and could be appliedto almost ;and, as with Honda, this ad promotes features, not ~ e n e ~ t s . advertisiRg people suffer from the bizarre delusion that customers by advertising as they are, as demonstrated in the beautithe new Audi B,which ‘doesn’t need avalanches, lightor walls of fire to m it look good’.~ x t r a o r d i n aRather ~. car with other car ey compare other car’s adve~isi with their advertisin .This may sellto a tiny deranged group who buy ca eative awards the ads win, but why shouldit appeal to anyad for abrand which yearafter year has done fine advertishey prospered despite my early e rts, so they’ll probably In allthree campaigns, t e c ~ i ~ u e t ~ u m over p hcontent; s not enou fear, in an overcro~ded market likethis.

This isthe third in a series of pieces on getting your creativeright. The first concernedexecution, the secondbriefing.Thisis about correct evaluation. I once askedmy client, Victor Ross, then chairman of ~eff~er’s ~ ~ ~how e s ~ well he could predict results. $1get it right about half the time,’ he said. Modest ofhim, Isuspect, since shortly after he won a bet with me about two ads we were running. Both did badly, which neither of us expected, and that shows just how hard it is to judge creativework.However, here are five guidelines. First, has the objective been met? Look at thebrief. You may findit is inadequate, or has been ignored. However, assuming it is good, you can see whether the communication matches its objective. For instance, you don’t needa four-page letter and a brochure to get a simple enquiry,whereas you will needa very elaborate confection indeed to sell something expensive. Second, don’twaste time pondering over minutiae like the cropping of the illustration on the back ofthe brochure or the choice of adjectives in the letter. Is there a good idea, onethat fits the positioning o f your brand or product, and will attract and engage interest in a relevant way? Make sure it is one ideaand not seven. One simple idea properly carried through will do better thanseveral, however good, that fight with each other. That confbses your customer. Third, remember youare not the prospect. It is hard for marketing people to know what will appeal to their customers, who do not spend their time in smart restaurants talking to obsequious advertising agencies about strategy, and are concerned about important things like their families, the outrageous price of beer and the likely winner of the FA Cup.

e point fast? People don’t wish to exert themrs. Is there a clear ossible to miss? Or re these buried under layers of creative s e ~ - i n d ~ ~ e nSettle c e ? for simple, her than clever, e n t e ~ a ~ones i n ~(of course, really have a er). to s o ~ e o n who e ~ onothin ~ s pect who is not too ,why they should reply-

e, you will have donea

itted to mention the m any briefsare not planne~,but are the ha

a different solution. But they need to ot a ~ o enough ~ g time. As a young cop sk reading:‘Do you want it good - or r is enough time,but you can steal about what’scomingup. Thusthey can st over ideasin advance, rather than going through the usual n job requested on the Thursday beforethe ond day when you want the work. Some time ago when judging the internal creative a w ~ d for s GUS, 1 chose as the winner one composed of elements of a number of m ~ i n gthat s had worked to a greater or lesser degree in the previous seven years. This brings me to thethird sin: not revealing what has worked - or failed - previously. One needs to see creative samples and know whom the work was aimed at. It’s p a ~ i ~ a rvaluable ly to know whichtypes o f people were most or least responsive.

09

The next sin is failureto supply competitive examples. How can youwin if youdon’t h o w what you haveto beat? The onlytime most agencies analyse the competition isto sell their ideas by comparison when pitching for the business - after which everybody neglects this tedious, but necessary review, returning t h a n k ~ to ~ y thepetty urgencies of a business driven by detail. The final sin I lay moreat thedoor of agencies than clients. It is the passive approach- simply acceptingthe client’s briefand starting work without going back to ask supplementary questions. Often this is because the agency isfrightened to confess it didn’t really understand what the client wanted. Equally often, the result is one of those ~ r e a dmeetings ~l where the agency produces ideas which they have persuaded themselvesare brilliant, only to have the client gazeat them, mystified, saying,‘Thisisn’t what I asked for.’ Incidentally, if anyone isinterested, I have a 27-point checklist coverin what I think a brief should cover.~ n f o ~ n a t e lIysuspect , it is incomplete, but it’s the best I’ve been able to come up with so far. : Quite true: my list now contains 31 points.

clclcl DATE: JULY 1993

If you’re in bed with theflu, as I was before Christmas,any me - even if only in a W commercial. So with what joy I saw some souls had pressed into servicemyveryfavouritemoment of television. friends about it for years. It was, I believe, the 1 ical series about the late John ~etjeman,when i n t e ~ e w easked r himif he had, loo back on his life, any regrets. ‘I haven’t had enough sex,’ was his l u ~ b r i o u s ch the commercial - for tingly and elegantly to the thought that time may be precious,but need not be expensive. Some oddball suggested the other week in these columns that this was dubbed (whichit wasn’t) and blasphemous. I thought it m n y , une~pected, honest and oddly moving, whilst deflating, in the kindliest way, the earnestness of the questioner. In short, it combined uniquely in a phrase five elements, any one of which is rarely found in whole programmes. Rubicarn once saidan outstanding a~vertisementshould not o also ‘bean admirable pieceof work in itsown right’. To me that commercial meets the criterion peflectly. Maledi~ions,though, should descendon whoever concoctedthe piece of b o a s m tosh on which Sedgwick squandered thousands in Tlie E c o ~ o ~ ~ late last November. It featured an indifferent sketch of Mozart, whose financial skillswe all recall so vividly, waving a conductor’s baton, which I think ced in his day, over the heading ‘GREAT E k - No 1 in Europe’. Thiswas set inwhite on an ugly grey patterned background, with the wise objective- bearing in mind the

dire, self-congrat~ato~ copy - of reducing readabili~as far as possible. ~ s as ~ , it isof goofjr messages from obscure Even in The E c o ~ o ~Eull Slovakian and Ukrainian bankstelling lies about p~vatization,this was outstandinglybad. Who,sober, could havewritten it?Did anybody with even a glancing knowledgeof the visual arts come anywhere near it? Was it really approved by a sane, thinking human being? g In my first year as a c o p ~ t e rI ,recall with shame ~ i t i n something half as bad about a new airport somewhere,but at least it only appeared in the local Liverpool paper, not a respected inte~ationaljournal; and I did have the excuse of youth and insu~cientguidance. The silly heading sugck plan to repeat this sort of thing. They would do better to take the money and put itin the Lottery, whence at least they would have some chance, no matter how small, of getting a return on their investment. Talking of which, did you knowthe market capitalization of Coca-Cola now stands at over $90 billion more than ~ e r i c a Express, n Disney and ~ o t o r o l acombined - which between them have three times the sales and 60 per cent more net income? I don't know what this says about the decline of the brand, but it certainly suggests to me that no matter how stupid we marketing people may be, we're paragons of logic compared to the stock market.

:A reader kindly pointed out to me afterwards that another watch company, not Sekonda, dragged dear old Betjeman back from the grave. This neatly demonstrates two facts often ignored. One: your advertising, especially if youuse famous people, should never overshadow your produc Two: a statement that could apply equally well to any of your competitors is usually a bad idea.

I am usually alittle disturbed when the public’s opinionCO S me question their judgement - or mine. But

o when in a pollby one of the music maga ed the greatest pop record eve think it was for Volk

stated line is then delivered: ‘Have you ever wonderedhow the man who drives the s n o ~ l o u g gets h to thes n o ~ l o u g h ?A’ striking demonstration of what : reliability - and why Doyle, Dane, Bernbach, the world’s best agency. You can reasonably divide advertisements into four kinds: well done; good ideas badly done; bad ideas well done; and bad ideas badly done. Inthe last category I would put a recent poster campaign for Ruddles, whose previous effortfeaturing obscure jokesabout Rutland Iquestioned but itwas better thanthis. Perhaps yousaw it: arather nasty blue representation of a computer screen, with lines like: F0rget.e-mails. Drink. Wth. Fe/males. Not.4 bo~ns//~.people.with.best.f~ends, Is this any way to sell a hearty rustic brew? Ientirely accept that ad agency posersspend all daytossing off in front of flickering screens but beg leave to doubt that thetypical real-ale swiller does.In fact research 1 saw last year strongly suggests that most haveno idea what e-mail is. Maybe the

stuff istrotting out of the brewery by the hogshead as a result, but I simply can9tbelieve it. There isno attempt toconvey anyof the important things about beer: taste, looks, strength, refreshment a d glorious, seam-splitting repletion. Conversely, I thought another recent campaign, for Colman’s English mustard, was a good idea well done, with just the sort of language and humour Ruddles should be using. There’s only one good thing you can say about Colman’s unique aidto digestion: it blows your stomach apart. This campaign says so, with jovial yokels delive~nglines like: ‘Smite my gmnions with a speckle rake! That Colman’s what is I call a mustard and a half’ and ‘Frettle mywelters! That Colman’s has more kick than a mule in a bramble bush.’I’m not sure how much life the product has left in it, but those ads will bring it out if anything can. rence between these two campaigns for me isthat one shows understanding of the customer and the other doesn’t. h d as Harvey MacKay observes in S~~~ ~ ~ thet Sha~ks h tho^^ ~e~~~~ a ~ (1989), e ~ something you know about your customer may be more important than anything you knowabout your product.

OOCIi DATE: SEPTEMBER l 996

We’re all familiarwith those ph~osophicaldisputes con the more retarded members of society whichgo rather li the best f-ing football team in the f-ing country.’ ‘No it f-ing isn’t.’ ‘Yes it f-ing is’ - and so on. es represent the very acmeof logiccompared with whatI readafewweeksago in ~ a ~ ~ a i ~ ,

expressed d e ~ ~ t e deserve ly aproud place there. No less a personage than John Hegarty of BBH magisteri~y stated, ‘Long copyis an indulgence.’ I can’t believe anyoneas wise and godlike really made such bizarre a remark, and trust he was either mis~uotedor recove~ngfrom a good lunch. If not, Ishall have to recast him as the Michael Heseltineo f advertising. But there he was in black and white, abetted by Patrick Collister, creative director of 0 & M,who suggested ‘Literacy is irrelevant’ nowadays. Discussing the length of copy is as fbtile as wondering how tall a general should be. However, if reader any should be fooled the byfirst statement above, it has been well and wittily rebutted by two friends of mine. One, the creative director of 0 & M, New Delhi,replied ‘How muchstring do you needto wrap a parcel?’ Theother, Bill J a p e , the world’s highest paid direct mail copywriter (up to $40,000 a mailing), said:‘Nobody ever complained that ~ o it^ ~ the e ~i~~ was too long.’ These remarkstell us all we

need to know, iethe length should befitted to thetask; and if it’sinteresting people will readlot, a whereas if it’sboring they’ll read none. An even better a u t h o r i ~David , Ogilvy (who will read Collister’s silly remark and weep), says long copy always works better thanshort. That maynot necessarily be true, though I havefound it so, but the only research I’ve seen, by ~ c ~ r a w - H some i l l years ago, found readership of ads in ~ ~ s ~~ ~ eewith s es ~ over a thous an^ words was about 25 per cent higher than amongst those with less. Long copy is no indulgence; it is exactly the*opposite- bloody hard to write. Nor is literacyirrelevant unless youare ~ i t i n to g illiterates. Iadmit this is true of most customers and almost everyonewho writes marketin or advertising documents, but it is probably lessso in the case ofthose with iots of money. Andwhilst stupid people’s money looks and spends the same as everyone else’s, you will probably find your efforts better rewarded among the rich than the poor. Moreover, though we are all (contrary to what some politicianstell you) moreprosperous than we were, the rich are, sadly, getting relatively richerand the poor poorer;and if youwant to take big money off rich people then long, literate copy is more likely to do it than short, illiterate copy. Is that clear? : The

blond and amazingly handsome John Hegarty is oneof the founders of avery successM advertising agencycalledBartle,Bogle, Hegarty, whose name overthe years has given muchinnocent pleasure and aid to comedians short of jokes. Not unlike the town I grew up in: Ashton-under-L~e.

n n n DATE:DECEMBER 11395

Those of you

ine nought exists ‘belowthe line’ sav

n ~ h i c htheir chairman, oneJim e under the heading Chest’ - a rather ce associated with sundry onanistic acti~ties. of gurus, old lagsand wanna~ees’,who c l a i to ~ sell the secrets of c r e a t i for ~~ 250 in two days and who, it seems, make him ‘sick’. Iquickly checkedto see if I was among the guilty parties before he was a t t a c ~ n ga seminar featuring scamps 1 o ~ ~ u r o p e , s l adirect r ~ e s tmarketing agency, Ge the unite^ States’ most able c o p ~ t e r on s finance a Chris ~arraclough, thenot entirely incompetent crea his name. ~aradoxica~y enough, even own to stand up and reveal a fewof his cherishedS ences. hat worried me about his onslaught was that c conclude courses or seminars on creativity are a concerned that client or account handlers attend th with a fistful o f laundry lists for success, tend to people without fully understanding their contex am often s u ~ r i s e dhow, after I have pointed ou

volumes of type reversed out or in sans serif faceor entirely in capitals are hard to read, eager students have concluded you shoulduse none of under any cir~mstance. ut can ‘ c r e a t i ~be ~ ’tau ht? Well, I don’t suppose you can take somebody as creative as two short planks and ~ a ~ cinhse a ~ them y with imagioutstanding exponents, they do what they do and l i s t e ~ n gto theprinci’t be a bad thing. If it were, surely almost all is people in thepaths of

rsalis on jazz composi-

an entire generation who like an old r e a c ~ i o n a ~ ? Goodl

have talked about this myste~ousline that exists in mar~eti re. ~enerally‘above the line, -which means adve~ising - is seen smarter area to work in tha ‘below the line’ - which means direct mail or sales promotion.~dvertisingpeople look heir below- he-line and sometimes even hate

:I

Is there one of youwho hasn9texperienced that in~riating feeling when someone sayssomething insulting to you, you’relost for are too late, you think up a devastating one? This what is theFrench c de ~’esca~ier’ - the wit of the staircase - something that occurs to way out. In my case, it takes rather longer, maybe becauseI’ Not long agoImade the mistake of going into a meeting

faws allround, implying I had been found out and my occasio erencescomeready-made. I coulddo little at the time save deny it, merely observing rather feebly that thebook in question was not very good, which it isn’t, It c~ntainsfar too many extracts from oldBBC radio scripts that have not worn well at all.What Ishould have done, as I realized later, was respond in themost wonderful~yap~ositeW ‘It is a good thing for uneducated men to read booksof quotations’(Winston Churchill). In any case, they ~derestimatedme. I o w n not one such anthology,but quite a few. Their plots lack a certain tension and na~ativeflow, but I believe the right quotation is like distilled wisdom. The following, on letter writing, could certainly be read to good eEectby many who send out direct mail. A somewhat l a n ~ i cn’ d de c a z r on what I assume was early l ~ t h - c e n ~ ~ junk mail came from illa am ant in William Congreve’s The ~ u Ofy The ~ o r ~‘d0ay, : letters - I have letters - I am persecuted with letters - I hate letters - no body knowshow to &te letters; and yet one has ‘em, one does not h o w why - They serve one to pin up one’s hair., Those who write (or sanction)dull letters should memorizeJane Austen: ‘I have now attained the trueart of letter-writing, which we are always told

is to express on paper exactly what one would sayto the same person by mouth”’Those whose loyalty p r o g r ~ m e s r e cwith ~ i t bribes and municate might appreciate James Russell Lowell: ‘Thetrue etter is to let one knowthat one is remembered and valued.’ ‘I like letters to be personal- very personal - and then stop,’ said Walt iskens in f i e ~ c P ~ ~~has e ~a neat ~ s exchange c ~ at’s rayther a sudden pull up, ain9t it, i my?" am; “she’ll vish there wos more, etter iti in'."' The classicon length is, o f course, I have er thanusual, only because er o f the PS - but others did first: ‘I that whish was most

Why do people who enjoy bigreputations for a brief period becomeso conceited and behave so insanely? the In music industry it’s understandable to some degree. The hype is prodigious, the money astonishing. How, for instance, I wondered, was my daughter’s musical partner Tricky affected when he saw himself a few months ago on the cover of a magazine wea a crown of thorns, illustrating a piece that suggested pop music has m influence on young people today than religion (which it almost certainly has ? ut what I findinfinitelymoreamazin is how people in our far-less-interestingbusiness become the happy, but obnoxious victims of o v e ~ e e n i n gnarcissism. Indeed, I was prompted to write this piece by a ~uestiona young university student asked me a while ago: ‘Why are so many advertising creative directorsso bloody ~npleasantand conceited?’ and gave me a coupleof examples. It’s a bitof a mystery, isn’tit? How can one feel pleased with oneself at mastered the trifling art of fillin the gaps between soap operas or the space on the back of the paper we ap fish and chips in - or used to, before today’s hygienic Euro-Paradise? Could it be that these bladders of conceit have nosense of propo~ion? And this because their minds are so shallow they lack the intellectual enterprise to look around and see how small the business in which they enjoy a certain fleeting fame really is? As Tallulah Bankhead once observed of a play idn9tlike: ‘There is lessin this thanmeets the eye.’

clclcl DATE: OCTOBER 1 9 9 6

ecent Nat West posters had type that was too small. In one a dog had just torn a settee apart. The line said, ‘ ousehold insurance, incl~dingacts of dog.’ I saw itseveral times before g ing the point because, like alot of their customers, I’m stupid. It probably raised guffaws a m o ~ ‘creatives’ g in the pub after work, but do you choose your bank because the manager tells jokeshe thinks are fiunny, but whichyoudon’t understand? Another ill-considered shambles has 26 words - about 21 too many. From far away you can’t seethe logo, just ‘Who’s connecting you to theInternet?’ When you get close, the answer is, ‘Make sure it’s a Cisco-poweredn e ~ o r serk vice pro~der.’This raisesanother questi Threadneedle’s poster doesn’t sayth ause they do. Instead, it c face of in~estment’- foo e of a man with a little

ads, are junk because people don’tundere if you’refooting the bill. : The

poster should be the distillation of your adve~isingclaim. That’s why so few are any good.As a matter of interest, the Col aign was discovered to be one of the most effectiverun that year - and their sales climbed rapidly.

Some years ago, after delivering a speech whichI thought excellent in every respect, my complacency was ruptured by a cynicalNew Zea who said: ‘Well, since you seem to ow just about everythi you guarantee success?’ Taking swift refuge in unaccusto responded that Idon’t hing you should do, mere1 things you should just as there are universal truths, there are universal failings, my years sitting on an aeroplanefor Ogilvy & Mather, Inoticed five common sins in creative designedto get replies: 1. ~eluctance to t to the point. We

em to have the mental equivalent of old motor-car engines, which need to be warmed up for a few minutes.We often put ina coupleof paragra before we get to theproposition. Maybe it’s fearof being rejectedwhen we do. 2. Being shy about the offer or incentive. Offers harness greed to overcome people’s reluctance to read and their reluctance to reply. Unle have good reason to do otherwise, the offer should be imposs ignore. 3. org getting that there must be something for the reader wherev reader looks. Hardly surprisingly, bold elements in ads attract most attention and the same applies to mailings. The reader’s eye first to the letter, thebrochure, the order form or someother piece in the mailing. Make sure your mostprominent benefit and your oRer are boldly featured wherever that reader may glance. 4. Making it hard to respond. American Express enjoyed a 30

uplift in sales a few years ago in one highly competitivemarket, largely by m a ~ n the g app~cation easier to fill in. 5. Failing to do acomplete selling job.Iam not among those who believe the copy should beas long as possible. Ho~ever,unless you sensible reason why somebody should respond and overcom reasonable objectionthey may haveto doing so, youwill not d as you could. ng on the ~ e ~ ~ e~r ’ s~record ~ business, e s Inoticed ~

n~ T h o ~ a sa, f o ~ of

a 0 0 DATE:JUNE 1

My granddaughter Sophie calls me Grandpa Sheep, associating me not with my loving nature butour modest flock ofthose amiable r u m ~ a n t in s n fact some years ago in NewZealand a seminar del hearing me say Ikept sheep, asked how many.My reply - ‘32’ - pro hoots of laughter, one wag even asking,‘D’you know ‘em all by name then, Drayton?’ I said Ididn’t, but that thechief sheep was called Mrs B. This fearlessquadruped had asupernatural ability to direct her collea through the thickest of obstacles to fields not ~ e l o n ~ ito n gus. Wherevershe went, they obediently followed- which reminds me of fashions in advertising, especially art direction. Someone devises acertain look and everyone copies it without regard for sense or reading habits. For example, a fashionarose in the 60s for kerning the letters in headings so they touched each other. This was done originally to make the type-size biggerin headlines but this was soon forgotten, and practically every headline featured this treatment. U n f o ~ n a t esince , the effect isto make a headlineharder to read. A more recent instance is the vogue forthe style of typography used on 18th-century tombstones, where some words are italicized or capitalized. The originator of the current trend did it to stress important words, but this was soon forgotten in the Gadarene rush to copy the technique without comprehending the reasons. A while agoIasked the best art director Iknow, my old friendand colleague ChrisJones, who has won nearly 100 awards around the world for his work, what he thought the greatest sin in art direction. He replied: ‘Affectation. Drawingattention toitself.’ Onecurrent style does this by scattering sans serif words all overthe page, somelarger than others, through 7

the reader must s t ~ g g l valiantly e to extract some sense. This is pere reader. ~ o e v ethi r Europe we are accustomed to read from left to right, not up and ly-waggly, whichtires the eye. ~ b s ~leads r inot~to involv Just as foolish a practice is s e ~ i n glo

Colin ~ h e ~ d o n book ’s ,and very amusing in places. :

~~~

~~~

body copy in capitals. The eye

L u y o ~(1995) ~ is

nications. The piece referredto theCaptain Chaos adve~ising‘era’, whichI recall more as a fleeting moment. Brendan commented on it with a fra refreshing as it is rare among those in his position:‘Theidea was to come up with a campaign which was universally likeable,but u n f o ~ n a t e l it y didn’t achieve universal l i ~ e a b ~And i ~ .because it had such high impact those who didn’t likeit were very vociferous.’ The managing director of Scottish Amicable said Brendan will ‘still have ut into our future market in^ strategy’. (‘Have input into’, I assume, means ‘advise on’.)I trust he will not suggest more attempts at l ~ e a b i l i ~ , which can be quite an overrated commodi~.There is a lot of evidence to suggest that my liking youor your adve~isingmay not be enough to make me buy from you.For example, I may love you because you’rean amiable h~f-wit,which, who knows, may havebeen the case with Captain Chaos.

From what little I recall, that particular creative landmark manage brilliant simultaneity to communicate allthe wrong thoughts about insurance, starting with a strained attempt at humour, whilst employing the one medium which has high attention value but is almost certain to d ~ i n i s h credibility - the cartoon. Insurance dealswith tvvo elements, neither of which is hilarious:nasty possibi~tiesand money. Catastrophe, death, maiming and penury are not funnyunless they happen to peopleyoudon’tlike. Nor isfinance ~ b - t i c ~ i matter. ng Consider the phrase ‘laughing allthe way to thebank’. I don’t know anyonewho does. Not those who work in banks, who are worried about being fired, unless they’reat head ofice organizin and certainly not their customers, who often have similarw o ~ e sI.find it hard to summon up as much as a wintry smile when I visit mine. Those thoughts were prompted by another news item I came acrossin A ~ v e ~ s ~ a~ few g ~ weeks g e ago.~udweiserhas been running a c a ~ p a i ~ that is their most popular for years.It came out number one across a wide range of measures including noting, likeabili~and memorabili~throughout the first three-~uarterso f 1995. During the same period sales went There isnothing freakish about this. A New Yorkbeer called Piel’sused to run very popularcartoon commercials. Everytime they ran, the sales went down. Every time they took them off, the public complained - so they brought them back. You don’t see much Piel’s around nowadays.

DATE: APRIL 1996

I was going to regale you this week with some extreme views about posters, but that will have to await a little historical reconstruction. The reason for this state of affairs will happily confirm the views of those among you who suspect I am not one tenth as smart as I try to appear in these pages, Last weeksomebody stole all our computers. As a result my stockpile of prefabricated ~ t t i c i s m shas vanished, because neither my PA, the radiant Denise, nor I have had the sense to have a back-up disk. There is some dispute between us as to whether that is her fault or mine. My position is that she knows damn wellthat I’m an incompetent fool, and should allow forit. I have yetto hear her opinion. Anyhow, as press date neared, this catastrophe led meto reflect gloomily that I would either have to have somenew ideas orstart making things up. Happily, on the way back from the airport I found a copy of the Sun, whose content confirmed gloriouslythat truthis stranger than fiction. ~ h o could invent the hea~-warmingstory of ‘SuperdadJohn arm an', who has just fathered his 16th child using a surgically created 10-inch Hampton designed by his wife or rather common-law wife, ‘beaming Jenny’? Why was Jenny beaming? It seems the reassembly of said organ was required because John ‘thought his lovemaking days were over when a flesh-eatingbug destroyed allthe skin on his privates’. When asked by the hospital registrar to draw the dong of her dreams, she set towith a will, saying, ‘Thiswas too good a chance to miss.’ JoblessJohn is bringi~gup his kids

(fathered on six different women)on €16,000 a yearstate benefits; and the rem~kableoperation I have just described was, of course, paid forby you and me. After that, the~ v ~ ~ ~ media ~ ~ ~ column ~ was a ~a big ~letdown. a r ~Steve ’ s Grime of Leagas Shafron Davis Ayersays, ‘Our trade is becoming an easier et for the press than theroyal family,’ Trevor Beattie of TBWA is even more hurt at theway our skills are disparaged. ‘Iam a human being. Give me a break.VVe are not faceless, soullessgits in stripy shirts,’ he claims.‘We million bras in a yearand 360 Nissan Micras a week.’ That’s a lotof bras ‘n’ cars.Also a lot of rubbish. Too many a d v e ~ i s i n ~ people - especially those with creative pretensions - fondly imagine advermarketing. Thereare one or two other people involved- those who design and make the product, those who distribute and retail, those who d e t e ~ i n ethe pricing - all very often more criticalto success. The Nissan and Wonderbra ads are excellent, but such wild assertions do no thin^ for case. And,who knows, I rather suspect the same may apply to us dimensions of VVa an’s majestic National Health willy.

As you know, Charles Dickens wrote his books as magazine serials rather like soap operas. I’d never comparemy work with even the worst of ~ickens, but I’m told some of youdiligently keepreading, which encoura me to introduce a fresh episode in the‘Andrew Boddin~onChronicles’. My colleagueAndrewwished to upgrade his mobile phoneand rang his service provider, Astec, hoping his prodigious expenditure entitled him to a reward. Nothinghappened until I mote about it in these pages. Then the chairman of h t e c contacted him with admirable speed and said he would sort it out. It seems Andrew was entitled not just to one reward but to so many he was almost embarrassed. Eventually hre bought a dinky new phone with many whiz-bang features, and the upheaval of a new number, but before then he went away, telling Astec not to contact him while hewas a w ~ yIn . his absence.there was a flurryof sales calls. The delivery of the wondrous instrument was sub-contracted to a courier company who despite being giventhe address said they couldn’t findit. Being out the next day, he askedto have it sent toour ofices instead. The couriers, using their initiative, went to thefirst address. As Andrew wasn’t there, they gave it toa neighbour-who was not a neighbour but a man decorating the neighbours’ house while they were on holiday. So it was locked in their house till they returned. Astec bent over backwardsto rush a replacementto Andrew. The courier even found the right address, and Astec said, no worries, they would

a ~ a n g collection e of the locked-in phone. They never did. Finally the neighbour gaveit to Andrew, who commendably didn’t sell it toa friendbut ran Astec to ask what to do. He was put on to a message box, which promised that theperson at theother end would get back to him, which no one did for three days. Thishappened twice. It’s easyto see howorganizations fall apart i n t e ~despite ~ l ~ their verbal tenti ions -because to be fair Astec said things would happen, and they did, in a fashion. Either they d

crass, ill- it ten letter telli

: How

did this enthr~lingsaga end? Astec carried on in the same slipshod fashion,got bought by Vodafoneand probably everyone concerned made a mint.I hesitate to draw any morals fromthis, except that drew switched to Cellnet and has lived happily everafter.

Never mind the wretched Internet: what about the phone? A Henley Centre report by my old colleague Melanie Howard claims some 18.2 million customers were lost last year by retail, travel, banking and leisure firms who don’t use it properly. God knows what theUS figure is. In CaliforniaI recently spent an hour getting through to United Airlines, and getting no answer at all from Delta. And never mind the hazards of the ordinary phone, what about its evil twin, the mobile? Most of my family and colleagues have them, but I have held aloof. It’s hard enough to find time to think in these harried times without people dis~urbingyou night and day wherever you are, about things that can usually wait. There’s no escaping the bloody machines, though. No matter where I go, their aural pollution seeks me out. The other day forinstance whilst quietly solacing myself with a th~ughtfulpint in ‘Cooper’s’,the Euston Stationbar, my reverie was shattered by some braying loudmouth. You know the sort -badly matched shirt and tie, telling the whole world his business, every other sentence ending in a redundant ‘right’. I thought these wretches became extinct in the 80s, but no. He was something ghastly in theCity and was boasting about his triumphs in some complicated deal involving a bewildering variety of countries, companies and transactions. I could hardly help laughing aloud when he urged his interlocutor to be careful: ‘Of course, this is strictly between you and me, Billy’ - and just about everyone in the NZ postal district. How fortunate for him that he was sitting next to a coward like me,

rather than the heroic Amazon I read about recently in the Northern edition of that admira~le journal, "he Big Issue.The piece (by Paul Sussman, whom I appla~d)suggested mobiles are not just maddening but d o ~ r i g hhazardt cording to him they send out microwaves that cause a number of nasty side-effects,includingcancer, whilst an accountant calledStark nearly died a violent - though ~ r o b a ~richly ly deserved- death in S a result of using one of these i n s t ~ m e n t of s Sat He made the mistake of triflin with an ~~-year-old, Myrtle whose e~uanimityhe distur~ed thetrain with hisnoisines ation by clickingher tongue and flarin her nostrils (I would is had no effect,sh t him likean Exocet missile, seizing his head in a

en he tried to free himself, he cla ed that she bit his ear. Then he fell oes not say whose umbre~ait was, but it puncery saved his life* The h e r o ~ eo f this counter was una~ologetic.'I hate mobile phones, Russians an I love peoplewho stand up for their beliefs. ut why turtles? Russians, I n understand. But what have those harmless amphi~iansever done to compare with the depre~ations of these eastly phones?

t a mobileand started havin aces - so manyand so ra p to a t down on my outrageo~s

: You've

guessed it. Eve d, stupid conversations in fact, that my ~ n a n cdirector i~ r

3

People jump to some bizarre conclusions in this business. I wrote a year ago about a presentation which moved meto giggles, when an otherwise very level-headed lady from 0 8~M Direct implied consumers could have a relationship with a packetof crisps. I recalled this when reading about a CIA Sensor survey, which revealed that 20 per cent of UK adults would buy a car over the telephone, 26 per cent would buy financial services by direct mail and 49 per cent would buy a PC from a catalogue.So what else is new? Over 10 years ago my agency created a Comp-U-Card mailing which sold two Bentley Turbo motor cars through the post. Anthony Jonesof CIA Medialab concludedthat thesurvey proved‘the UK consumer is interested in building arelationship with businesses’. I would humbly suggest it proves nothing of the sort. Most sane people have no desire to have relationships with businesses - for good reasons. To start with they aren’t much fun to be with compared to people. I mean, when did you last want to go to bed with a corporation? I would go further: many businesses behave in such a grasping, even dishonourable way nowadays that nobody would have anything to do with them at all ifthey could possibly avoidit. Another subject people jump to conclusions about without thinking carefully is the Internet. There are several issues relating to this modern marvel whichare little discussed, includingthe fact that telephone companies are beginning to get pretty pissed off by the fact they are providing a

very cheap, and sometimes free, infr~structure that enables too many other le to exploit them. I don’t seethis lasting for ever.But one point o f ~ e w that struck a chord with me recentlywas very wellput on 13June by Walter ssberg, techno lo^ correspondent of the ~ ~ e e ~ ~ ~ First, he pointed out that even in the US where the PC has ~ e ~ e t r a t e d ~~~~

ed a lot in the three and a half years since I wrote this. I could havebeen even morewrong than I was - and quite a lot te Istand by. In eople are so keento get on to theI n t ~ ~ e t oviders are maki rtunes from the phonecompaniesfor either conne~ingsubscribers very slowly,or not at all. It won’t last.

DATE: JULY l99

~

hts that unfold 'seem own to thetasteful descriptions. ere is a rich tradition in business whereby studies the past because that way we can all squander money, S decade. Howe~erthis problem of having too much direct mail, memos, e-mail - is not new. Inthe late 14th century, an agent of Signor Datini,an Italian m e r ~ a n t , c o m p lthat ~ e dlwe spend half our time reading letters or answering them'. No there, because Datini was clearlythe partner fkom hell. Be 1410he e ~ c h ~ 156, ~ e 49 d letters with his associates. For a he had 10,000letters ~ippingback and forth all over sou ally. I learnt that fkom ~ o r l d l yGoods by Professor LisaJar e n t e read ~ based ~ ~ on~the obvious thesis that in the people were just as vain, flashy and ing as they are now.

At the time, it was thought the new invention of printing would make life easier - just as people expect great wonders from the Internet now. Well, in some waysit did, and in others it didn’t. Every time a new medium emerges - radio, the cinema, TV - the experts tell youit will render one or more of its predecessors irrelevant.‘Yetusually nothing of the sort happens. We seem to have an insatiable appetite for messagesof all kinds. The bigthing about the Internet to me is that it is a pexfect direct marketing medium - especially if you sell to theright sort of people, iethose rich enough to have PCs. The Gaphas enjoyed huge success. TheirInternet sales last Christmaswere exceeded only by those of their most successfix1store on 34th Street in New York,and now they are starting a separate Internet business. I am a classic late adopter, but I have finally succumbed to theInternet’s y colleaguesand I have just spentsix months putting together a Web site, ~ . d r a ~ o n b i r d . c o mwhich , tells you everything youever wanted to know - and probably alot you don’t- about direct marketing and related subjects. It’s all free, and you can even win a rather predictable prize, but watch out for the usual inept onslaught on your budgets.We do take ‘no’ foran answer, though - and I’d appreciate your comments. TE: The Website Iwas puffingin this piece so shamelessly turned out quite well. For those who understand these things, it is very sticky. Visitors stay for an average of over 23 minutes.

I don’t suppose many of you have read one of the silliest books ever ~ t t e about n our business, a 1950sbest-seller called“he ~~~~e~ ~ e r s ~ ~ ~ e It put the wind up peopleby suggest in^ advertisin

without them even k n o ~ n it. g The ideawas that t ~ o u g hsome magicalprocessslogans - like‘drink Coke’ - were beingflashed onto the screen so fast that people didn’t notice them consciously but were influenced ‘subli~nally’.I always thought it was complete bunk, like the phoney research about second-hand smokingor recovered memo^ syndrome. Despite my unjustified opinionof myself,I can’t believe muttering ‘Drayton is gorgeous’ too fast for peopleto hear - no matter how passionately - will increasemy exiguous fan club. As you and I know very well, consumers are distressingly unwillin as they’re told, no matter how manydesperate stratagems we directing their thoughts, for the most part we are wildly att about a n ~ h i n gin the desperate hope that they’ll do what we want just occasionally. everth he less a strong belief in our mystical powers exists, often among people who should knowbetter. A few years ago, for instance, when ~ e r i Express c ~ were in the dumps, they thought new advertising would fm things. They switched their account briefly from 0 & M to Chiat Day,which didn’tunderstand their business and produced some very poor workas a result. The truth was were spending too much on getting poor-quality new customers and not

enough on keeping the ones they had (a common vice). What’s more, outlets resented their high commission rates. Marketing techniques alone cannot solve such issues;they can onlycontribute to thesolution. Whenthey were addressed, things got better. Those most gullibleabout the power of marketing know least about it privatized firms, for example. Few seem to grasp the simple factthat unless you deliverthe goods, allthe marketing ploys in the world won’t help. Thus, I was sitting on Late Western Railwaysthe other week taking four hours to make atwo-hour journey to Somerset. Would belongingto their first-class travellers club, Merlin, have helped? The reverse, Ifear - especially as my rage was superchargedby knowing the jumped-up booking clerksin charge had just become millionaires. Though perhaps Merlin membership gives you a wizard-like ability to predict when the trainwill arriveat your destination. It’s amazing how much money some of these people are making. There was a general howl of outrage when a bloated functionary in one of the utilities, a man called Lewis (presumablymeter a reader who oozed his wayto the top), was found to have paid himself E3 million last year - a reward, one assumes, for playing his inadequate part in a not very goodjob of supplying us with gas, electricity or whatever. Actually it was a bonus for getting away with incompetence without ~unishment,only possible becauseof the fiscal ineptitude of the last Government. Another exampleof the golden ruleBlair’s crew are revalidating: politicians invariablyscrew up businesses; and business people usually fail in politics. :The Thatcher and Major gove~ments sold off, or privatized,

public utilities at knockdown prices. Those who then ran them - mostly the people who had doneso when they were nationalized - made disgusting amounts of money extremely fast, rarely by improving service more than utterly necessary.

Shakespeare referred to the soldier’s ‘bubble reputation won in the an industry for bubble r nd tiny achievements lo n of Chiat Day,who

thing, though, and they always ued me, pa~icularlywhen I read some time ago that they had restructured their agency as a virtual office, especially since I have run my business that way for four years. y motives were nowhere near as h i g h - f l o ~as theirs, and ce~ainly to do with a lust for high techno lo^ - I can’t even drive amotor car. No: it justseemed to me a cheaper way of running a business, with benefits both for my clients and myself. And so it seems to have prove with one and a half helpersin my seedy office,whilst my associates work rand estates in theHome ~ounties,busy scribbling, d r a ~ n absurd excuses for late work, cajoling our clients and doin bizarre things with databases -just like peoplein real agencies. doubts even our clients appear to like it. The chief benefit is a better class of person. By offerin this o reed om I can rd peoplewho with one e~ceptionhad all previouslybeen either d or principals in their o m agencies, and no longer wanted to WO

the usual basis. But for me the greatest benefit isthat we have hardly any meetings, about one every six weeks. So we don’t waste time taking about such triviaas sexual harassment, secondary smoking,who should go on the board, or whether so-and-so deserves a bigger ofice, concentrating rather on vital issues suchas where to go to lunch and why my daughter’s band just failed to win Mercury’s Album ofthe Year award. I would loveto be ableto report to you smuglythat thisis the best of all possible worldsand anybody who operates otherwise is mad. Sadly,this is not true. For the idea to work, you need highly motivated people who enjoy t And personally I have had to working on their own ~ t h o u supervision. forgo one or two of the small pleasuresI grew to love in larger agencies - in particular my favourite indoor sport since I became too doddery for more active pursuits: going round the creative department very early in the m o ~ i and n ~~ t i n rude g comments on people’s work.Now I have to settle for sending abusive faes. U~fortunately thewhole idea falls flat on its face when Denise’s Mac breaks down and those prats at Apple take forever to come and fm it. Ah well, I suppose you can’t havee v e ~ h i n g . : ~e

got rid of Apple and tried a fewother brands. It did not help. See ‘The future is neveras advertised’, alsoin this chapter.

Last month I went to speak forthe Peruvian MarketingInstitute in Lima - one of those deals where your hosts plead poverty, so instead of money you get a free trip to see the sights, which in Peru are incomparable. The marketers are pretty smart, too, I was surprised to find. I flew with continental, once famedas the United States’ lousiest airline but now reborn. They have cleverly copied Virgin’s Upper Class, which is half-way between business and first, and their limos to theairport, and have won an award for service fromthe mysterious J D Powers organization - not just once, but twice in a row. I don’t know how Powers compile their ratings, but they would havehad a swift rethink if they’dbeenon the flights I took. One limp-wristedsteward between Houston and London managed the impressive feat of not smiling once at a passenger in more than nine hours - though he didweaken fleetingly over Nantucketand shoot a quick twitch of the lips at one of his colleagues. Changing planes at Houston was fun. Eager to welcome the huddled masses willy-nilly, the US perversely insists you go through immigration even if you’re not entering the country. Screwy, or what? Anyhow, it certainly made for a fair old scramble. Add my usual conhsed state after flying over six hours and no wonder I left a bag fullof goodies on the plane from Lima. WhenI asked the ‘customer service’ guy at Gatwick forhelp, he faced the problem with enviable equanimi~.‘If it was carry-on baggage, that’s your fault.’I wonder if BA trained him in the bad old days before he got his present job. Business theorists believe all firms are in the service business nowadays. As far as I can makeout most are actually in thegood intentions and bullshit ~,

business. This is typified by the clich~-ridden,high-sounding statements many plaster all overthe place - usually at points ~ a r a n t e e dto i ~ r i a t e those of us who are experiencing the opposite of that promised. T is, as you would expect,a leader in this p a ~ i ~ a rinfuriating ly form ate mastur~ation. A few weeks agoI was waiting to pay a phone ir ~ ~ b l e d shop. o n There was noqueue, the pa~ng-indesk was and the staff - who could clearly see mestanding there - careme, rather like languidwaiters in a crowded bar. Facing meI saw the follo~ng:‘You’ll find we’re easyto contact, friendly to deal with. ~e have set ourselves s t ~ g e nstandards t in meeting your re~uirements.’ There followed some more waffle about rapid response and a good connection every time, all of which I had time to write down whilewaitin If you have goodintentions in your firm, take my advice:for God’s sake, et about them. Your custo~erscouldn’t give a hoot about your soul-se~ching.Let the results come as a delightful surprise to - but thenyou’ve ink they used to call it ‘managing e~~ectations’ otten about that. It was the last management fad but three, if ewes me right.

DATE: C~CTDBER l997

A

few days ago the second annual survey on the competitiveness of countries was issued. Britain had slumped to 17th place - just ahead of Chile.Themain reasongivenwaspoor infrastructure, particularlyin education and transport. Iwould suggest pathetic management leadin low staff morale plays its part, too. The problem was crystallized w o n d e ~ l when y Ireturned recently from France onthe P & 0 ferry, reaching Portsmouth railway station at 9.30 pm. There were no staff and no announcements on the electronic screens- just a message on a blackboard with a number of droll errors of which the best said the station had been struck by 'lighting'. "he whole trip was a w o n d e ~insight l into how vigorously the ferry companies are working to combat the challenge of the tunnel and how eagerly the railways are struggling to satis@their customers before privatization. On embarkation there was no i n f o ~ a t i o non what to do with my luggage as a foot passenger,until a kindly French customs man told me to put it on a conveyorbelt; it would be given backto me on arrival. On the ferry out, Brittany Ferries have a kiosk giving advice about travel and attractions in France.Isaw nothing similar fromP & 0 on the way back. Nor didthe restaurant quell the continentals' fear that all food in Britain consists o f overcooked chips, roast beef and overpriced wine. In fact the only imaginative touch wasa man makingup little figures out of balloons to thegreat delight f u ~ r sales e of the children - a bit of added valuethat Ithink will do more for than anything else onthe ferry. On disembarking, my luggage was delayed just long enoughto ensure I missed the 925 train to London; though this was with the aid o f the bus company, whichstated there were frequent buses - which there weren't -

to thestation. When I went to theP & 0 office to ask them the times of t r a i ~ s I was greeted with the apathetic response, ‘We don’t store that info~ation’ - from an indifferent drab sitting behind acomputer screen. h impeccabl~ stupid m ~ t u r of e jargon and uselessness. The first thing people a * *

was ~ r i t t e nI, have seen. no morec10

n n n DATE:SEPTEMEER 1 9 9 5

B B

Here’s a new law for you. ‘The more firms talkabout customer seruice, the worse it gets.’ Be honest: have you heard more waffle on any other subject in the last five years? Butwhat actually happens? My PA Denise wanted to know when Cannock Gates would deliver a gazebo, It took three phone calls. During one someone called Emma said, “You can’t expectus to let all our customers know what’s happen in^. We’ve got lots of them’ - which makes you wonder how longthey’llstickaround. Also, what the hell’s going on chez Denise? Gazebo? Next she’ll want a sauna in the offke. Being eager to explore the frontiers of techno lo^ I got On Digital, free. Alas, I couldn’t ‘activate’ it as their ‘helpline’ was almost constantly engaged for a week. Brilliant invention! Brilliant offer! Brilliantmanagement! I know that because I’ve just read a sycophantic piece about their fast-talking, inspiring, motivati~gboss. To adapt Edison’s remark, lessinspiration and more perspiration might help. Then maybe he could motivate his dazzled minions to get a welcome pack out in less than three weeks. My other new law states: ‘The moredata a bankhas about you, the less intelligently they will use it.’ Thus, Barclaycard sent my partner, Andrew Boddin~on,his new card - then told him to do their job for them. ‘If you have authorized any companiesto make charges to your previous account number, please advisethem o f your new account number straight away.’ Baffled, Andrew rang to see if there were any charges. A helpful cus-

tomer service person said, ‘Over the last six months, you don’t seem to have any; but anyhow usually they get redirected automatically.’Huh? I like the word ‘usually’. How usually did they ave in mind? Frequently usually? ~ccasionallyusually?.Search me,p v . ere’s another mystery. How did Lloyds becomethe most successfil of the big banks?Was it with pretty new signs? After trying unsuccess~llyall to talk to my ‘personal banker’, Denise had to settle for this novel ex~lanationfrom someone else: ‘ ~ have e a skeleton staff and we. can’t S a n s ~ e the r phone. We have to deal with personal customers.’ How about a brilliant new invention called the ans hone to apologize, take your number and promise to callback? No W the invading US banks these bozos’ lunch- as I lon cerhave their ~roblemscurre , but does the solution g their women’s wear catal has his Fulton - and not a word about ‘the WO en in your life’? True, David mad moments, but he rarelywears WO n’s clothes, however fashionable. ers sort out this mess? ~ hthey’ll ~ fire , hem, in fact anybody except those respons~ble:the e Pm thinks there should be fewer menat thePIU. Abbey should have fewercounters, and cha e so much the cusl1 go away - literally. re recently revealedthat 70 er cent of customers who not getting ~roducts,service or communicationsthey nt. I may be astupid old sod, but is degradin all three the answer? :As

this was published, Stephen ~rabiner,the boss of o to a new job, which he didnot in fact take, havin lsewhere. ~ e a n w h a~ number e of financial firms were busy down, ie employ fewer peopleand reduce service.

nncl DATE: JULY 1999

How hard can it be to buy apager? Bloody near impossible as far as Ican see ifyou’re dealing with Dixon’s and you want to do anything that inte~ereswith their droll management processes. Recently one of my dedicated acolytes decided he couldn’t live witho~t one of these ingenious little devices. Since I was brought up when sophisticated communication meant the adroit use of forked twigs to carry messages,I couldn’t understand why. But1certainly understood what happened after I decided to humourhim and buy the thing. He went into his local Dkon’s branch and asked if they would let us buy a € 7 9 . pager ~ ~ on our American Expresscard, and let him collectit. The answer was ‘yes’. My offke then called up to arrange this complex transaction with the assistant store manager, who kindly took the details of the card and the name of the person. A little later, after we had goneto this trouble, he called back to say actually we couldn’t pay on a card billed to my office and have the wretched thing picked up - even with my written authority. Helpfully, though, he said there was a way to solve the problem: we could fax a company purchase order.We duly didso. Then, at 5.05 in the afternoon the poor fellow called back apologetically. Their head office wouldnot authorize the sale without a letter from our ‘holding company’. You can picture our surprise. We were trying - desperately - to buy something for a measly €79.99. Dixon’s were trying - even more desper-

ately - to stopus. The assistant manager could only say, ‘It’s not my fault it’s head office,’ and leave it at that. He was not, in thejargon, ‘em

He found a pager with almost exactly the

e customer is a l ~ ~ y s you can read how someone imp0 managed to reinforce the point I

ter in this chapter,

pay through the nose forit. I found this out recently when I made the dreadful mist my Australian confrere iller’s Hotel, off ~ e s t b o u r n Grove. e If you’veread this column for a while, ow he shes me with a regular supply of tipo ode an jests and S. Over the years he has helped me cover a number of Aussie esoterica, from the perils of being ‘swooped bymaa g ~ eto ’ thede ity of otherwise unemployable Poms to get good jobs with over there. The principalthing to be saidin Miller’s favour isthat th some good material in return. ‘Miller’ is, I understand, th iques Guide. I put alcolm there becauseit’s 110 a night for a singleroom in a rather ugly b r a ~ i ~ restaurant, an it’s not cheap. As some sort of compe it is stuffedwith fine a n t i ~ ~ e s .

What it is not stuffed with is fine service - or any sewice worth thename as far as I can discern.If you ring a guest up early (inmy case 7.30) in the morning, you get an answerphone. It seemsamazing, but from what Malcolm experienced, there’s nobody there to look after the guests at night. Is that illegal? It certainly seems dangerous. “hat happens if all the guests are mired in drunken slumber and a fire breaksout? On Malcolm’s first night, one of his fellow guests experienced Cool Britannia in action. He locked himselfout of his room by accidentand had to sleep on a couch,warmed by other guests’ coats. The next night at midnight alcolm himself couldn’t open the front door and had to go to another hotel. Miller’s seemed to doubt his wordon this, and when we last spoke he rguing about whether he should pay for that night. any of us in marketing may imaginethe lesson of the last 20 years is learnt: that people do understand they must deliver service. Frankly,I fear there has been no change of heart. Many merchants will still rip you o given halfthe chance - and prosper doing so. Theother day a tipster was recommending firms likeConnex and Stagecoach as an investment - the very peoplewho make railtravel a misery every day. The antiques business shows what effrontery and guile can do with a piece of junk. I wonder if Mr Miller’s Guide is any more reliable than his hotel. TE: It’s amazing how

quickly oneforgets things in the news. WhenI wrote this, NlrBlair and his minions were talking about ‘repositioning’ Britain because the traditional associations - pageantry, the Royal Family and so forth -were not ‘cool’ enough. Besides being fatuous, this illustrates how people who don’t understand marketing properly think it can achieve the impossible. You can’t wave a magicwand and change viewsthat have taken centuries to solidify.

A man has just arrived in a new town. He stops someone and asks: hat are the people here like?’ The reply came: ‘I think youyllfind the people here much the same as they were where you came from.’I like this use it i~ustratesthe fact that our attitude is often the important ingredient in success. Thebest story I know about that is one you may have heard. ut it’s worth repeating in case you haven’t. The Czechshoe magnate, Bata, sent a salesman to Mrica to check out the prospe~s.Whenhearrived the man sent atelegram: ‘Nobody here wears

get to run the world’s biggestshoe business by accident, but by persistence, which as we allknowisa far more essential ingredient than intelligence, imagination or wit. He sent another salesman out who immediately telegrammed back ‘Great opportuni~.Nobody here wears shoes.’ This came to mind when I was walking through my local villagein my role as general busybody and sensation seeker. Well, something interesti~ is goingon in whatbusiness journals call ‘the retail environment’. had three general stores. One, a mini-market,has always thrived. closed down because the people gave up: I suspect they bought it as a retireent hobby,just as people dream of retiring to run a pub.They ha sidered another useh1 ingredient if youwant tosucceed: knowledgeof the subject, in this case retailing. In much the same way fewof the many thousands who dream of running a pubbother to learn it’s oneo f the most taxing jobs imaginable, almost sure to ruin your marriage, makeyou an alcoholic or both. One ofthe other stores has always struggled. It used to be called‘The Village Stores’. Then came the first resort of the witless: it was ‘rebranded’ as

‘Cannin~on Capers’. This failed. A successful publicanbought it, but had no luck - probably too busy doing what he does best to learn about running stores. Finally a new couple, Mr and Mrs Stephenson,have turned the place round. Guess what? They had the novel ideao~improving the product and the service. They re-laidout the shop - which was quite spacious - to sell more than groceries. Now they run a little cafe in part of the space and sell videos. Theyopen 7 days a week, 13 hours a day. I was highlyimpressed, and asked Mr Stephenson what retailing experience he had. ‘None,’ he replied. ‘I’ve spent most of my life as a draughtsman.’ My God, this couple would have made millions with Kingfisher or someone like that. I asked him their secret. Clearly, it was attitude. ‘It’s a great opportunity,’he said.‘The agricultural college here is full of kidswho like a drink and so on, so we started by offering the things they like, and it worked.’ I admire this couple morethan many of the high-powered peopleI meet in marketing. They havethe common sense to do the obvious. All they need now isa mission statement toscrew everything up.

DATE: NCYVEMEER 199s

ndly convey myinsults to thechef,’ I asked the waiter. I didn’t re but I felt likeit, because as far as I could seethe restaurant - the ~ainfor Cafe near ~iccadill~ - coulddoalmostevexceptcookwell. I was so im~ressedwhen I entered th dered why they weren’t ction of special e bab~ons,croco-

when I waited for several minutes in a

but were colossal evenso. The foodwas the final t u ~ - o f f If . you run a restaurant, no matter how stunning the ambience and w i ~ i n gthe service - which indeedit was - it’s no bloody use if the food’s indifferentand overpriced. My views were formed early, sincemy parents’ ~ub-restaurantwas in the Good Food G ~ ~ from d e its very first issue. One reason was that when some people arrived at 3 am oncemy mother got up and made them a meal. Now that is service.It happened all Of47 years agobut the message has yet to reach the Legh Arms in fright~llysmart Prestbury on the other side of Manchester. They seem to have reversed Unipart’s w o n d ~ r old ~ l slo and operate along the lines of ‘Theanswer is no, Now, what’s the ~ ~ e s t i o n ? ’ I had booked for party a of some 20 people. But couldwe bring in a bottle of c h a m p a ~ if e we paid corkage?No, it was ‘illegal’! Could I buy a bottle of wine at thebar? Only from the wine waiter. (He was busy.) CouldI extract so much as an apology when the waiter spilt gravy on my newly cleanedsuit?

Not a ghost of a chance. R e ~ ~ i ton London g on Virgin Trainsit started again. Could I get a mineral water? No - sold out. Could I get any crisps?No - sold out. Haven’t they run this line longenough to notice the last train from Manchesterto London on Sundayeveningsiscrowded,especially on Mother’sDay? I never thought I’d end up pining for the returnof British Rail. ho pays for allthis? Obviously, we customers. But I feel sorry for the constantly having to deal with and apologize forthe incompetence of the management - who shod pay for it. They’re either recruiting the ~ o n people, g or not training them, or not motivating them to do a good job. If the economy is roaring ahead you can get away with this crap but when the do^^^ comes - what goes up must come down- God knows what will happen. People won’t have the money or desire to be insulted in P r e s t b ~they’ll ~; findbetter ways to get from Manchesterto London; and ey won’t accept special effects as a substitute for decent meals.

DATE: APRIL

1998

Service is a hobby-horseI mounted some time ago; I do not propose to dismount any time soon, and I hope youendorse this. Compare two firms and how they treat their customers. The first is engaged in the marketing of the future: they sell a flower delivery service over the Internet. A colleague in Spain tried them out and was delighted to get a message: ‘Thankyou!You are our first customer in Spain. Please accept $65 worth of flowers, free, to be sent to anybody anywhere in the world.’ To adapt the ~ c ~ n s motto, ey they are giving the customer ‘a service better than he has any right to expect’, perhaps because they are trying hard in a new market. The second company dominates an market. Here’s what e lovely Denise, when dealing with ThomsonTravel.Denise booked athree-bedded room for herself,husband and four-year-old son, for whom she paid 80 per cent(!)of the adult price. A three-bedded room with cot spacewas confirmed. What she got was a cramped~ n - b e d d e droom with a camp-bed blocking access to thepatio doors. She complained, only to receive an ( u n s i ~ e dletter ) pointing out the small print saidsomethree-beddedroomshavecamp-beds.Irrelevant, surely, in view of the confirmed booking. Shethen wrote to themanagin director who passed the buck to his ironicallytitled ‘customer services manager’. Shewas offered €75 in travel vouchers as compensation. Understan ably Denise didn’twant a titchy discount on something she had no wishto undergo again. When she wrote again the customer services manager in turn passe buck to thetravel agent suggesting they misrepresented or misunderstood the facts. The agent, who has been in business (and with whom ~e have

dealt) for many years,was so surprised she checked the ‘Hotel Fact Finder’. an extra bed. Some rooms This clearlystates, ‘Roomswith 2 single beds plus are large enough to take 3 beds plus a cot’ -just what Denise expectedand did not get. Still unhappy but commendably optimistic and persistent (how d’you think she puts up with me?) she wrote back to the managing director. He replied, reaffirming hisdistress at her dissatisfaction and passing the matter back to the customer services manager. Every reply she has had from him has repeated the words, ‘Please bear with us. We will come backto you in due course.’ I suspect she’ll get a helpful response on the twelfth of never. Have Thomson everwondered how muchbetter they would doby satisfying complainants, rather than sinuously wriggling to avoid doing so? Research shows how vigorously unhappy customers spread the word, and that satisfied complainantsare better customers than if they’d never complainedat all. ‘If Thomson doit, do it; if they don’t, don’t’was their old slogan.I can see why they changed it. It was a slip-upby the copywriter. The sense should clearly bethe other way round. Adapt or die is a fine phrase. Mortality rates in the travel business have always been high.On this evidence, the more the merrier. : So what happened? Eventually, Denise got a €75 cheque, which did not encourage her to use Thomson again. And Thomson are now in trouble.

Readers often ask how I keep up this tide of bilge, weekafter punishing week. Whence come the ideas? A cartoon of a critic gloomily seeking inspiration suggests one answer. ‘1 can’t find a n ~ h i n to g get an^ about, was the caption. So anything stupid gives rise to a good oldrant. Another comes when someone contradicts me, giving rise to a good old literary punch-up. Double thanks, then, to Andrew Owens,Dixon’sFinancialOperations Director. On 21 May I told how we couldn’tbuyacheappagerover the phone from Dixon’s with our corporate AmericanExpresscard,even though one of their shopkeepers assured us twice that we could. I suggested they cared lessabout their ~ s t o m e rthan s their systems and that the poor fellow was not allowed to use his o w n judgement in a smallmatter. Mr Owens responded in thisjournal using the silly politician’s trickof ignori~gthe main point, and gave some statistics on credit-card fraud instead. Forget that another small shop completed the very transaction Dixon’s couldn’t:how can people all overthe world, every day,24 hours a day ring and buy things with their credit cards?Maybe this brea~hrough, which after all is only about 20 years old, has escaped Dixon’s notice. In short, Mr Owens mademy point for me. I, the customer, was wrong - and their systems were right. But if all we did was complain, what a gloomy world this would be. Compare Dixon’swith Colgate-~almolive. If you study this column you may notice me refer occasionally to my PA, the fragrant Denise. Whyso fragrant, you may ask? Well, she just adores all

es of ~ g u e n t sfragrances, , scents, perfumes - indeed a n ~ h i n to g make ce ambience agreeable-but she had some trouble with Soft & Gentle rosolfor intimate usage. So she complained.Here’s what ‘rst, they wrote and said sorry. They said that they’d examined the there didn’t seem a n ~ h i n gwrong, but perhaps Denise had some ‘idios~cratic’- and God, isshe idiosyncratic - reaction to one of the ingredients. She may have sprayed it too close to where it was supposed to go, a part of the body I hesitate to mention in these genteel pages. They assured her they took great trouble with their products. They made helpfbl ons, explained why sometimes an ingredient can cause problems d by apologi~ingagain. In short, they bore in mind the words of the i m m o ~ aDavid l Ogilvy, ‘The coRsumer is not a oron, she is your wife’, hat really made Denise happy- I have detected a certain acquisitivehat when acknowle~gi r letter they sent E3 WO detailed ex~lanation. title without learnin omers about it’s smart to say sorry before you make our threa~bareexcuses? Maybe because, ested, customers CO

isalways worth bearin ind that research suggests r whose complaint is satisfied will become a better ~ s t o m ethan r if een a problem in the first place. I have mentioned this el sew her^, and sometimes I wonder:could t islead to an interestiRg S that make badproducts? : It

If you went into an IBM office 20 years agothere was every chance you would see on the wall a plaque bearing the company motto: ‘Think.’ At some point IBM forgot this admirable injunctionand got into a f e a ~mess. l They seem to be climbing out again, so perhaps the signs have reappeared;but why on earth do so few marketers think beyond the obvious? Take Books Etc. They cheered me up no end about a year ago by advertising that if you didn’t like a bookbought you there, they’d give you your money back without question. How obliging - and smart, I thought. I devour books bythe yard, since Ifind lots of ideas to steal, and I transferred most of mybusiness to their Queensway branch. When my daughter, bless her, recently bought me ~ ~ which ~I ~ had already read, I agreed with my strategic adviser, Denise,that they were the people to see. I entered with sprightly step, looking forwardto exchanging that book and buying a couple more. The girl at thecash-desk said pleasantly but apologetica~y,‘They’re getting a bit tight on that sort of thi and hailed a smug young twerp - the manager, I fear -who said ‘Sorry’wi what seemed uncannily like relish. He couldn’t help becauseit wasagainst their policy: the bookwas bought in Manchester, where they hadno branches. I said, ‘VVell, Iam quite a good customerof yours.’ This rang no bells. Maybe his superiors have failedto explain the fairly s i ~ i ~ c abearnt ing happy customers have on his salary being paid. He was, in the old-fashioned way, only following orders. Ibade him a waspish a ~~~~

‘Con~rat~ations, you’ve just lost a customer.’ Does their policy make anysense to you? It doesn’t to me. Maybe it’sto do with stock management. But a est-seller like ~i~~ S ~ isn’t~hard~ to s unload. The whole thing was an impeccable exercisein pis sin^ off a ~ a p p y - percustomer who with a little t h o u ~ hcould t have become a friend for life

res r a ~ ~ from i n ~three to five - than unh~ppyones, who t

‘Find out what people want and need, and give it tothem - and you’ll get rich,’ said an old-time US millionaire. This pithy definition of marketing sprang to mind - not for the first time - after I was savaged by someone from Mastercard a while ago for saying rude things about his barrage balloons. ~ismissivelyhe pointed out that today’s financial marketing is far too sophisticated for mypoormind to grasp. Havingworked with American Express for18 years, I doubt that. Their marketing has been infinitelymore effective than that of Mastercard, and even someoneas stupid as me is bound to pick up a few of the rudiments over such a long period. The problem with financial marketing is not lack of so~histicationbut a pathetic failure to get simple things right. It’s no use, forinstance, producing multimi~ionpound commercials with oodles of special effects if you can’t communicate properlywith your customers.By that I mean send out letters thatare polite, easilyunderstood and easy to reply to. Take how my colleague Andrew Boddington, who has salted away some of his massiveearnings in a savingsplan, was treated. Skandia Life sent him a letter reading: ‘YOUhave been advised [which hadnit] he by Barclays Bank plc the former assignees,that they no longer havean interestin. the above plan. The benefits under the plan have therefore reverted to the policy holder@)’, followed by an illegible signature. A while later, Barclays didsend him aletter, which said:‘We enclose the

~ d e ~ e n t i o n e d d o c ~ ePlease n t s . sign and return the attached form of receipt’, followed by some scrawlednumbers and a signature, d l ~ ~ deciphera able. Andrew asked himself the sort of questions people who deal Mth these sophisticated marketers ask all the time. ‘Who si ters? Do they wish to remain secret? om do Iask for if Icall? Do these le careat all about me? What exa re these letters about? Why can’t I read the s i ~ a in~either e of them?’ pressed it simply. ‘I put 150 a month into this plan and this is the q u a l i ~of attention Iget. Why can’tthey just give methe respect dueto a ~ s t o m e r ?What ’ heshouldhave as letters from both him what the plan involved, refte his mind about its pr worth, and telling him what The letters should have noted whom to talk to if he had any ~uestions,and included a free phone number and a paid envelope so it would not cost him money to do these sloths’jobs

DATE: ~ ~ V E M B1996 E ~

a

on the ~nancial side o f

,

Why do I say ‘flagrant’? To answer that, we must ask why firms are constantly changing these people. Surelythis has to be that they don’t what they want from them to startwith. Most top managers probab even define ‘ m a r ~ e t i nAs ~ ~a.result they don’t h o w what it is supposed to achieve. And they ce~ainlydon’t think deeply enough about how well they pedonn compared to others - not just in their own industry, but outside. In other words, too many are incom~etentdrones. All this was put into perspective for me bymy PA, the wonde d o ~ - t o - e a Denise, ~h the other day. She was talking about how sh treated at her s u p e ~ a r k e(and t she has been own to complain fromtime to time about this), compared to the treatment she receives fro who ~ r o ~ her d e~ t financial h services. So I thought ita good ideato get her to tell you what she thin own words. After dl, the evidence suggests many of you maybe too busy

~ t i n reports, g planning strategies and sorting out your next jobs to spare the time to talk to consumers. ‘Let’s face it,’she started. ‘I haven’t evenhad a bloody key-ring from my m o ~ g a g eprovider. At least the people at Safeway or Tesco make some attempt toprovide somedecent service.’ And having begun, it was hard to stop her (as you willsoon discover if‘you get her on the phone). ‘If youthink about it: your mortgage provider isgetting in theregion of €500 a month from you’ and all they ever do is increase mortgage rates, tell ow marvellous they are in silly commercials- but never communicate on waysto save you money.For an average €~O,OOOmortgage you are paying these people in theregion of €120,000 - not a badreturn for the mortage p r o ~ d e-r and all they do is take the money with absolutely no service what suits them. d comparethis with Tesco and the like who offer points as reward for shopping there. Now not many of us are fooled into t h i n ~ n gthey are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but at least they to keep your custom.I get something like €20 ~ u a ~from e r Tescoto spend as I like - not a fortune but a goodreturn on an ~ v e r a €40450 ~e spend a week on groceries.’

Have you ever had the feeling you’re beingo~ertakenby events? I felt practic~lyrun over two weeks 0 . Barely had I sent off my why Eurostar didn’tpersist with stination advertising than t VTry well. But it is a pleasureto be moreor less time to time. For years Ihave to anyone who cared to listen - and quite a few who di

This is,of course, a wildly imagina set o f statistics, but Iwas vastly heartto read what follows. ‘ keting with passion and persistence are found overtwo tter return on capital improvement in pre-tax profits and wonder how those without passion and persistence d how do youd e f ~ those e rare qu~ities?) Also, ‘44 per cent of marketing directors make little plans with their o m departments and 68 per cent fail to share their manageri~colleagues’. And ‘less than 10 per cent of companies with “customers”,“qu~lity”,“service”and/or “people” itt ten into their mission statements can claim a motivated worldorce’. ( have longsuspected any firm with any mission statement is b

7

These statistics come from Strategic Management Resources,who help you motivate your staff,which iswhat they mean by ‘workplacemar~eting’. The former headof the Brann agencyruns it, and I think she’s on to a good thing. She certainly did a good job at Brann. My only worry is that if people communicate with their employees using as much pretentious jargon as some of the stuff she sent me, they’lljust standaround in befuddled confusion. In their otherwise excellent newsletter, alicenseecalled Dr Shirley Probert produced a whole page of 100 per cent proof business-school gobbledegook. Ihave developed a macabre interest in this sort of guff, and even a kind of perverse admiration for its practitioners. How many people can use the phrase ‘distinctive competence’ fourtimes in three paragraphs, or ‘integrate’and ‘integrating’three times in one? I was disappointed to spot only one ‘holistically’.Dr Probert shouldtry harder. I believe I may havehesitantly pointed out before on these pages that in this country if you want to write to anyone except business“schoo1 denizens, man~gementconsultants and such miscreants, the use of relatively comprehensible language is mandatory. This reminds me of what a famously insensitive 18th-cen~ryScottish judge said when sentencing some poor soul. ‘You’rebraw a wee fellow,but ye’ll be nae the worse for being hangit.’ Workplacemarketing is an excellent idea, but will be none the worse for being explained in English. It shouldn’t needto shelter behind obfbscatory drivel. Mind you, my faithful aide Denise rightly says any communication is better than none and, rather cynically, ‘The~ e r i c a n usually s fall forthat sort of thing.’ Whatworries me isthat more and more of the British do,too.

0 0 0 DATE: MARCH 7 9913

cia1 effects over content. One US commentator said, ‘I don’t think a man who sees the ad is goingto say, “I w to go out and hire these guys”,but it differentiates them from the competition.’ Of course, the point is that any advertising is better thanno adve~isin - unless it is so bad it putspeople off your product or service, whichhappens rarelyless than you might i m ~ ~ n e . By contrast to them u l t i ~ ~ i o n - d o l l a r ~ d effort, e r s e nan ad in Septe ber’s B ~ s ~ ~Age e s has s the headline, Whose guide to MBOs is priceless, free?’ and beneath it, ‘The answer is Deloitte & Touche’, and then the slogan, * ~ o c u sonly ~ g on clients’. It won’t get people to hire them, but a response is the right first step. Actually, it is the fustad I have seen in this field to boldly offer a useful incentive and go all out for replies - and it would get more if the copy were longer and told you moreabout the booklet.

1”

Their slogan is awaste of space and a lie. You’d have to have checked your brain in at thedoor to believe they focus onlyon clients. Being accountants they focus on their profits just as much, and probably more. However, we must not quibble,because ~ o n g s the t advertising rulesClaude s i ‘Offer ~ ~ service’Hopkins laiddown 78 years agoin Scientiflc A ~ v e ~ iwas and that booklet is agenuine service. ~ y h o wno ’ doubt these firms willlearn the basics of advertising eventually. They certainly havethe money. Four years ago, I was talking to Price ater rho use in New York. One of their legion of VPs told mea million-dollar fee was small change even for oneof their smaller divisions, so they can rd to plaster the globe with messages. But if you really want to know, the best business-to-business medium is direct mail - about four times as ctive as trade advertising - though I believe in that too. I hope they find agencies who know what they’re doing, which you ght imagine would me irect marketing agencies - after all, they count eir results and should w what works. I doubt it though, looking at most of the stuff they run for themselves. Brann,one of the largest firms9 ran an ad the otherweek with the headline ‘Ship H0t99a play on words as tasteless as it is irrelevant. Why do agencies that make their living by getting responses for clients run ads that will do nothing of the sortfor themselves? Perhaps,reverting to my topic o f professional firms,the old legal maxim applies:the lawyer who acts for himself has a fool for a client. Some o f their writers should spend time poring overJohn Watson’s Creativi~in Direct~ a ~ k eproba~ n ~ ’ bly the best recent English text on what works and what doesn’t in ads. It will be much more help than weak puns.

u n o DATE: CIGTCIBER 1998

‘ N o t ~ gkills a bad product faster than good advertisi Bernbach. Actually, I think nothing kills a bad productfaster than pissin money away, which brings me to thesubject of mylocal r ~ w a station y an the ~eplorable antics that have been taking place there. If you have a long memo^, and have bravely persisted with thiscolumn, you may recall a hea~-rendingtale I told ~ h o e v e ran r the station

thus forcing me onenight to take a ~ ~ i leak v ebehindthe local To keep costs down th station stayed largely ~ m a n n e d , smashed most of the ~ n d o w sThey . were then boarded up exercise. To this you cannow add the extra it is costingto puti This will be smashed repeate~y,unless some great intelle would becheaper to have someonethere night and day than ut railway people are pre adept at pissing away when buying my ticket the other morning. Near the counter glossy Great ~ e s t e m brochur~s that must have cost at least title was ‘Our Disabled Persons ProtectionPolicy’. ‘Ah ha,’ I said to myself. interesting. They are selling insur~ce.’ But no:the brochures were about what therailway is doin

7

people. The booking clerk, an amiable chap as bemused as me, said he’d received three boxes of them and in over two weeks just three copies had been taken. Thiswastekl exercise in fatuous self-congra~lationis paidfor out of the (fast-rising) fares.If they want totell disabled peopleabout these services, a simpleposter, with a cleartitle like ‘Howwe help disabled people’, will dothe trick. I also picked up a leaflet headed ‘We’re modelling our service around you’. Inside is a lot of crap about their ‘commitment to providing services which are fast, frequent and on time’, ‘service which is second to none’ and ‘fast and efficient access’ (unless you want to take a leak). There is a handy English word for this stuff. It is ‘lying’. Their services are getting slower, less frequent and more delayed. Theone thing good about Great Western is the staff, who don’t deserveto have their efforts, and their wages, belittled in this way. The managements of these firms model their service not around us, but around their o w n rapacity, raising prices and cutting service whenever they can get away with it. We should string up the rascals who have just made fortunes behaving in such a foolish and grasping way, take their money and - travelgive it tothose who have to live with the consequences every day lers and staff. And shoot the conni~ngpoliticians who made it possible, while we’reabout it. “FE:Since I wrote this, a report came out revealing that

therailways in Britain,besidesbeing dirty, u n p u n c ~ a land badly run by shameless profiteers, are the most expensivein theworld.

DATE:SEPTEMBER19538

The other morning I shaved with toothpaste, an aberration that will happily confirm many readers’ viewsthat I am going gaga. Marketing is a young person’s game, so few of you willempathize with me. Howeverthe cause ofmy behaviourwill not be entirely s ~ p r i s i n gto those of riper years. If you have been blessed with good eyesight you may somewhat be alarmed to discover, usuallyin your 40s, that you start finding it hard to read fine print, particularly in soft lighting. That’s why you sometimes see diners of a certain vintage holding restaurant menus not at the normal distance but about three feet away fromtheir eyes. I don’t know what the medical term is, but something nasty has happened to your retina and eventually you have to get either glasses or contact lenses or, if you are very bold, havelaser surgery. So that is how I came to pick up a smalltube of what I thought was shaving cream and smear it generously all over my face before noticing a pleasing peppermint aroma which persuaded me I had the wrong tube. You may ask why I wasn’t wearing my glasses. The answer is simple: 1 was lolling in the bath at thetime, in which circumstancethey steam up. Happily the toothpaste frothed up almost as well as shaving cream - and I carried on anyhow, doinggreat a job, whilst thinking how wonderful modern consumer products are. Sho~-sightednessis not the sole province ofdecrepit writers, 1reflected

on reading an item in the23 May issue about Rimmel? which nestled appropriately beside a piece by Mr and Mrs Snoddy’s little lad about d o ~ - s i z i n g , a subject weboth agree about. hen I was young, Rimmel sold cheap cosmeticsin ~oolworths- and for all I know still do. They’ve just been taken over by Benckiser,the first casualties beingmarketing director Ann Hunter and mana ing Peasland. It’s alwayssad to see peo le losetheir jobs, tho sur rised to see it in this case. Invariably firmstake over others with much e about ‘rationalization’ and ‘economies of scale’, or as I would put it,firing someofthe people who do the work and g i ~ n those who remain. enckiser peopleare now goingto do the two departees’jobs. ~ o ~ e lmarketing ly~ director of their fra~rancecompany, Coty, willdo MS H~nter’s,whilst Peasland’s role has been added to the duties o f W Opossib~tiesemerge. Eitherthe two people who have ese additional roles wer to do or they are about ot a badidea, but itis if

ociated overheads ye

and Mrs Snoddy’s f ~e ~ i ~ ewhose s , tal

o n n DATE: JUNE1 9 9 6

e eminent media

In my extreme youth the Battle of Britain took place. The atmosphere was not unlike that during the recent football-fest,except the British behaved better, many in those far-offdayshaving been taught manners, and none havinghad their minds pollutedby the propagan Sun, ~~~0~ and so on now spew out. To make steering dificult for the ~ ~ ~the Qskies~weree full, ofbarra balloons - called blimps nowadays - a sight I recalled three wee~endsago when one was hovering over my London squat. On its side I could just read ‘MasterCard’. You may judge this a fitting and ingenious wheeze, but I must be honest with you and reveal what flashed through my mind when I saw this u n g ~ n l y vehicle: ‘What silly bastard decided to do that?’ Perhaps you consider this an overly harsh and peremptory response, so I will elaborate. Good marketing should, in so far as we frail humans can manage,match the resource to the need. Or to put it another way, you shouldn’t waste money. Everypenny squandered by lazythinkers or vainglorious agencies on f~volousor irrelevant messages isa penny you coulduse to improve the product, cut the price or enhance the service: all much morei m p o ~ a nto t the customer, who pays our wages. Therefore, though some repetition is essential in advertising,any proposed messagethat tells people things they already knowin a boring way should be viewedwith deep suspicion,and then cancelled without ceremony. You may divide allmarkets into threestages. The first is when the kind o~productis new and few customers know what itis, for example you offer the first ever credit card. The second iswhen the kind of ~roductis no lon

,you havecom~etitors,and customers are a credit card is. And the third is when e v e ~ o n e

This effision produced a firious cou~ter~last from som~one at rd, ~ h i c hI then responded to - see pa e 169. As one ~ o u ~ ~ i s once remarked, if you are clever enough, your readers will write your co~umnsfor you.

c l n o DATE: JULY 1 9 9 6

The US talk-showdemagogue RushLimbaugh, whose politics are w o ~ n g l yadjacent to those of the late Genghis Khan, has ~ t t e two n best-sellers whosetitles are, I suspect, distinctly better thantheir content: f i e ~a~ f i i ~ g Os ~ To Be g and ~ There, ~ I Told You So. The latter sums up my reaction when C a ~ p amagazine i~ reported research a while ago showing~ s t o m e r see s financial ads as ‘condescen~g,patronizing stic’. I have been sayingthis foryears. Banksespeciallyhave m somediretripe.Theexception, Isuppose, is Uoyds, whose work hasat least been consistent and well produced, but too many have followed the Goebbels p a r a d i ~ never : mind the facts, just lie repeatedly - ‘the bank that says “yes79’, ‘the action bank’, ‘the listening bank’, when we know banksare too often negative, sluggish and deaf to all but profit. Just about the only outstanding work I recall was over 20 years a John ~ e b s t eand r Brian Mindel for a bank that doesn’t even exist any more, the National Provincial. It focused neatly on how directdebit made p a ~ n g your bills less painful. Other advertisers prance through never-never land, hoping to make the~selveslovable, perhaps. Thi~-secondepics dramatize the stunning revelation (no doubt derived from costly research) that their staff and customers are human; romantic ballads hymn early morning withdrawals from cash machines; buffoonish clerics dance with Dickensian quacks; ballet dancers cosy up impro~ably to heavy-metal musicians; neo-Busby Berkeley

choreo~aphyis pressedinto irrelevant service; they’ve eventried dull slos printed back to front. I was yakkingabout this last year at a direct marketing cours by a young man from Nat West. One ofhis colleagueslater rang me to ask why I thought their fdl page ads with drawings of people were about as much use asburning large piles of E5 notes. lunched welland wasless than entirely coherent. What I should have said was that good advertisingfits its subject. Money cuddly or funny. It’s a serious matter, about numbers and practic~ities,not images. hat are your cha es? How do your interest you offer a 100 per cent are? How quickly can I get a loan? mortgage? Boring but necessary matters - har rising,becausebanks are boring but necessary. t to love my bank, insurer or bu~dingsociety; 1 don’t even

n’t remember any of the a ve in this piece - they were that bad. the same sort of rubbish stillappe~rs. Interestingly enough, someone fromM & C rang me ecause they were t h i ~ n of g changi their success~lf o ~ u l ~ . ost always a mistake.~arketersget bored with their advertising

Have you ever feltashamed at being attracted to some gruesomesi despite yourself'? Road accidents, for example, always draw h o ~ f i e dyet fascinated onlookers.I know this from personal experience: at 18 I was run over and nearly died. Indeed, I was an object of medical curiosityas the first person in the northof England known to sunrive a ruptured liver. I recall

that can only hearten those of us who believe progress is still possible in this wicked world. The bre~throughin question is the pol~ropylene cia1testicle for dogsor rather, since these things tend to come in pairs, polypropylene artificial testicles. These have been introduced in the United States, of course - where life at its best and worst is to be seen - to assuage the post-operative trauma of male dogswho have hadtheir own removed. It all reminds me of the touching riddle: how many country and western singers does it take to change alight bulb? Five - one to change the old one,the other four to sing about the one they lost. In an age when such marvels are possible, what can we say about our petty struggles in marketing? Take the great supermarket war, in which the antagonists, exhausted from struggling over their traditional turf, h sought to change the battleground, first launching competing schemes of bribery and now movinginto things like banking. In my view, the bankers

couldn’t possibly be as bad as people paint them, but if1 ran s u p e ~ a r k e tIs hard before allyin myself with people who find their o business so tough - either because they might sc ing as ~ f f l c ~tol do t wellas ~ a ~ n

or l n s t ~ n c ae ton ~ o~moneyand t

: On reflection, I may have been wrong here. Since ma banks are so bad at what they do, perhaps the s ~ p e ~ a r k ecan t s dobetter. Then again, as I write S a i n s b ~ ’are s having a very hard time - as are Marks

vated matters. What sponsorship buys, he explained with finite patience as to a small child, the is ‘acquisition of the rights of association’. And third, the return on vestment derives fromthe way this sort of thing is exploited in the ‘mar~eting mix’. But the eager scrutiny I gave to his comments was nothi applied to reports s h o ~ n that g most of the €600 million inves Cup links was probably wasted. It seems the l 2 official spons 98 put up €250 million in order to render ~ o - t h i r d of s vie remember their names and 55 per cent to get them wrong. So this, I said to usby was trying to explain to silly old me: you S end €50 million and nobody associates you with a n ~ h i n gActually . that’s U there were more complaintsabout Vauxhall’s nasty little sponsors than a n ~ h i n gelse. As for the ‘m~ketingmix.’, how do you expl thing most of your customers are b l i s s ~ y u n a w e of?~Beats me.

Over a century ago, a man deeply in debt asked one ofthe Rothschilds to lend him some money. The response was ‘No, but I w i l lwalk acrossthe floor of the London stock exchangearm in arm with you.’ Now ent use of a natural association, but thethings I was discussing - Citibarik and Elton John, forinstance - do not seem natural partners. Mr Busby did mention the Co-op bank, which I admire greatly, but I cannot see why, as they were not World Cup sponsors to my knowledge. His point that promotions make people change their buying habits is quite true. Unfort~ately,though, what bribes give, bribes take away. m e n your promotionends, someone else’s begins.Many did indeed go to ~ainsbury’s to collect their David Beckhammedals, but most are now drifkck to thes u p e ~ a r k ethey t started with. You could sayI was unde~helmedby Mr Busby’s arguments, but they e me a few goodlaughs, which is morethan those who blew E600 mi~ionhave enjoyed.I am not saying sponsorship is bad;I am just saying it should be relevant and care~llythought out - and if‘this is the level of t h i n ~ n gNlr Busby employs in his pitchesto likely punters I would be very careh1 before succumbingto his blandishments.

nncl DATE: JULY 199E3

y financi~dealings over the years have been eclectic, eccentricand, let’s not mince words, stunningly incompetent. I have made a livin most bizarre ways, some of which you might find hard to beli selling malt whisky for investment on the phone, pop record Swedish newsagents and swimming pool franchises in France. T have got into from time to time with Her Majesty’s Commission Revenue are too depress in^ to recount here but would certai ws amongst those ofyou Respite this, finance fascinates me, hich is why I was recently c h u c ~ i n ~ ~~s~ over an article in The E c o ~ o about

ad advice. One is he partners in these firms, who re of~ourseaccouneir sense of a d v e n ~ r esave wit de their indi~dual They ant to change the law. The E c o ~ o pooh-poohed ~ ~ s ~ as auditors are ke nly aware of the conseq will approachtheir task with ‘a healthy sense of terror’. This splendid phras de me think. Why cannot the sa applied to our busines re all ~genciespose as *pro~essi to complain that their agencies are dictatorial when telling them what todo, but pay no pe are rarely even upbraidedwhen their certainties produce ~e all know it is often impossible to isolate what part theadve~ising plays in your marketing, though I’ve noticed that whenever a firm does enjoy successthe agency is very quickto claim the credit. Conversely, you

tants and not noted

have probably noticed how many reasonsother than advertising an agency can blame for fiscal disasters in a client’s business. Despite this the only sanction you can generally apply isthat of changing agencies. Particularly amusing in this context is the way many financial insti~tionshave changed their agencies without to my mind noticeablyi m p r o ~ n gtheir advertising. And what about direct market~ng’where results are measurable? I was to their relief Iended addressing an audience at one fim a while ago. When after trotting outmy usual selection of droll examples,pithy exho~ations and off-colour jokes,one executive cameup and said, ‘Maybewe should talk about doing business,’to which I responded amiably, what a good idea. I suppose you’d liketo gethigher responses to your mailings,’to which came rious response, ‘We’d be happy to getany response at all.’ I don’t h o w if a healthy sense o f terror is the answer, but a little more h ~ i lmight i ~ help. A while ago Iasked someonewhose talents Iadmire what motivated him. ‘Fear of failure,’ he replied.Ido so agree. That, and reflecting beforewe boldly go for another so-called creativebrea~hrough that someone else’s money, someone else’s business and someone eke’s career are on the line.

o n o DATE: M A R C H

1996

~ h ~ s t o p h Fildes, er that v nnyfinancial journalist, likes so much he trots it out r . ‘ ~ imoney ~ n to~a ba allon of beer to not sure w h i ~ hwall it’llend up against.’

this is meant to convey the insouciant joy of one with nomoney w o ~ i e s , though research shows if youshow people on beaches readers n a ~ r a l l ythink about holiday resorts. Three headlinesfight for yourattention. The first cannot poss as it is carefully placed over the sand of the beach so you can’tre well, really,as it is incomprehensibly Wee. It reads: ‘Money says, “But you still haven’t opened those bank statements, have you?’” just the sort of thing little girls sayto mum on holiday. Or is it mum sayingit to thelittle girl? Or is it God? Who cares? Sadly the next headline, which you can read, s t ais~ g e ~ g l y pt and language.It says, ‘Let’s sort money out.’d m cial services proxnises usto arrange things so we . This is about as credible as a politician’s promi never explain precisely how this miracle w ill be The copy begins,‘At times like this, bank state thing on your mind.’Not bad: two cliches in one sentence. This is followe

by an idalliblesign of bad writing - a changeof person - because that sentence talks about ‘your money’whereas the next runs, ‘That’swhy we need to keep moneyunder control.’ (I like the idea of keeping money ‘under control’. Onepictures it as a kind of ravening beast, likely to savage people at dead of night if not kept in.) The third sentence reverts to thesecond person, ‘Chec~ng your account balancer e ~ l a r l yis one way.. .’. In the third headline a good idea creeps in: ‘a free book to help youtake i l l help you put control o f money’. This ‘practical and impartial guide w money in its place and help you enjoy real peace of mind’. How nice: another clichtl?. Apart from knowing zipabout how pictures communicate and managing headlines, the art director doesn’t knowwhat gets response. The coupon is carefilly placed so as to be ignored - in a thin anaemic strip at the - to ensure ‘the i n t e g r i ~of the design’ was not ‘compromised’. Lord knows how much they’resquandering on this stuff. If they looked at r e t ~ r non investment, someone would havean immediate heart arrest. And, I might add, this applies ~ t even h greater force to the current wave of expenditure on changing the name of the ~ i ~ a Bank, n d which at least has some meaning,to theinitials HSBC, which have none. : Shortly afier this appeared, Lloyds

Bank spent a fortune c h a n g ~ g the look of all their branches, stationery and so on. Imagine what would happen if they applied the same money and enthusiasm to improving their service. Unlikely,though.

a n n DATE: MARCH l999

5

Do you knowhow to advertise? What a silly question. Of course you do. First, youextract as much moneyas you can fromthe people in charge, based on any of a number of vague criteria. These almost certainly don’t - the long-term valueof a customer - because include the only sensible one you don’t knowit. Then you spend weeks, even months talking to good-looking, persuasive peoplefromadagencies about your plans. Finally you choose the one that seems best, usually on the evidence of elaborate and detailed proposals from people who cannot possibly understand your business.If you have a6ig budget arner from this tiresome and processa photo in this or another magazine accompanie~ by wildlymisleadinginformation about how you arrivedat your decisionand a few wordsof vile sycophancy from your new agency’s boss. Then, 9 times out of 10, the speculative campaignthat so enchanted you will be discardedas impractical, and you will never see the people who did it. They will be working on another new business pitch, as will the charmers you met, and you’ll be handed over to the oily rags who will do the real work. You may wonder if they know what they’re doing, because a months few later you’ll either be collectingawards and a bonus, or the addresses of good executive search agencies. In fact, do you ever wonder if you’re doing? I don’t askthat maliciously, because most people have very little idea. A few years ago,when David Ogilvywas asked for his advice by James D Robinson 111, the (about to be fired) headof American Express,he said, ‘Why don’t youhire someone who understands advertising?’

These thoughts are provoked byre-reading an excellent book called ~o~ to ~ ~ v e ~given s e to , me years agoby one of the authors, Ken Roman,f o ~ e r head of the Ogilvy Group.It will save youvast a amount of indecision,heartache and financial disaster, because it covers ahuge range of topics clearly and with ~ ~ m i r a bbrevity. le They includeweighty matters like why,when and how often you should change a campaign, which media suit which products and false assum~tionsabout integratio~.But they also inclu~e wise words on lesser, but still perplexingsubjects like what research reveals S, the right way to re a radio script, what to bear in a celebrity and how b he letters should be on your posters. The book has been revised and reissued as ~e ~o~ to ~ ~ v e ~ ~ s ssed by how well it is written, which is why you should do favour and buy t ~ f ~f ~o r ~also s , by rator, Joel Ra~haelson.It is the best and shortest book on od business English. Give it to your staff: it could save you S hours trying to wrench sense from their sloppy ~~

~~~~~~

9

creative partners, n as^ o ~ er ~ ~~~~ee country

told', saidthe headline. It seems an expert was advising would-be advertising people to avoid merry quipsif they want tosell to their countrymen, who? herevealed, aren't motivated by that sort of thing. In Britain, on the other hand, the article pointed out, fimny ads work very well. Since most of the world has long believed the Germans have no sense of humour, whereas the Britishalmost own the copyright, this came as no surprise. But humour is a fimny old thing. ~ e n ~ - e i gyears h t agomy partner and I had a spectacularly unsuccessfid business in Sweden, another place where humour is allegedlyin scant supply. Some Swedes seemed almost ashamed about this. A s u ~ r i s i n gnumber were at pains to tell me that whereas all their c o ~ t ~ were e n stone-faced oafs, they themselves were always game for a laugh. All I can say that is when our business went broke, noneof the creditors found it at all hilarious. I wasn't exactly chortling with glee myself, forthat matter. It is over70 years since Claude Hopkins, perhaps the most able advertisin man ever, ruledthat 'no man buys from a clown' in his ~ c ~ e ~ ~ ~ c ~ ~ which isperhaps the best advertising book ever.'Yet humour often sells - even in Germany. I have in my filessomefunnyadsfora Ge

mail-order catalogue firm, believe it or not, which did very well. One offered a freewashing machine to all familieswith more than 13 children, sayin everyone else would have to buy one, and ending with the price plus inst~ctionson howto order. It sold loads of washing mac~inesand made audiences in many countries laugh - especially in places likeIndia, where they have large families. featured a number of similar offers, such as free baby clothes for allfa mi lie^ who had hadtwins that week and a free tracksuit for allread-

:One problem with

humour is not only that whatyou findhnny I don’t?it is also that itdoesn’t travel very well.As marketers try totransfer successfd campaigns fromone market to another, this makes it very hard to use. Ihave been telling jokes for20 years all over the world, just tomake eches alittle less boring.For what itis worth, I find that ones about e, money and baddriving tendto bewellreceivedalmost eve~here.

0 0 0 DATE: AUGUST 199

I suppose many of you are, like me, entertained by Auberon ~ a u g h ’ s writing. But funny as he is,I don’t think he is amatch for hisfather Evelyn

who, before writing novels, wrote on travel, art and architecture. Here is a thoughtful observation he madeabout an unusual, but rather u n s a t i s ~ n g chief shipboard race in 1929: ‘The disabili~suffered by tortoises as racing animals is not slowness, so much as a poor sense of direction.’ It seems to me the chief disability suffered by many if not most marketers is not sloth, so much as poor grasp of priorities. Too often they feel f i d ~ n gwith solve basic problems; in particular they seem to imagine bullshit is a s u b s t i ~ t for e action.A ood example isthe current Barclays B esides being needlessly obscureit offers little or no competitive benefitto the prospect - and the same can be said of many other advertisers. I have quoted in these columns beforemy favourite definitionof marketing, from a long-dead ~ e r i c a millionaire: n ‘Findout what people want and snappier description need, and give it to them - and you’ll get rich’, a much than theCIM’s multisyllabic one.It is inst~ctive,then, toe~amine the activities of the Cott Corporation. Theyare the Canadian chaps, you recall,who came overhere not long agoand wrought havoc in thecola market. ~ a ~ i n genough ly their secret is rather old-fashioned,A good example isa beer they f o ~ u l a t e din Canadacalled‘President’sReserve’.They started by analysing howthe best beers in the world -which of course come from Pilsen- are brewed, and comparing them with what was availablein

ada. They then setabout b r e ~ n ga better beer using superior in and methods. They imported hop twice as expensive as the one y other Canadian brewers; they matured the beer for 50 they conducted taste tests; and, lo an wasn’t a d ~ e ~ i s ethey d , could sellit for less.~ i t h i anfew There is a moral in

- is in this case beerpop-

ologize, but theBarclays Bankc a m p a i ~ I refer to was actually at I can’t remember a thin about it, which itself makes a point, I suppose. - the Chartered I n s t i ~ t of e ~arketing- defines marketing as a isci~line that‘identifies, anticipates and satisfies customer needs at a Cott ~ o ~ o r a t i ohelped n one or two su~ermarketchains improve their cola offerings,and the sales results gave the big brands a big fright.

,t h i n ~ n g it was all hisown inst ton Fletcher S

re nothing but a bun laining about clients’ u~easonableways. A. week later, Raoul inne ell was saying how badly a mana~edtheir businesses. Havi couple of agencies, starting with my own money - or to be honest no moneyat all in one case,just ample desperation - I yield to none in my incompetence. On the other hand clients are exceedingly difficult to manage, often because they mess you around so much. Years ago, IBM screwed us around so remorselessly,if unintention a and said to theclient as politely as I could, ‘Either that I asked for meeting you pay us a whole lot more moneyor 17mafraid we can’t do business any was then (about 16 years ago)perhaps the most highlyregarded fim in the world, and he saidsomething like, ‘You can’t saythat toIB which I replied, ‘I just did’ - not having heard that wonderful phrase, ‘Read my lips., I tried to explain. ‘It has taken us a dealof time, trouble and effort to put together our staff. Talent ishard to come by,but in our industry, which is a new one, it is even harder. The other day an art director came in to me in tears because she had found seven different sets of amendments on one

piece of your ~nishedartwork. If I can get enough ood people like her, I can always get more of you; the reuerse doesnot ap I ~ y enjoy ~ u culturalfootnotes, here is how a client treated som~one

don to get there? Folly often rules amongst the displays near my London hovel.~ o m cone ood adve~isingwith bad puns, like the one for Nokia f e a t ~ n moony-faced nun and priest: ‘A superior way to t to mother’ is th pathetic quip employed. Others have clearly been dr t up with no reference to thefact that almost allthose exposed to them are ~ ~ z z i past n g in their shiny little motor cars, far more intent onnot h i t t ~ othe g motor cars than looking at posters. This should leadthe intell ood posters must be simple,striking and unde How, then, is one to fathom the thinking behind a current poster for ~utland?Looking ~ e m ~ k a bsil yilar to the campaign forthe London this deploys a droll~ictureo f a chicken called Simoneto i l l ~ s t ~ athe te o rustic joke, ‘ ~ had e to close the zoo when the chicken died’, selecte~no doubt because R~tlandused to be the smallest c o u n ~in En

nny. ~ n f o ~ u n a t echickens, ly zoos, jokes and Rutland are not be ut thatexcellent ale, Ruddles. However, since neither the brand the beer is all that ~rominent, you would neverknow it as you race to the office. about the ~ r o ~ u c t i Iosaw n last week, whichfeatures a muscular, oiled maletorso in the manner now de ~ ~in jeans ~ commerc~als? e ~ r he insides of what

can no^ conceiv-

DATE: JUNE l995

‘Madam,youhavebe en your legs an instrumen immense pleasu~e,but you sit there scratching at it Beecham tothe cellist. ictatorial way with orche

performance was him shouting at his players when they irked hi His greatest memorial is the way he single-handedly promotedthe music o f Frederick Delius, who o t h e ~ s would e probablyhaveremained in obscurity. He was able to becomeaconductor because of wealth derived from Beecham’s Pills, a remedy largely composed, I believe, o f bicarbonate of soda and sold, in the carefree pursued by medical advertisers, as a remedy for just about eve indigestion to cancer. They maynot have done people much good but they did havethe savi grace that compared to some competitors they didn’t do much h a m number of the competitors were largely composed of alcohol, and so times opium, thus ~ a r a n t e e i n that g if youdidn’t become drunk a you p ably became a drug actually recommend Since then advertising has been regulated to make such claims and p ucts impossible. Nobodytoday could promise%io-Bilge will make you slim’ or ‘Juvasex will make you young again’ without having to prove it. The one

area where such sharp practice still flourishes unchecked is political adver.I would loveto think school classes willget smaller, hospital waiting lists shorter, as Labour posters promised - but how? Many of these things are controlled by forces nogovernment commands. By what miracle could they summon out of thin air in any reasonable periodthe school teachers let alone literate ones) needed to make classes smaller, or the doctors to ake waiting lists shorter, even if the money existed, whichit does not? Nor will more taxes produce that money as swiftly or copiously as politins would like. The British public like every other will always findits way round tax demands when they exceed the reasonable. I cannot believe anyone advertising a car, a washing machine, a credit card - or for that matter Beecham’s Powders - would be allowed to get away with such unjustifiable claims. It is scandalousthat politicians are peritted to make promises about our lives and our children’s that, should they prove false, will affect us far more than any claims ordinary advertising voters ht make. Andwhat is goingto happen when t w o years from now ce that these promises - on issues about which we have such strong feelings - have not been honoured? Bill Bern~achonce said, ‘~othingkills a bad product faster than ertising.’ Far worse in my view is advertising which makes claim ot be delivered.~oliticiansare expected to tell any liesthey like to get d. But do they have to bring their nasty practices into our relatively ~es~ectable field? TheGove~mentshould dosomething about it. (Just kiding, really.) For once I was right. Almost exactlytwo years after this appeared, egan to become rather agitated about the promises made by the Labour Party. These certainly helped to win the election. However, school class sizes went up, not down; hospital queues got longer, not shorter; and the promised ‘ethical foreignpolicy’ looked a little suspect when it was learnt we were selling arms to thecorrupt and repressive IndonesianGove~ment. m

I just got an envelope from ~cottish

con~den~ia~’. For once the en it, since it cont

e, not justsly a

t

e was c o m ~ ~ e t e ~ y

response: no name to reply to, nor any nd of request, ur encoura~ement to ally: do it’s an admirably designed with aninterestin ind you, Ken hrey, Bosch marketing commu~cationsmana would makean ideal client for them. He’s ~ n i ads n with ~ phone numbers, but with ‘no immediate plans to use any data that is captured’. even sure direct m ~ k e t i would n~ workin his sector - a ‘pushy approach’ on is still out’. Has hebeen cloistered in the de ths ofthe ast decade? Doesn’t he know every intelli the world and even some not too bright are obsessed with data and what can be donewith it? Jon Ingall, about to be promoted to some grand, unspecifie oup would never m

the last time you got somethin through the letterbox and said ow”?’As David Ogilvy pointed out years ago,our job is not to make ople say ow'. It is to make them say, ‘I’ll buy that product.’ What’s more, sincethe latest DMIS research shows direct mail volumes have douled in the last four yearsbut readership has only dropped from 59 per cent an arrow pointing down

ossesses easyJetto put theGo logo o they think that discourages people from tra~elling areness for them. o m goal of World Cup class. :In another piece I tell the Go side ofthe easyJet story. It seems I was

o o o DATE: JULY 1998

A woman with a rash on her hand goes to thedoctor. The doctor looks

it closely but has noidea what it is. He looks out of the window htfu~y,and then asks, ‘Have you had this before?’ The patient says, ‘Yes.’ ‘I. see,, says the doctor. Then, after another thoughtful you’ve got it again.’ That comes from Mark ain, who was a damn sight funni tury ago than mostcomedians are today. And talking about comedians,

What can you, the intelligent marketer, do? The usual a r ~ m e n t sare being aired.Firms must save money by cutting down on e v e ~ h i n gnot essential, and that includes marketing if they see it as an expense, not an investment. A friend who runs a publisher’s callsit ‘saving your wayto Many advocate the opposite - increase or at least maintain spending since in past recessions firms which didso emerged stronger than before. This appealsto marketers, of course, for eminently practical reasons like a keen desireto stay employed. But it also makes sense.If e v e ~ o n else e cuts down but you increase, you gain a disproportionatebenefit. Even if you simply maintain spending at thesame level whilst others reduce, you’re to come out better. This sounds all very well,but it does not deal with ugly reality.You’re short of cash, because yourprofits, from which youmust first molli shareholders, and then h n d e v e ~ else, ~ gare down. Who can conjure money out o f thin air? The answer is: anyone who starts tospend his or her m o ~ e ywisely. This means behaving like a thrifty housewife: record the

results of everything you doto thelast penny, so as to find out what works and what doesn’t, and then invest in the former rather than thelatter. Since the last recession something has happened which makesthis much easier. Today about 90 per cent of marketers have taken the first step towards effective advertising:they have put response devices in their adverments. They can see which ones work best, and which o f the media in which they appear work best. But willthey bother to do so? asurement is pointless if its lessons are ignored - and they probably if your agencyhas anything to do with it. Most have fought tooth and nail against including response devices; nowthey wriggle out of drawconclusions fromthe results. Many willdiscourage recordingthem ere’s the line - and I bet it’s familiarto many of you - ‘The ad isn’t are just a designed to get a response, but tobuild your image. The responses bonus.’ Sheer poppycock. If people reply, they read or watched your ad with interest; and unless you think adve~isingworks by osmosis, that must be your aim. ‘When someone has read yourad, they want toknow what todo,’ said John Caples allthose years ago.‘Tell them.’

DATE: NCJVENBER 199E3

‘Tell young Draytonwhat happened when thawife leftthee, Alec’ was a popular request in the vaults at my parents’ pub, TheSycamoreInn, ~Shton-under-L~e. Alec’s lugubrious response - ‘She said she were going out just toget a loafof bread, and I’ve never seen her since’ - was always greeted with satisfied roarsof laughter. The assembled veterans never seemed to tire of it, though I believe the exchange took place in exactly the same words every time I served, quite illegally,behind the bar. The job was poorlypaid,even though it was not always easy. Those old chapswere pernickety about their pint. On the one hand, it had to have a good head onit; on the other, if the topof the liquid were more than one-eighth of an inch below the topof the glass, pressing questions would be askedabout why it was onlyhalf-f2211. Guinness for many years - and even to some extent now - made agreat thing of the creamy head on their stout. One ofthe most famousadvertising images ever the is smiling moon-facedrawn on it in a poster that ranbefore the SecondWorldWar.Andof course more recently Eoddingtons has enjoyed astonishing success by focusing on what’s on top of the beer rather than what’s in it. oreo over just as the Guinness posters used both to sell and entertain, so does it work with Eoddin~onstoday. It’s a good example of the fact that theprinciples of advertising do not change. These principles havebeen known since the early years of the c e n ~ ~ when US universi~ professors like Hotchkiss, and brilliant practitioners like

13

Claude H o p ~ n sexplained them. But the evidence sug and their clients are tragically unaware of the e peopletoo damned lazyto study? Or is nobodyteaching them anyhow? is to succeed, it is as well to pay a t t e ~ t i oto~three h every custo~er’smin when c~nsiderin mpared to what?’ Spr o subsidia~es:‘What can you d r me that nobody e

ion. E ~ t e n s i ~research e that persistently focuse ut how much does fles on about paradise

ay that unless youradve~isin he night. To this I would addthat unless it shows 1 sink without trace.

reater than thesum of the parts, when

r hit comb and Stewart. The owner, Pat tty well, but BBD&O did

an unhappy agency for years. They tried to spend themselves out of trouble again, buying Papert, Koenig & Lois, where oddly enough I once worked. No thanks to me, it was known as London’s most creative agency, havingamongst its alumni Alan Parker who now does quite well in films, and Peter Mayle who has also prospered, first from rude books about willies with Gray Jolliffeand then from respectablebut fiunnier ones about France. Anyhow, that didn’t work out, so BBD&O bought Samuels, Jones, Isaacson and Page. This also proved a failure; in fact they didn’t get it right till they went in with W,wisely leavingthem in control. In the 60s 0 & M swallowed S H Benson, one ofBritain’s oldest, best-loved agencies. H o ~ tales ~ came g out; the Benson folk feltit like beingon the wrong side in theSt Valentine’s Daymassacre. No s u ~ ~ s e there: one of 0 & M’s bosses then was a legendarily unpleasant creative director called ~ l l e ~ n g t owho n , was, despite the name, actually a Ruma-

A. 10-year US study of mergers and acquisitions foundthat in 57 per cent of cases the firms ended up worth less together than separately. Many are

DATE: FEBRUARY 1997

17

e in the United States,

out more. Respondents receive kit a from P & G including an enrolment card. To fill out the card the respondent goes to the dentist who then rates thepatient’s dental condition. The card isreturned to P & G, and for the next six months the p ~ i c i p a nuses t Crest. Five months after the enrolment P & G send a reminder to visit the dentist again. That reminder card is validated by the dentist after the visit. If the patient, or the patient’s parent doesn’t agree that Crest has p e ~ o ~ e promised, P & G will refind the cost of six months of Crest - up to worth, with proofs of purchase. Some aesthetes in C a were complaining ~ ~ a while ~ agoabout ~ how~ uncreative Procter& Gamble are. All I can say is that this idea is very imaginative indeed, and could do more for Crest than any number of clever ads. The campaign is of particular interest to direct marketers, not m its i n g e n ~but ~ , because it uses one of our oldest tools, the m0 arantee, and because many regard P & G as the world’s best m ~ ~ e t i n

o r ~ a ~ ~ a t iYou o n .h o w when they get s ~ r i o ~ sinvolved ly that direct has

of letters, hoping that some are opened, and maybe evena few readand responded to. It is grossly inefficient; the letters cost a fortune to send, waste time, consume a lot of trees.

ow. I have on file six E c o ~ o ~siusb~s ~ p t i o nletters received in thesame week by a colleague in S ~ t ~ e r l a n d . If the know-alls responsible for that example of prejudice as owle edge were to pause and think inte~igentlythey some sensible conclusions.For instance, why, if it is so sloppy, doestheir employer use direct mailto get the money to pay them to bish? The answer is that, even done badly,it works better And what about the poor trees? If they were to visit any two piles at the end of any week, oneof all he people in that house are exposed to in another of all the direct mail (about two mailings per averag

would teach them a simple lesson.It might help if they also spent five minhow databases work. They couldthen help savethe planet by passing the k ~ o ~ l e d on g eto their commercial brethren. Of the 152-page issue which carried the piece quoted, 90 pages contained adve~isements,almost all i~elevantto most readers, and where

0

~works ~ splendidly s ~ for one of my cli-

ents, justas direct mail worksto get their subscri~ers. ow ever, the piece in ~uestionwas so sloppy that I must poi t out the truth, if only because accordingto their mailings -the journal is readby ministers, heads of state, businesspeople and other luminaries all over the world. I hope they don’t take it too seriously. TE: The E c o ~ o really ~ ~ s seems ~ to have got my goat. I refer to this example twice.

DATE: M A Y 1996

Did you see the W programme had children with little inclination or talen

reat teachers are rare, incompetents and bulliesmorecommon. My first maths teacher, GeoffreyLaTrobe Foster - may he rot in who made my lifea mis

i n t ~ ~ o v ite nwas in mail order. These reflections arose after receiving a w e ~ - ~ t t letter e n - itself a cause for- from joy Friends Providen a ‘decent investment’. Compared to what? An indecent inves o better. Paul ~aymondo m s half Soh0and is the richest man in the co~ntry.But the letterexplained that if I wish to invest in thin c o ~ p society t or defile the environment they have a speci that you might reasonably deducethat their ordinary finds cent’, from whichit is but a small step to conclude that they’re two-faced h~ocrites.But, carping aside, the letter made me consider,~~~e~Q ~ ~ how Q , better marketing could makethem more money. hat have allthe billowing cloudsof waffle about Planet Earth (and that obscene politicians’ romp in Rio) achieved? Even marketers who ob created ‘green’ products have been disappointed because, as we r rediscover, what people say and what they do often differ. Few pe

they’re dishonest - perish the thought; but many, when tempted to be, give way ~ t h o uat thought. Few people admit they don’t givea toss about the environment, but happily somedo care enough to do something as long as it ~ v o l v e no s effort, which is why the mailing was a good idea. That being said, some people care moreabout it than others, so before ail alltheir customers Friends Provident should find out which.~~uesre mailings to customers (which canget over 50 per cent response) eveal manythings, including their views on allsorts of things. They r their fund first to those who felt verystrongly about the environment, then if that worked to those who felt lessstrongly, and so on. This, forthose who constantly bore uswith the phrase but do nothing, is being ‘customer-fo~sed’. And goodness, how it pays. I have seen targeting messa~esin this way double response. A few years ago one firm, which took the trouble to ask how people felt about their motor insurance, claimed it made their e x ~ e n d i ~work r e fivetimes harder. Yet Friends Provident’s disinterest in me is so total thatI cannot recall them ever asking meanything about a n ~ h i n g . r these views in a spirit of public-spi~tedbenevolence, bolstered by the sentimental thought thatFriends Providentwere once my clients. But a more practical reason is simple: I am a policyholder and wish they would market better. I’d likea bigger pension and a better environment to enjoy it in. : Theworld’spoliticianshad just spent disgusting amounts o f money on one of their regular boondog~les todetermine what sho~ldbe done to help the environment. As usual, little was decided, less has been ood time was had by all.

o n o DATE: MAY 1997

To be honest, I’m still recoveri

tical and childis~ysensitive people is damn hard work. Perhaps the best creative directors ever were BernbachOgilvy and Burnett. In the United r the 1960s when they were the count Shelton o f Mather & C r o ~ h e in most outstanding agency and John Webster of BMP (trained by She seem to me superb exemplars. N o ~ a Berry, n who did the job at 0 & M, New York in their glory years, was asto~shingly good. RecentlyI re-read a 1987piece by himin ~ ~ discussed how to revitalize brands, tellin vision sets made in the UK under the name General Electricand Hitachi. ~ t h o u the ~ hHitachi costa lot more, it out~old lectric modelten toone. At a time when the avera e marketing director maywonder if he’ll still be around next Wednesday, the long-term perspective required to buil

distinctly short supply. So perhaps it is worth reminding ourselves of all the happy consequencesthat flow from having a strong brand. an’s example - which is remarkable,but not unique - showed it more for,and buy relatively more of, your brand. r point he made whichhad never occurredto me was that a strong even affection,so customers are willing to forgive an infe~orproduct -

of scale mean you can, if you wish, etition. If you sellthe same number of

h improving your product so as to er as important as they were. I have ver seen a n ~ h i n but g opinion and anecdotal evidence to prove it, and the reasons for trying to build a brand remain as important now as ever. And since e v e ~ o n is e in such a tearing hurry to get results, I can onlyend with ~ e ~ e ~s-~make e ~’ haste ~ slowly. ~ ~ the public relations pundit, hadloyally - and understandably - written a rude reply to an even ruder piece I had written about one of his more lucrative clients, a woman who in my view had blighted e v e ~ h i n gshe ever touched. : ~ u e n t i nBell,

I was once requiredat a conference,where as usual one was beingas impossible ~uestions’ to define the perfect clientin three words. Irep1 ness to test.’ Many new entrants to the direct marketin banks, the motor car companiesand so forth - do not test enough. It is the accountability of direct marketing which makes it a~ractiveto many businesses. Whereas it is often difficult’ if not impossible, to discern precisely what happened as the result of your advertising, with direct m ~ k e t i n g you can track the effectiveness of various messages throughout the relationship with a given customer.You can see exactly what your money is achie and thus estimate accurately wh shouldinvest to recruit an customers. The object of your directmarketing can be:to recruit more customers at a given cost, and thus increase the volume of trade; to lower the cost of recruiting customers, and thus increase the p r o ~ t a b i lof i ~each custo or to extend the period during which a customer stays with you, thus increasing the p r o ~ t a b i l of i ~the relationship. You can only achieve such objectives byconstant testing. People do not test enough because they don’t know howgreatly changes can improve results. One famous examplewas given by John over 30 years ago, who reported that simply changing the headlin advertisement had improvedresponse by 19.5 times. A few years ago my colleagues and I were able to cajole a client into testing a different letter in a mailing to recruit new customers for a credit card.

All the other elements in thepackage remained unchanged. But that letter(I ~ o t one e over twiceas long as the one then being run) improved response I have seen the addition of one wordto a headline increaseresponse by 20 per cent, and other seemingly

smallelements can often have a surprising have seen a change in the colour of an envelope lift and in one recent spectacular example,a chari factor of 16, without changing the pro~osition, simply by

erally, changesin targeting will makethe greatest difference, but it’s elements. In one programme fora client in the ors: list selection, offer, timing, price, creative the best test results and and response method. Intheory, if you combined all compared them with a combination of the worst, you got 58 times more responses. I once showedthis case history to a group of bankers in Salzburg. They knew little about marketing, but they understood money and were duly impressed. If you are relatively new to direct marketing, I suggest you push your agency and your colleaguesto suggest a constant flow of ideas fortesting. is oneof the few areas in business where, for little extra cost, you can ea1 ofextra money. If you are not spending a good 10per cent each year ontesting, you certainly should be if you have an established business. And if youare a new mar~eter,the percentage should be much higher. Obviously the quality o f your product or service is even more critical than theelements mentioned above. :

DATE: O ~ Z T O B E R 1992

ency in Chicago planned to reposition ~ a r l b o r ofrom being a ladies’ brand and put tattooed cowboys in theads, research said it wouldn’t work. Someone who was there told meLeo was urged by all his colleaguesnot to run the campaign. Leo was not noted for his slywit, but he replied:‘To hell if you don’tagree, 1’11go away and with the research. We’re ~ n n i n itg start my o w n agency.’ I’m told the inekenrefreshes’ and the surreal Hedges campaigns also researched badly. In both cases Frank rageouslyy said go ahead. I have never found anybody who admits to liking, let alone reading, ~ e ~ ~ e~ r s ’~ mailings ~ e- maili s which ~ propelled the ~~~~s~ into the pre-eminent position ~ o n g s t world’smagazines as well as selling mounts of merchandise. Nor have I ever come across any ndents who claimed to like reading long copy - yet I have never seen short copy makingthe same proposition as long copy pull nearly d research inva~ablyreveals that people don’tread direct which always makes it hard for me. How have I managed to prosper by ings for which clients will only if prospects pay not only read, but also to theend and reply? o alte~ative to thatrare ability to enter into the mind of the tomer that some creative people possess, and an equally rare cornmodement and guts tomake and carry out tough decisions. : I like that remark by

it elsewhere.

VictorRoss so much that I see I have repeated

ble readership or response by any means. If you assignthe value of100to a full page,then assuming the copy remains the same, a half-page produces 70 replies or readers, a quarter-page about 48, and a double-pagespread about 141. These figures have emerged, to within a couple of ~ercenta points, in five separate research studies over the last 80 years. Sou may be wise, then, to have a space larger no than you needto convey yo ay that makes it easy to read. Your agency may deny this, cia1 reasons, but it’s true. Some years agothere was a controversyin A ~ v e ~ s ~

Dave Trott - known as ‘Trotty, - was briefly famous as one of the unders of the Gold, Greenlees, Trott advertising agency. He introduced what one might call a Sun-style approach to advertising with lines like ello Tosh,got a Toshiba.’ TE:

It is often suggested (perhaps by those seeking to dramatize a dull life) that marketing is like warfare. It certainly has similarities, suggested by FieldMarshalMontgomery’squip’‘WorldWar I1 will end when the

opposing sides haverun out of paper.’ Most ofthe needless bumph marketers produce is dueto two things: showing off and bad writing. People imagine long words and jargon will make them sound cleverer than they are and conceal their inability to write properly or think straight. The mundane is turned into the mystical.Thus an agencyis hired to ‘generate foot-fall into stores’, that is get more people to come in. Or, as an agency boss said recently, ‘The phone is becoming ever more integrated into everybody’s life.’ This means people are using the phone more, but that’s so boringly obvious it can’t be made to sound important when said simply. Or someone is ‘tasked’ with doing something’ rather than (more briefly) told or asked. Peopleare ‘proactive’rather than active; thin are ‘trialled’,not tried or tested. ‘Concepts’(not ideas) are new and innovative, not just new. You need ‘core competencies’, not skills or abilities. Apart fromwasting paper, this linguistic garbage encourages outsiders - and our colleagues - in their view that marketers are a bunch of pretentious tossers. And many entering this industry must be deeply conf~sed and, yes, corrupted by the odd useof language - either strange new words, or old ones usedin a peculiar fashion. Some are so captivated that they end up talking in a manner quite

enetrable to normal people. They feel m ~ k e t e r smust establish their g a fewsentences of drivel, like dogs sniffin other’s arses to ds. For those ofyou in this unhappy predicament, ssary of common usage, but I quail at the task, because some words can mean almosta n ~ h i -n and ~ even contradict0 Take that sad duo ‘strategic’ and str rate^'. ‘Strate~c’ in people’s titles could meanone of at least three things. Perhaps they’vebeen moved sided given poshtitles because no one knows what todo with them; or hey do modest but usefbl jobs not WO big salaries and can be ff with grander titles, for example ‘Stra c Media planner’; or possibly someone really believes the words retain some meaning. This is impossible sincethey are now applied to any a c t i ~however ~, trivial,and hardy ever usedin their original context of the long-term or important, but with how ou doa n ~ h i n g like recruit new customers, write your headlines,or your window displays. If you wish to feel part of a se cabbalistic circle gabbl each other in a fo ns master this fool you wish to talk to c people not taken in by such bald amazed how many of those who h

Last year I was dining in Sydneywith anold colleaguewho quoted a line I loved: ‘Direct marketing is the art of losing money in small amounts.’ ‘That’s b ~ i a n t ! I’ cried. ‘Who said it?’‘You did,’ she responded. I guess this proves if you spend all your time scribbling and rabbiting, you must occasionally produce a gemto shimmer amidst the dross. Even a stopped clock isright twice a day.Mind you, maybeI stole it from someonewith red talent. I remembered that little line when reflecting upon the recent Van den Bergh promotion that w l icost the firm over three times what they forecast. In caseyoudidn’t read about it, they expected about half a millionrespondents and a E l million phone bill,but got 1.7’5 million replieswith a billto match. Whilstgwaws all round are in order, it’s also worth asking why this happens. It can prove more costly than failure, as Hoover demonstrated. arket research can’t tell you what people will do, becausethey don’t ow themselves, but why on earth couldn’t the Van den Berghers conduct a livepre-test before spending all their money and ending up with such an e m b ~ a s s i n gsuccess? Theanswer, I suspect, is that nobody suggested it. That’s because hardly any sales promotion people understand the value of testing before youspend -just one reason why they tend to cock it up when they try to do direct marketing, in which testing is the bedrock. (Mind you, this ignorance isnot restricted to them: it applies to other enthusiastic amateurs who think it’s just a matter o f ‘doing a mail-out’.) Let me give youthe three reasons, besides ignoranceand laziness, why

people don’t test. All are ~ o n gFirst, . they suffer from the fond delusion that they can predictthe hture.They rarely can,as the Van den B shows. Second, they think they don’t have time. Third,there isn’t enou money. Yet strangely enough I find that s o m e h o ~they always

cause their customers.

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Mr Baldwin, primeminister o f this country when Iwas born, revi press as having ‘the prero~ativeo f the harlot through the a ~ t h o uresponsibili~’. t And jolly goodfun it is too, let me tell Ibecame aj o u ~ a l i sat t 19, after walking out o f universi~becaus bored (more likely too stupid to appreciate the opportuni~I had) and became assistant editor of a journal called C o ~ o ~ - nowlong-dead, but relevant then because we still had a cotton industry. On re~ection,since my you^ observaS of the Manchester ilar bodies led me to predict the industry wasdoomed, maybe Iwasn’t that stupid. Iused to write rude editorials about the US f m support policy, an asinine c o ~ e ~ o n that Iimagine inspiredEurope’s even dopierc o ~ o n A journalistic maxim states that fact is sacred, whereas comment is free. Often it is also wildly irrelevant, as in a pieceIread sometime ago on Tesco’s Clubcard. Thewriter was critical of Tescofor spending about €50 million a year bribingcustomers to stay loyal (an i n v e s ~ e nwhich, t judging by sales, has paid off splendidly). He judged their plan to use data gleaned at the checkout to target different categories with tailor-made promotions was silly becauseof the greatadvances in market research and the use o f sample groups over the last 50 years. Idon’t know what these great advances are, but he said: ‘YOUdon’t needto interview the whole country to find out people think of Tony Blair. A sample o f just a few thousand is usu deemed suffkient.’

This shows ignorance of the way marketing is goingand of the benefit of holding data on individuals rather than groups. The fact that a percentage do or think this or that helps you devise offerings that will appeal to a greater proportion of customers rather than a lesser.But what if youwant to talk to a small minority?You can’t eliminatewastefil messages unless you know exactly who they are. Once you do you needn’t waste a penny talking to thewrong people. People tend to forget it, but junk is not confined to the postal system. There’s junk food, junk television, junk advertising and junk promotions. And what is junk to me may be wonderfulto you. To me Fairy Liquid commercials are junk not just because they make mewant to throw up but also because I’m not interested in washing-up liquid. Despite this they have been successful for decades. I n d i ~ d ~data a l should eliminatejunk. As always, though, theory is one thing, practice another. What you havejust read was inspired by aletter a friend received fromthe good folkat Tesco. Impeccablyaddressed to her, it was in response to her complaint about a ‘foreign body’in some vegetable ricemix she bought at their ~ c ~ a n s w o r store, t h and it thoughtfully enclosed €4 worth of vouchers in compensation. This is morethan kind of them, since she has never been anywhere near Ric~answorthfor 30 years, let alone visited the Tesco there. Gripping stuff, this database marketing. : What does it take for one of these loyalty schemes to succeed? First, you stand a much better chance if you’re the first in your market to have one. Second, you must use the information gained intelligently.Tesco were first in their field and have tried hard to be intelligent - though, as you willsee elsewhere, in onecase they, or their data people,effortlessly changed one reader’s sex.

n o n DATE: MAY 1 9 9 6

Evenif there’snosuch

ee lunch there is sucha t delight. One recent Saturd en he droppedme off, th which were in considerable

esture did more for the public relations acti~tiesof the London t usual flannel about how friendly, cheery a that their ~ s t o m emanagement r can be highly unpredi~able,unless you’re a Japanese at Heathrow, in which case there’s a fair chance you’ sort of bill you’re used to when going from Narita airport to d Tokyo. So let me repeat what I said at thetime to Andy Demetris: ‘Thanks very much, Andy, and good luck with your career.’ I’m also prompted to make some obse~ationsabout incentives and public relations. anypeoplefeelincentivesd age their image or that those who respond to them are likely to be less valuable customers. Not necessarily so. Richard V Benson, who died recently, was perhaps the leading expert on market in^ s~bscriptionsin the United States. He affirmed that ‘a subscription sold at half price over a periodof not less than eight mo

will producethe same quality of customer as a fill price subscription’- ie the renewal rate will bethe same. So if youare wondering whether you shouldtry incentives, my advice is, do so by all means,but remember what Mr Benson was talking about. He was talking about an offer designedto ~ t i ~a t relationship. e Most incentives are simply deployed forshort-term reasons to produce a quick injection of extra sales and make the marketing department look good,or at least h ~ - competent. ~ a ~Too few people do enough with thenames generated. Also remember that you must make sure that theincentive you offer fits in with your brand.Even a very pricey product will benefit from something appropriate. Six years ago, immediatelyafter the Australian budget, Lexus put four financialexperts in a studio and recorded their comments. These were edited overnight, put on a tape cassette and mailed to every Lexus owner in ~ ~ s t r a l ion a ,the very sound premise that those who own Lexuses are more interested in money than most, because they have more of it to lose. Thiswas a cleveruse of direct mail to effect goodPR. Even better PR was obtained, I think, by a car dealerin ~ u e e n s ~ a who nd te topeople who had traded in their cars, enclosing a cheque for $50. The letter told them the dealer had got more than he expected fortheir old car, so this was a t h a ~ - y o uClever, . or what?

o o n DATE:SEPTEMBER1 9 9 6

y doubts have been put into words exceedingly well by one of the wisest people I know, VictorRoss, erstwhile European chakman of the ~ e u ~ e ~ s ’ Digest, who made a marvellous speechon the subject in Spain last year. He implied that most marketers had not thought deeply enough about what loyalty is, or what produces it. He suggested that ‘loyalty is what is left when you removethe bribes’. And bribery is what most of these schemes are.Few attempt, even cursorily, to project anybrand values. Theyare little more than extended promotions. Fine, if you’re the first person to offer them, but very difficult to manage long-term. First others start doing it, and then everyone does it, and then people compete to offer bigger and bigger bribes. It happened with the newspapers in the30s. It happened in the60s with trading stamps. It’s happened with the airlines. (And significantly, Pan h,who were the pioneers, ended up bankrupt.) Icertainly don’t envythe supermarkets. As the S ~ Times ~reported ~ a couple ~ yof weeks ago, they’ve already to had cut their margins radicallyin thelast few years. It all reminds me of the Anglo-Saxons (youremember them, don’t you?). They used to give the Danes goldto stop raping and pillaging - it was called Danegeld.TheDanes got greedier and greedier, until eventually the Anglo-Saxons just couldn’t affordto pay the Danegeld any more. They had to stand and fight. All the bribes did was ruin the country whilst a tough decision was put off. There must be a lesson in there somewhere. : I was talking complete pime (not for the first time) in this piece about the creches. They’re offered another by store. But I stand by the rest of what I said.

DATE: AUCiUST

1995

‘Your composition is both good and original. Unfo~unately theparts that are good are not original; and the parts that are original are not good,’ said Dr Johnson to some poorwriter. Few people think well and originally about marketing, but one is Professor Andrew Ehrenberg of South Bank university, whom I interviewed a while ago. In January he’s conducting a seminar that should be well worth attending on consumer loyalty and response to price. I’ve commented on his conclusions pre~ously - for example, pricepromoted brands are mostly bought by existing customersyso price-related promotions not only have nolasting effect, but also are merely a rather complicated way of t h r o ~ n gaway money. But he has many other insights that, within the field he has largely concentrated on (fast-mo~ngconsumer goods in fairly static markets), challenge accepted ideas. Thus, we may refer to ‘our customers’, but it seems these people are mostly other brandsy customers who occasionally buy from you. fn fact ‘your’ customers typically buy no more than 30 per cent of their requirements in the category from you.He questions the use of that word ‘promiscuous’, which has added a naughty frisson to so many dull meetin Customers are mostly polygamous, not promiscuous: brand loyalty is a habit of buying one or more brands. The phrase ‘strong brand’ is misleading, he implies: brands are neither strong nor weak, just big or small. They differ in strength - if that is the word - because of their number ofbuyers, not their buyers’ loyalty. He strongly suggests the intimate relationship between customer and brand many marketers fondly dream of simply doesn’texist, because “requently bought’ goods are mostly bought infrequently: in many casesabout

he customers buy the brand only about once a year. And those apocaes in market share that make headlines- the B o d d ~ ~ oand ns ay reality for most marketers. Most market shares are pretty steady in the medium term. Despite all our efforts ‘the dominant factor in brand switching is marketshare: brands of the s m e size tend tohave muchthe same degree of loyalty’. his mostchallenging statement answers the question: ‘Are a brand buyers especiallyworth having?’ Ne says no; generally has few near 100per cent loyal buyersand they don’t buyit very much. This I have for years advised my clients to use directmarketi of customers: those who buy most of the generic pro mostly buy your brand. It seems to work for things like frarances and booze. How does this square h his obse~ations? es, he would look more into areas like ~ n a n c i a l s e ~ cwhere there is little loyalty,but changin~ iers is such a pain that S there more to loya n sloth? In the car industry, which With Toyota in ~ustraliaW 0 per cent, as opposed to the

the lunch.

DATE: NOVEMBER 1’1395

Goethe observed: ‘With idiots even God himself is helpless.’ This came to mind when at 5.45 pm one Saturday I answered the phone in my modest country residence to be greeted by alady who said she r e ~ r e s e n t e ~ Mercury. WouldI like to hear about a neiiv service of theirs? There has been too much talk about loyalty lately - I have added my share of sceptical comment - but this has the eamarks of an int~guingnew approach:adisloyaltyprogramme. I was as polite to thelady as I could possibly manage; I felt sorry for her. None the less, this would be a goodtime for you and me, gentle reader, to ponder upon what strange processledsome nitwit at Mercury to think it wise to have innocent customers ~ i s ~ r b at ed home on a glorioussummer evening in the serious beliefthat they want to talk about some trifling - and quite possibly useless- new service. What could be more likely to make one think a firm had no understanding of its customers than this wanton intrusion? Whatever service they were selling, you can be sure it vvill be ‘ongoing’. Shortlyafter the phone call, I picked up the latest load o f old codswallop from British Telecom, all about their Business Connections. They send this bumph to me at home because nobody has had the intelligence to find out if it is my business address - which it obviously isn’t. The mailing included a catalogue featuring a seriesof ludicrous conversationsbetween models shot so as to make them look as silly as possible, asking emba~assinglyill-phrased questions like Tan you tell memore about m~timediaand the information super-highway?’Justthe sort of thing one wouldnaturally say to a BT oper-

ator - who would, just as n a t ~ r a ~trot y , out a witty riposte like ‘BTc you instant access to analmost ~ ~ n iamount t e of i ~ o ~ a t i o nHuh? .’ On the back o f the catalogue one operator ~ f o me,~ ‘ e~ have e~ a

DATE:AUGUST 1 9

Here’s the startof a letter from a widely admired marketer - part of their widely admired loyalty programme. Dear Mr Nicholds As a member of Tesco Baby Club, we’ll make sure you’re the first to know

about new services for busy mums like yourself.

Frankly,youcan‘teliminateallsuch errors. Someone at American Expressin NewYork once calculated there were over 100 steps to carrying out a direct mail campaign- ie over 100 chances to screw it up. I would urge any firm, particularly one relativelynew to direct marketing, to ensure their people learn how vital the boring minutiae are, because they can make you look really stupid. .Arrange a few trips to see suppliers. Mistakes don’t occur because they’re all drones, idle but because many clients choose on price, not knowledge. So suppliers’ bosses (who often make af o ~ u n epay ) staff poorlyand don’t train them a d e ~ ~ a t e l y . atefbl to Mr Nicholds for sending me the letter; indeed, I want to of you who sendin examples andwrite kind letters giveness from those I have been rude about. His unpl sing, isnot why I kept the letter. It shows Tesco are doing someent with the data their loyalty pro~rammeproduces. They are l a u n c ~ catalogues g that are more likelyto succeed becausethe data reveal, for example, which customers are best prospects for a children’s catalo If Sainsbury’s are doing anything as smart I am not aware o f it. I belonged to Sainsbury’s schemes at two separate stores since they

ave yetto receive anything fkom them - or if1 have, I can’t recallit. As figures show, most of the people who belong to these schemes don’t other to redeem the points. Their attitude to joining is ‘why not?’ hat S~nsbury’shave going for them at themoment islittle more than an updated Green Shieldstamps p r o g r ~ m eThis . may beworse t h m usebecause they are giving away moneyto gain loyalty whilst prob~bly ving the opposite. The customers who get the most points are the best customers. They are being trained to expect bribesin exchange for buyi So their loyalty is more likely to be eroded than stren he obvious to penetrate at Sainsbury’ how to get things don hen they set about launchin S, the name collectione was superblyexecuted. utthe names are just th .Inhis history of the ~ i ~ i a r n noted that if you control the t ent in show ~ ~ s i n e s s , e; but in marketi the fact that you condoesn’t mean youcontrol the business. You must use ose who use it best will triumph - in the su ermarket just amazed that ore people don’t app

‘An expert is someone fromout o f town who knows nothing about the subject, but has lots o f slides.’ A friend with Andersen Consulting told me that one. Irecalled it whilst chairing the Scottish Direct Marketing conference last year. As Ilove the sound of myown voice to thepoint of folly,Iwas wondering why I had agreed to do something that was unpaid and without the satisfymg compensationof boring a captive audience. However, the firstspeakerquickly gained my a~ention,not by what he said, which was both dull and hard to u n d e r s t ~ dbut , with the f o l l o defi~ ~ nition of relationship marketing’. It was taken fromthe ~ c KQ ~~ a ~~ (1997): es r ~~ ~ A marketing approach in which acompany seeksto build closerelations~ps with its current and potential customers in order to encourage them to concentrate a dispropo~ionatelyhigh share of their value with it. The company pursues this objective by developing and continuously updating a deep understanding of each customer’s present and future needs, and by tailoring the choice, deliveryand commu~cationof its value propositionto these needs as closely as is economically possible.

*

Such dreadful prose should be condemned for cruelty to English. importantly, if I were a clientit would worry the hell out of me, becauseif that defi~tionis correct, relationship marketing is just direct marketing without balls. Ibecame an expert not because of my many slides,but because 15 years ago I wrote the first British book (Bird, 1982)to define direct m a r k e t ~ g simply. Thereare three parts: acquiring people’s namesand putting them on a

database, with relevant i ~ o ~ a t i ousin n ; that i ~ o ~ a t i to o nserve them t~stingand measu~ngthe results.

DATE: JANUARY 143

dled? These processes are not part of many firms’present structure, so they don’t appreciate what skills you need to manage them. Moreover, many p r o g r ~ m e sfail to tailor the type of reward to the customer’s status. For example, ‘soft’ rewards which focus on privileged service and recognition tend to becomemore important the moreloyalacuqtomerbecomes, whereas ‘hard’rewards like free flights are more important to fxst-time or infre~uentcustomers. Another feature of such programmes that is ‘success’ is measured wolby of membership rather t an wdue. So money is wasted trying to convert persistent promiscuous users into loyal customers. This is particularly true where expensive statements and newsletters are mailed regularly to customers who haven’t bought for long periods. Why not spend less on those people and use the money more sensibly by rewarding those most likely to become loyal? Companies that do not understand that rewards are no substitute for consistently delivering value may actuallycreate programmes that create more, not less, promiscuouscustomers. Such customers and prospects an incentive to purchase or respond, thus diluting profit margins. They start tocompare offersand buy depending on the best offer. I agree entirely. I’m sceptical about these schemes; yourcompetitor can always outbribe you. To me they are merely frills unless youare near perfect. Until then, invest your money in better service and communications. As a friendwho runs the world’s largest wine club observed:‘We sell service at a profit;it justhappens to be deliveredas grape juice in a glass.’

n n n DATE: JUNE 1 9 g 6

2) C o ~ ~ o n s e n s ~ e irect

, Kogan Page, London ird, D (1997) ~o~ to ~ ~a Sules t ~ ee f f ethat r Sells, Kogan Page, Lon n s ~ n gPrentice ~ake Caples,J (1983)~o~ to ~ u k e Y o ~ r A ~ v e ~ ' on^, ) T e s t e ~ A ~ v e ~ s i n g 5th ~ eedn, t h oRandom ~s, ) ~ o r l ~ l y G Papermac, o o ~ s , USA MacKay, H (1989) ~~i~ it^ the Shffrks~ i t h o ~ t ~Eaten e i n ~g ~ i v e , USA

~ c K i n s e ~y ~ a ~ e(1997), r l y USA ~ o l l a ~r a i l i n g (1992) s Libey ~ b l i s h i nUSA ~, ,D (1963) C ~ n ~ e s s ~ oAtheneum, ns, Nevv York ,D (19~7)O ~ on ~l ~ v~e ~ ' sRandom ~ n g , House,USA adigan, C (1997) ~ f f n g e r o ~ s C oTimes ~~any, (1987) ~ a x i ~ a r k e ~Mn cg ~, r a ~ - HUSA ~l, Rapp, S (1990) f i e Great ~ a r k e ~ T~rnaro~n~,'Prentice ng Hall, USA RaFleld, T (1992) Dear personalise^, JUVT Direct, London , Press,Nevv Y o r ~ Roman, K and Maas, J (1976) ~o~ to A ~ v e ~ ' sSte Martin's Roman, K and Raphaelson, J (1992) tin^ that ~ o r k sHarper , Prism, York Institute of Direct Vvatson,J (1993) Creativi~ in ~irect~arketing, Teddington r California Vvhe~don,C (1995) q p e a~~~ a y o ~Stt ,r a t ~ o oPress, Vvolf'e, T (1999) The Painte~or^, Bantam Books,USA Y o ~ nJ~ , (198~)A T e c h n i ~ ~ e ~ o r ~ o ~ National ~ c i n g Textbook ~~eaC so., , ~

USA

Zeldin, T (1994) An ~ n t i ~ ist ~ to^ t e o ~ ~ ~ ~Minerva, a n USA i ~ ,

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

Z O O Leo’s

73

above the line

51,118

A d ~ a p 76,231 advertising 12,15,16,20,43,48,58,68, 73,74,105,106,191-216 archaeolo~ 98

Bank of Scotland58 BarclaysBankplc 169,201,202 Citibank 190 Co-operativeBank 83,290 Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank 89 HSBC Midland Bank LloydsBank 154,18 Lloyds Bank-TSB 9

cartoons 129-30 financial 185436,192,193-94 poster(s) 85-86,113,123-24,17 205-06 Bass 25 ata

159

agents and agencies23

estate 24 travel 24,163 air travel y s52,149 British ~ ~ a(BA) Cont~ental 149 easyJet 210 Go 210 Pan Am 244 AmericanExpress 38,48,112,125,131, 143,155,165,169,197,243,248, 249 ~ - B B ~9,215 O AndersenConsulting 94,177,251 art 14,63454 art direction 127-28 Astec 135-36 AT&T 81,96 Audi 105,106 Auld,Malcolm 13,14,157,158

~eyond2000 73 ~ i g ~ s s uThe e , 63,64, 138,225 Blair,Tony 17,18,66,144,158,239 Boddin~on,Andrew 135,136, 147, 153, 169 B o d ~ ~ o n12,213,246 s Books Etc 167,168 brand@) 2526,28,184 loyalty 225-26,245-46 name(s) 91-92 values 47 Branson,Richard 26,32,95 bric-a-brac 5-28 briefs 109-10 see also creativity Brisk,Phil 21,22,199 BritishTelecom(ST) 9,20,38,82,150, 247-48 BusinessAge 177 Business ~ e e k 116

C a ~ p a i 27,115,185,219 ~ banks

185-86

Caples, John 100,212,227

Carter, Ed 9,10,82

Drucker,Peter

Cellnet 9,10,136 Chiat Day 68,143,145

Econom~st,The 111,112,191,221,222

Clinton,President 35,36 Coca-Cola 1,112 Colgate 123,124 Colgate-Pa~o~ve165-66 commercials 84,231-32 see also TV commercial(s) CommonsenseDirect ~arketing 220

Con~ess~ons100 copy, length of

34,50,237

education 59-60,9596 Electrolux 1,2,92 e-mail 113,141 employment 61-62 English languagesee language Esberger, Simon 9,lO Essayon Tactics 88 EveningStandard 53,134

11516,229-30

Cotton 239 creativity 103-30 briefs 109-10 deadly sins 125-26 evaluation 10748 teaching 11 7-18

Fiat 105,106 FirstDirect 31,32,33,34,200 fiscal disasters 191-92 Forensic ~ a r k e ~ n 98 g FriendsProvident 223,224 Fulton, David 153,154

Creativi~in Direct ~arketing 178 customer(s) 1,2, 147-70,245 c o ~ ~ c a t i with o n 169-70 happy 167-68 rewards 253-54 service 149-54,163,178

Dan~erousCom~any 96 Dear Perso~a~ised35 Direct Line 33,34,57,58 direct mail

12,29,32,34,35-36,38,

39-44,46,4?-48,53-54,119,141,

178,221-22,230,249 mailingpack(s)44 personalized letters 36,46,240 t e s ~ o n i ~ ( s126 ) direct marketing 11,29,33-34,43, 45-48,51-52,59,68,95,178,192, 219,227-28,235,246,251-52 Creative Council, The 1 1 7

targeting 3 5 3 6 testing 227-28,235,251-52 Direct Marketing Association, European 37 Direct Marketing Association, UK 46 Direct Marketing Association, US 51 DirectMarketingCentre46 d i s c i ~ ~ n e99-100 Dixon's 15556,165 Doyle Dane Bernbach 67,113

GeneralElectric 156,225 Goldfish 31,32,33,34 GoodFoodGuide 161 Great ~arketingaround, The 219 GreenShieldStamps 97,250 Guardian, The 199 Guinness 25,213

Hidden ~ersuaders,The 143 Honda 25,105

Hoover 1,2,92 Hopkins,Claude 232

100,178,199,200,214,

How to Adve~'se 100,198 How to ~ a Your ~ A ~ev e ~ ' s i n~ga k e

on^

100

How to Write a Sales Letterthat Sells! 120 humour

199-200

IBM 140,167,203 ideas 79-104 down-sizing 82 motivation^ research 81 re-engineering 82 right-sizing 82 incentives 241-42 incompetence 17,19 InsideDirect s ail 42 insurance 130

direct 57-58 m o t o ~ g 58 Internet 34,93,124,137,139"42,163 ISA(s) 66

J WalterThompson 104,203 jargon 19,147,233-34 junk 29,43,240 mail 53,119 Labour Party 18,66,208 Land'sEnd 33,34 language misuse of 93-94,251 use of 77-78,176,198,234 Leo Burnett 73,74,108 lessons 5 5 7 8 Levitt,Theodore 34,237 literacy 115,116,118,131 loyalty 237-54 earning 253-54 schemes 240,243-44 McKinsey & CO 96,163,252

~ c ~ iQ nu a s~ e~r ~ y251 ~ uon~Sunday, l The 105 mail order 65-66 mailshot(s) 35,79 marketing 59-60 see also direct marketing fmancial 169,173-74 loyalty 52 mass 49,50 one-to-one 50,52 relations~p 52 segmentation 49 targeted 50 workplace X76

~arketing 11,26,33,48,67,79,81,88, 147,173,182,206 M a r k e ~ gChartered , Institute o f (W) 59,60,201,202 MarketingSociety,The 89 Marks & Spencer 153,154,188,202, 237 Marlboro 85,230 Maste~ard 169,170,183,184 ~aximarketing 219

MBNA 33,34,90 Mercury 19,20,247,248 mergers 215-16 ~ i l ~ i ~o on l ~~auri ~ i n g 41 s ~ i ~ oThe r , 183 mission statement(s) 69, 71,94,175 mobilephones135-38 money 171-94 mortgageprovider(s)174 National Advertisers,soc cia ti on o f (US) 51 New How to Adve~'se,The 198 M e w York G u a r d ~ u ~25 Nissan 134,216 NSPCC 21-22

O ~ C u n ~ i n g120 Ogilvy, David 24,51,74,75,83,96,9 108,116,126,148,165,166,197, 203,204,209,210,214 Ogilvy & Nlather (0&I M) 33,51,74,75, 115,125,143,215,225 Direct 67,139 OgilvyGroup 100,198 0~~~on ~ d v e ~ s i99 n~ On Digital 153,154 opportunities 159-60 Owens,Andrew 165,166

P & 0 151,152,214

Painted or^, The 14 ParetoPrinciple49 Parker, Alan 68,215

Penguin ~ i c t i o n oa ~~ ~ oHumorous d e ~ Quotations, The 119 PepsiCola 1,2,62 pla~ing/planners 67-68 Preuveneers 28 Private Eye 87 prize draws 36 Procter & Gamble 12,47,95,96,172,219, 220,229 Prudential 154,173 ~ n 85c ~ Quelch*John 33,34 quotations 119-20

59

railways. 179-80 Bridgwater station 17,18,179 British Rail 162 Connex 158 Eurostar 71,72,175 GreatWestern 144,179,180 SNCF 71 Stagecoach 158 Virgin 162 ~eader’sDigest 107,125,229,230,244

~ e ain ~Adve~sing i ~ 100 recruitment 75-76

~esults ~u~letin, The 77 Results International 77,78 Roman,Ken 100,198 Roman and Maas 100 Ross,Victor 107,108,229,230,243,244 RoyalAutomobileClub (RAC) 32,58,91 Ruddles 113,114,206 Saatchi & Saatchi 216 S ~ e ~ a174,205,243 y Sainsbury’s 188,190,243,249-50 salespromotion(s) 33,44,59,217-18, 252 Samuels, Jones, Isaacson and Page 215 Scienti~cA d v e ~ ‘ s ~ 100,178 ~g Scottish Amicable 129 Scottish DirectMarketing251 ScottishProvident209 Sears 95 Sedgwick 111,112 SekondaWatches 111 112 Spectator, The 37,91, 120 sponsorship 189-90,218~ stockmarket 57,112 Strategic ~ a n a g ~ m eResources nt 176 strategy 87-88 corebrand88 subscriptions 241-42 Sun, The 15,54,133,183,232

reward schemes 249-50 S

~with’

the~Sharksw i t ~ o u t ~ e i n g ~ a t e n Alive 114

talent and temperament 121-22 targeting see direct m a r k e t ~ g Techni~uefor~ o d u c i n Ideas, g A 104 technology 131-46 Tesco 174,239,240,243,249,250 Tested A ~ v e ~ s i nethg hods 100 There, I Told You So 185 ThomsonTravel 163,164 Time 49,50 Times, The 87,182 Touch ofEviI, A 113 TV commercial(s) 83,84,111,231-32 Type and ayo out 128 typography 127-28 Unilever 32,47,172 Up the Organ~sation 8

V i ~ p o i n t 225 Viking 33,34 Virgin 25,26,148 see also railways Direct 123 Visa 170,243 Wal~ Street~ou~al 41,42, 140 Way ofthe ~ o r ~The d , 119 Way ~ i n gOught s To Be,The 185 Webster, John 68,185 Week, The 87 Welch, ‘NeutronJack‘ 155,156 ~ o ’ ~s ~ i l ~ at? n g(UK) 41 ~ o ’ ~sa i I i n g at! (US) 41,42 Wonderbra 134,216 Wood, Peter 57,58

World ~xecutive’sDigest 253 WorldlyGoods 141 writing COPY

76,10344 76,99-100

SundayPeop~e 100 SundaySport 54 Sunday Times,The 244

W ~ t i that n ~ Wor~s 198 ~.dra~onbird.com 142

supe~arket(s) 173,174

Zeldin,Theodore

7,8